Whale sushi, anyone?
Thursday, November 16, 2006
Japan's whaling fleet announced that they will be setting out for another expedition in Antarctic waters, which will result in the catching/slaughtering of almost a 1000 whales. Although there has been a whaling moratorium in place since the 1980's, the Japanese are circumventing this by calling their actions "scientific research". Both Australia and New Zealand officials have condemned the mission, but Japan is unrepentant, saying that it had proof that commercial whale harvesting could be sustainable...From what I hear, the crew of the Sea Shepherd vessel I saw in Melbourne last week is itching to notch up another whaling ship kill on their ship's bow...
Hi
As for Japan's goals, the current 850 whales is nothing. Back in the commercial whaling days more than 5,000 minke whales were killed in the Antarctic each year, and scientists seemed to think it was sustainable at that level, but needed better scientific evidence to be sure. What the government is hoping is that with the improved understanding of biological features of the whale stocks in the Antarctic, they'll be able to get scientific justification for these larger scale commercial hunts (there is nothing to stop Japan setting itself a quota of 5,000 each year if it wants to).
Japan's researchers have been having success with this too: the IWC's Scientific Committee recognised that the results obtained at the halfway point of the original JARPA programme "had the potential to improve" the IWC's "revised management procedure" (a scientific procedure for setting sustainable catch limits for baleen whales). The committee also noted that the results "might allow an increased allowed catch of minke whales in the Southern Hemisphere without increasing the depletion risk above the level indicated by the existing Implementation Simulation Trials for these minke whales."
Of course, the idea of whales being killed in the first instance is objectionable to nations like Australia, NZ and the UK, so they have naturally tried to discredit the research.
Sea Shepherd on the other hand seems to be a terrorist organization. I think people should think twice before supporting a group such as this. Do we want to condone terrorism, even when we may agree with the general intent of those carrying out such acts? If we do, then it becomes very difficult to criticise radical terrorists who act against us...
Interesting points. Leaving my moral objections to the slaugher of wild marine mammals aside, I am always amazed when scientists (one assumes they are ecologists and/or marine biologists) are of the opinion that the harvesting of an aqautic species can be 'sustainable'. Counting whales is notoriously difficult, and so is predicting the ecological consequences of depletion of yet another whale species. And I won; even go into the potential threat of climate change on krill stocks, which may lead to a rapid decline in whale numbers...
According to the American Cetacean Society: "Only in recent decades have minke whales been taken by whalers to any extent; they were thought to be too small to be a worthwhile catch. But as the larger whale species became depleted, the whalers began to hunt the minke as a replacement...It is thought that minke populations have increased as they started to eat the food that was previously eaten by the now-depleted large whale species. The present population worldwide is believed to be over a millions animals."
There should be alesson there...If large-scale minke whaling was to resume, how long before their numbers are depleted, as well? International fishing fleets have a history of not stopping until most of the fish of a specific species is gone.