Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
data to reconstruct a global historical trajectory for sperm whales and concluded
that the animal's status needs considerable revision.
White's prewhaling total was about 1.1 million whales (672,000-1,512,000), and
the population was still at about 70% of its original level in 1880, when open-boat
whaling was about to cease. Contrary to a common impression, open-boat hunting
did not have a destructive impact on global sperm whale numbers. Modern whaling
was made more lethal with the use of harpoon guns on steamship bows (common
by the 1870s); after World War II long-distance expeditions by whaling vessels
extended their reach to the last unexploited abodes in the Antarctic Ocean, and the
adoption of diesel engines made it possible to hunt even the fastest whales (sei,
minke). Japanese vessels began i shing in the Antarctic in 1934, and by 1939 they
were killing nearly 10,000 whales, yielding about 45,000 t of meat. Whale meat
became much more important after the end of World War II when it emerged as a
leading source of scarce animal protein: in 1947 it was the only meat served by
Japanese schools for lunch, and it remained popular until the early 1960s.
Japan remained the leading whaling nation after World War II, but its effort
peaked in 1965, with nearly 26,000 killed animals (about 70% from the Antarctic
seas); a decade later the killing was down to about 13,000 a year, and just over
5,000 whales were taken in 1980, two years before the International Whaling Com-
mission i nally decided to end commercial whaling starting in 1986 (Kalland and
Moeran 1992). And yet whale meat sales have continued: while Japan observes
the ban on commercial i shing, it has been conducting as already noted small-scale
but persistent “research” hunts of mostly minke (but also sei and sperm whales),
directed by a government-supported Institute of Cetacean Research, which yield
1,000-2,000 t of whale meat every year. Norway and Iceland are the only other
countries that have been defying the whale-hunting moratorium.
The post-1970 decline and then the end of commercial whaling came just in time
to prevent what might have become an irreparable overexploitation of several
species, including the sperm whale. Between the 1830s and the 1920s, worldwide
sperm whale hunting kept on declining, but then modern hunting led to rapidly
increasing catches that culminated in the annual killing of more than 20,000 animals
during the 1960s and in a signii cant population decline (Best 1983). Whitehead's
(2002) models indicate that by 1999, more than a decade after commercial whaling
ended, the global population of sperm whales was at 32% (85% coni dence interval
of 19%-62%) of the prewhaling total, and other species, above all the right whale
and the blue whale, suffered even greater declines: by the year 2000 there were fewer
