For the past week, crowds along the Sacramento Delta east of San Francisco have marveled at the spectacle, and fretted over the fate, of a mother humpback whale and her calf who are headed away from rather than toward the ocean. Biologists have been trying to herd them back to the sea to no avail and now their health appears to be deteriorating.

It’s a quirk of human nature that the public (and media) care more about two individuals that can be captured on TV or seen with their own eyes than about the lives of tens of thousands of whales that hang in the balance pending a vote by the International Whaling Commission this month in Anchorage. Twenty years ago, commercial whaling was banned by the IWC, but Japan is lobbying to lift that ban to satisfy their market for whale meat. The Japanese and some of their pro-whaling supporters claim that scientific studies have shown that whale populations have recovered enough to support commercial whaling. They probably don’t have the votes needed to overturn the ban this year, thanks to some intense lobbying by conservation groups in Britain, Australia and New Zealand (those countries seem much more attentive to the issue than the U.S.)

The IWC meetings started early in May with the scientific committees meeting first. David Ainley, who’s been studying penguins in Antarctica for 20 years, presented some papers there about the interactions between whales and penguins in Antarctica’s Ross Sea. (We did a webcast with him from his research camp at Cape Royds late last year.) David, who took this picture of a minke whale at left, said the IWC conference was the only biology meeting he’s ever been to with armed guards at the door. Japanese whaling vessels were in the Ross Sea this year, killing minke whales as part of their “scientific whaling” program. The whales are cut open on the ships and data on fat stores and stomach contents is collected. It’s doubtful whether Japanese scientists would kill whales for research if there was no market for the meat and David says that nearly all biologists at the IWC meeting question the need to sacrifice whales at all since there are non-lethal ways to study them.

I’ll keep you posted what happens with the IWC meeting and writing more about the spectacular Ross Sea and David’s research there.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 23rd, 2007 at 8:46 am and is filed under antarctica, biology, conferences, environmental science, international polar year, science in the field, scientists. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.