SOME of the die-hard whaling nations are pressing for the moratorium
on commercial whaling to be lifted for the minke whale at this week’s meeting
of the International Whaling Commission in Noordwijk, in the Netherlands.
Norway claims that stocks of minkes, the smallest of the great whales, are
large enough to sustain commercial catches. But the IWC’s scientific committee
believes that too little is known about minke whales to hunt them safely.
Iceland and Japan also want to hunt minke whales.
The main purpose of this week’s meeting of the IWC is to review the
moratorium, which it agreed in 1982 but which came into effect only five
years ago, with a promise to review the moratorium by 1990.
The scientific committee, which has spent the three weeks running up
to the IWC meeting discussing the status of whale populations, concluded
that it is too soon to tell if the moratorium has made any difference to
the populations of great whales, which breed very slowly.
Whalers began to hunt minke whales only after 1972 when other species
had become scarce. But by 1986 the IWC decided that the number of minkes
in the North Atlantic had fallen by 80 per cent because of overhunting,
and protected them.
Despite this, Norway has asked for permission to take between 1700 and
2000 minkes a year in the North Atlantic. Japan is expected to ask for a
quota of 5000 in the South Pacific. The Soviet Union is also asking for
a quota of 70 minkes and 30 fin whales a year for the next two years for
Justin Cooke, a biologist working for the International Union for Conservation
of Nature (IUCN), said that it is not clear what criteria the IWC needs
satisfied before it decides to lift the moratorium. The Norwegians say that
their surveys of whales in the North Atlantic over the past three years
show that there are perhaps 77 000 minkes, rather than the 20 000 estimated
by the IWC when it banned hunting of minke whales (see New Scientist, This
Week, 9 June).
Uncertainty surrounds both the whaling nations’ methods of estimating
numbers of whales and how they will manage commercial whaling if the ban
is lifted. The scientific committee believes that none of the models is
good enough, and the IWC has asked it to produce a better one by next year.
The committee is also assessing five new management procedures developed
by different groups of scientists. Simulations of previous strategies, which
were based on factors such as birth and death rates and the rate of reproduction
for a particular species, have shown they could destroy stocks.
The crucial factor is what constitutes a population. What looks like
a single large population can turn out to be several discrete populations,
which do not interbreed.
The scientific committee disagrees over how many groups of minke whales
there are in the North Atlantic. Based on information from marking studies
and analysis of DNA from whales caught in Norway’s programme of ‘scientific
whaling’, the committee decided that there are three separate stocks of
minke in the North Atlantic. The scientists failed to define the boundaries
of those stocks, however. All of the proposed management strategies could
lead to extinction if ‘two real stocks are managed as a single stock’, says