Right rare whales

Abstract

Perhaps the world's smallest whale population has been recorded. Nigel Williams reports. Perhaps the world's smallest whale population has been recorded. Nigel Williams reports. The collapse of the International Whaling Commission's discussions on the resumption of limited commercial whaling only highlights the pressure that still exists on these species. And new evidence from a survey of one population reveals how perilous it is, even after the 24-year moratorium on commercial whaling. The North Pacific right whale was the subject of hunting in the gulf of Alaska from the mid-1800s where whalers talked of the large numbers of whales they saw. Although there are no accurate records of the numbers of right whales at this time, “there is no doubt they were abundant throughout much of the North Pacific from North America to the Okhostsk Sea and Japan,” write Paul Wade at the Alaska Fisheries Science Center and colleagues in Biology Letters (published online). Intensive nineteenth-century whaling, primarily by American whalers, may have killed more than 23,000 whales and dramatically reduced these populations by the 1850s, they report. Despite international protection agreed in 1949, in the 1960s the USSR killed 372 right whales in the gulf of Alaska and Bering Sea. These catches, which were part of a 30-year campaign of illegal whaling by the USSR, decimated what was probably a small but slowly recovering eastern population, the authors write. Right whales have been so rare in the north Pacific since then that individual sightings merited publication. Right whales were ‘rediscovered’ in the eastern Bering Sea in 1996. Since then, NOAA surveys conducted between 1997 and 2008 have encountered small numbers of right whales in the Bering Sea and Aleutian Islands, and have collected identification photographs and biopsy tissue samples. The authors report photographic and genotype data to calculate the first mark–recapture estimates of abundance for right whales in this part of the north Pacific. The estimates suggested that the population contains eight females and 20 males. Although these estimates relate to the population only in this area of the north Pacific, the population in the total northeastern Pacific is likely to be larger, the authors say. But their study, they believe, provides firmer evidence of numbers in this tiny population. “The photographic and genetic abundance evidence reported here are in close agreement,” they write. They compare this tiny population with that of bowhead whales near Svalbard in the Arctic, and right whales in the eastern north Atlantic and off Chile and Peru, which were all decimated by whaling. “Its precarious status today — the world's smallest whale population for which an abundance estimate exists — is a direct consequence of uncontrolled and illegal whaling, and highlights the past failure of international management to prevent such abuses,” the authors write. The situation of this tiny population of whales is in doubt because of the ratio of 2:1 males to females but is more encouraging than the skew reported almost a decade ago, but the paucity of females is still a cause for concern, they write. “Their situation presents us with a grim reminder that international fisheries and whaling agreements are largely worthless if unaccompanied by stringent international monitoring and regulation of catches,” they write. The collapse of the IWC's talks in Morocco last month can only lead to concerns about the international regulatory structures.