It looks like the wayward whales found their way through the Golden Gate and back home to the Pacific without so much as a tail wave goodbye. It was quite a rescue operation and it looks like biologists might also have gotten some good data about humpback whales from their extended time in the Sacramento Delta.

That’s a nice ending but we’re still waiting to hear about the vote at the International Whaling Commission meetings in Anchorage. Quotas and approval for subsistence whaling by Arctic native groups have been approved, but the vote on whether to resume commercial whaling awaits. Meanwhile, Japan is working to keep their whaling industry afloat. They are lobbying to overturn the ban on commercial whaling and to disband the International Whaling Commission as an ineffective, unnecessary regulator. They are also pleading the case that certain coastal communities should be granted permission to hunt for cultural reasons as do the Arctic subsistence whalers. The distinction is that subsistence hunters consume all the whale products themselves and don’t sell them on the commercial market, as the Japanese whalers do. Greenpeace is protesting, but their efforts aren’t generating much U.S. press (maybe they should try raising awareness in Japan). The media will probably pick it up big time if commercial whaling is approved, so no news is good news.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 31st, 2007 at 3:11 pm and is filed under environmental science, Uncategorized. 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.