This paper investigates the problem of protecting multicast sessions in mesh wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) networks against single link failures, for example, a fiber cut in optical networks. First, we study the two characteristics of multicast sessions in mesh WDM networks with sparse light splitter configuration. Traditionally, a multicast tree does not contain any circles, and the first characteristic is that a multicast tree has better performance if it contains some circles. Note that a multicast tree has several branches. If a path is added between the leave nodes on different branches, the segment between them on the multicast tree is protected. Based the two characteristics, the survivable multicast sessions routing problem is formulated into an Integer Linear Programming (ILP). Then, a heuristic algorithm, named the adaptive shared segment protection (ASSP) algorithm, is proposed for multicast sessions. The ASSP algorithm need not previously identify the segments for a multicast tree. The segments are determined during the algorithm process. Comparisons are made between the ASSP and two other reported schemes, link disjoint trees (LDT) and shared disjoint paths (SDP), in terms of blocking probability and resource cost on CERNET and USNET topologies. Simulations show that the ASSP algorithm has better performance than other existing schemes.