Whaling Case Research Articles

Short Reflections on the ICJ's Whaling Case and the Review by International Courts and Tribunals of ‘Discretionary Powers’

Short Reflections on the ICJ's Whaling Case and the Review by International Courts and Tribunals of ‘Discretionary Powers’

On the Way to Definitive Settlement of Dispute: Lessons from the Whaling Case

On the Way to Definitive Settlement of Dispute: Lessons from the Whaling Case

On the Way to Definitive Settlement of Dispute: Lessons from the Whaling Case

On the Way to Definitive Settlement of Dispute: Lessons from the Whaling Case

Short Reflections on the ICJ’s Whaling Case and the Review by International Courts and Tribunals of ‘Discretionary Powers’

Short Reflections on the ICJ’s Whaling Case and the Review by International Courts and Tribunals of ‘Discretionary Powers’

A Double-Edged Harpoon: The Trial of Science in the Antarctic Whaling Case before the International Court of Justice

A Double-Edged Harpoon: The Trial of Science in the Antarctic Whaling Case before the International Court of Justice

The Antarctic Whaling case: litigation in the international court and the role played by NGOs

Australia, in 2010, commenced proceedings in the International Court of Justice against Japan challenging the international legal validity of Japan’s conduct of its “scientific” whaling programme in the Southern Ocean. The case against Japan was argued in the International Court in June and July 2013. These proceedings were brought following a sustained campaign by the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) in Australia and internationally in which four Legal Panels were sponsored to consider the legality of Japan’s whaling programme. The role played by IFAW in promoting international litigation strategies to challenge Japan’s whaling in the Southern Ocean is considered, against a backdrop of similar and related environmental campaigns by other non-governmental organisations.

A new method for estimating animal abundance with two sources of data in capture–recapture studies

Summary 1. Mark–recapture studies are often used to estimate population size based on a single source of individual identification data such as natural markings or artificial tags. However, with the development of molecular ecology, multiple sources of identification can be obtained for some species and combining them to obtain population size estimates would certainly provide better information about abundance than each survey can provide alone. 2. We propose an extension of the Jolly–Seber model to infer abundance by combining two sources of capture–recapture data. The need to merge both sources of data was motivated by studies of humpback whales in which both photo‐identification and DNA from skin biopsy samples are often collected. As whales are not necessarily available by both sampling methods on any given occasion, they can appear twice in the combined data set if no combined sampling ever occurred during the survey, i.e. being photographed and genotyped on the same occasion. Our model thus combines the two sources of information by estimating the possible overlap. Monte Carlo simulations are used to assess the properties of the present estimator that is then used to estimate the size of the humpback whale population in New Caledonia. The new open‐population estimator is also compared with classic closed‐population estimators incorporating either temporal and/or individual heterogeneity in the capture probability: the purpose was to evaluate which approach (closed or open population) was the least biased for an open population with individual heterogeneous capture probabilities. 3. When all assumptions are met, the estimator is unbiased as long as the probability of being double‐tagged (e.g. photographed and biopsied on the same occasion) on every occasion is above 0·2. 4. The humpback whale case study in New Caledonia shows that our two‐source Jolly–Seber (TSJS) estimator could be more efficient in estimating population size than models based only on one type of data. For monitoring purposes, the proposed method provides an efficient alternative to the existing approaches and a productive direction for future work to deal with multiple sources of data to estimate abundance. 5. R‐codes formatting the data and implementing the TSJS model are provided in Resource S5.

Automatic Indexing for Content Analysis of Whale Recordings and XML Representation

This paper focuses on the robust indexing of sperm whale hydrophone recordings based on a set of features extracted from a real-time passive underwater acoustic tracking algorithm for multiple whales using four hydrophones. Acoustic localization permits the study of whale behavior in deep water without interfering with the environment. Given the position coordinates, we are able to generate different features such as the speed, energy of the clicks, Inter-Click-Interval (ICI), and so on. These features allow to construct different markers which allow us to index and structure the audio files. Thus, the behavior study is facilitated by choosing and accessing the corresponding index in the audio file. The complete indexing algorithm is processed on real data from the NUWC (Naval Undersea Warfare Center of the US Navy) and the AUTEC (Atlantic Undersea Test & Evaluation Center-Bahamas). Our model is validated by similar results from the US Navy (NUWC) and SOEST (School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology) Hawaii university labs in a single whale case. Finally, as an illustration, we index a single whale sound file using the extracted whale's features provided by the tracking, and we present an example of an XML script structuring it.

Implicatures: a schematic approach

Grice's theory of implicatures is still considered one of the most valuable descriptions of conversational logic. However, when it comes to specifying how persons reason from the content of an uttered proposition to some other proposition it implicates, Grice is vague. If implicatures were actually that open-ended and indeterminate, reliably communicating something “off the record,” indirectly, by means of what one implicates, would be impossible. This paper proposes to develop a solution that grounds the calculation of implicatures in Greimas' [Greimas, A.J., 1987. On Meaning. Selected Writings in Semiotic Theory (Perron, Paul J., Collins, Frank H., Transl.). Francis Pinter, London; Greimas, A.J., 1990. The Social Science: A Semiotic View (Perron, Paul, Collins, Frank H., Transl.). University of Minneapolis Press, Minneapolis, MI] model of narrative. Based on a semio-narrative approach to indirectness [Cooren, F., Taylor, J.R., 2000. Association and dissociation in an ecological controversy: the great whale case. In: Coppola, N.W., Karis, B. (Eds.), Technical communication, Deliberative Rhetoric, and Environmental Discourse: Connections and Directions. Ablex, Stamford, CT, pp. 171–190] and Sanders' [Sanders, R.E., 1987. Cognitive Foundations of Calculated Speech: Controlling Understandings in Conversation and Persuasion. State University of New York Press, Albany, NY] model of calculated speech, we show that the general mechanism of implicatures, as first introduced by Grice [Grice, H.P., 1975. Logic and conversation. In: Cole, P., Morgan, J.L. (Eds.), Syntax and Semantics, vol. 3. Academic Press, New York, pp. 41–58; Grice, H.P., 1989a. Further notes on logic and conversation. In: Studies in the Way of Words. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, pp. 41–57; Grice, H.P., 1989b. Logic and conversation. In: Studies in the Way of Words. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, pp. 22–40], can be operationalized by mobilizing schemata that were devised to explore the universal forms of narratives.

Economic Science, Endangered Species, and Biodiversity Loss

Abstract: Although economic analysis can be used to argue for preservation of species and habitats, many natural assets represent inferior investments in society's asset portfolio. We demonstrate this for the case of ancient temperate rainforests and minke whales ( Balaenoptera acutorostrata). For both rainforests and whales, we determined their value for harvest and balanced this against society's valuation of the preserved stock. For the market and nonmarket data available, we then determined how much rainforest and how many minke whales global society should keep in its asset portfolio. Although ecologists increasingly attempt to justify preservation of biological assets on economic grounds, we argue that this might be a dangerous approach to take. Ultimately, it may be necessary to reexamine the ethical foundations for conservation of nature and biodiversity, including the economist's use of utilitarianism. We suggest that the safe minimum standard approach may prove useful in practice.

Dynamic and static approaches to mixed good management: The case of minke whales in the Northeast Atlantic

Whales have private and public good characteristics. A dynamic model, developed to capture the complexities of managing such a resource, yields optimal steady-state estimates suggesting that the current stock of minke whales in the Northeast Atlantic is below the steady-state optimum. The dynamics of the optimal approach to the steady state are consistent with drastic measures such as the current moratorium on commercial whaling. These findings are not consistent with previous research in this field. The discrepancies should be attributed to the inclusion of non-use values in the present paper. Finally, we compare the outcomes of the dynamic model with the results of a simple static model. We find that the latter consistently errs on the side of excessive exploitation because of its failure to account for the impact of current harvesting on future benefits and costs