Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
cod catches, hoping for an eventual stock recovery, but a generation later there are
no signs of any comeback. But even such dire lessons remain stubbornly unlearned:
after that stock collapse European cod i shing, particularly in the North Sea, con-
tinued with an intensity surpassing the precollapse rates in Canadian waters (Cook,
Sinclair, and Stefansson1997).
Pre-nineteenth-century coastal whaling is another ancient practice that had
almost no effect on the numbers of migrating whales that entered shallower waters:
besides the Alaskans, its practitioners included Basques, Normans, and Scandina-
vians, as well as the Japanese. Because Japan's ancient Buddhist bans on killing and
eating animals did not apply to sea mammals, whale (
kujira
) meat from animals
killed in coastal waters was a welcome source of protein and fat from the very
beginning of the country's history (Shiba 1986). All estimates of original whale
populations before the beginning of large-scale, long-distance whaling are highly
uncertain, and the best new models, based on mitochondrial DNA sequence varia-
tion, may not bring any more clarity.
Roman and Palumbi (2003) used this technique to put the total numbers of
prewhaling North Atlantic whale species at 240,000 for humpbacks (360,000 for
i n whales, 265,000 for minke whales). This i gure was in stark contrast to the
previously estimated total of 20,000 North Atlantic humpbacks, and the new esti-
mate was immediately questioned. Smith and Reeves (2002) used historical records
to estimate the total removal of 29,000 humpback whales between 1664 and 2001;
added to the extant total of 11,000 individuals in the late 1990s, that would indicate
a pre-exploitation total of about 40,000 animals, and historical removals would
have to have been roughly six times the reconstructed rate to conform to Roman
and Palumbi's (2003) estimate (Smith and Reeves 2004).
Commercially well-organized long-distance whaling began gradually during
the seventeenth century, with Nantucket, Massachusetts, emerging as its center
(Starbuck 1989). When the North Atlantic whaling grounds showed signs of growing
depletion the vessels moved into the South Atlantic, and soon afterward they were
active throughout all but the southernmost circumpolar waters in the Pacii c, as well
as in the Indian Ocean. The world's i rst truly global industry had been born, its
practices immortalized in a great American novel (Melville 1851). Sperm whales
(
Physeter macrocephalus
) were the primary target of this great open-boat hunt,
which began in 1712 and whose annual catches rose to more than 5,000 animals
during the 1830s (Best 1983). Whitehead (2002) used modern visual surveys and a
population model that incorporated uncertainties regarding population and catch
