Whales remain in dire straits

By JIM McLAY*

It is disappointing that Barbara Sumner Burstyn's Dialogue column linked her attack on the overall cause of whale conservation to the recent presence of Paul Watson, of Sea Shepherd, in a New Zealand port.

Ms Sumner Burstyn appears to have swallowed the whaling lobby's propaganda hook, line and sinker.

Some of her assertions require correction. For instance, Milton Freeman (who is a sociologist, not a biologist) is welcome to his unsupported opinions about whale populations - that the number of minke whales has trebled over 30 years and humpback numbers are exploding at a rate of between 12 and 17 per cent a year. But they are incorrect.

Let's look just at Southern Hemisphere minke. In 1992, the International Whaling Commission accepted an estimate of 760,000 for this species, but in 2000 it agreed that estimate was no longer valid.

This year, the commission's scientific committee advised that latest data indicated the population may now be less than half the previous estimate.

Far from "trebling over 30 years", the current scientific advice is that southern minke whale numbers may be in steep decline.

As for humpbacks, Ms Sumner Burstyn need look no further for the truth than New Zealand's waters.

Between 1912 and 1963, our whaling industry killed more than 3600 humpbacks on their annual migrations through Cook Strait and Colville Channel.

Forty years after the industry collapsed, coastal sightings of humpbacks are still extremely rare.

Any claimed explosion in numbers certainly has not reached our shores, and seems unlikely to do so anytime soon.

Saying that "whales now eat at least 300 million tonnes of marine food" is a repeat of a Japanese claim that is rejected by reputable scientific opinion.

Above all, it ignores the fact that most baleen whales eat either plankton (such as Antarctic krill, not a greatly sought-after delicacy for humans) or deep-water squid that are of no commercial value.

And "speculation that rising numbers of minke whales may be holding down the population of blue whales that compete for the same food" is straight out of the Japan Whaling Association propaganda handbook.

Blue whales in Antarctica remain at extremely low levels (estimates range from 600 to 2000 animals), not because they compete with minke for krill but because they were hunted to the very brink of extinction.

Even Japanese scientists concede that blue and minke whales tend to forage for krill in different areas of the Antarctic Ocean.

If only it were true, as Ms Sumner Burstyn claims, that "for some species we can no longer argue that we need to save the whales ... [because] they have been saved".

The scientific facts prove otherwise. While it may be convenient to repeat these inaccuracies, saying so does not make it so.

Minke sushi anyone? asks Ms Sumner Burstyn. No way.

* Jim McLay is the New Zealand commissioner to the International Whaling Commission.

Further reading:
nzherald.co.nz/environment