Japanese study finds whales are losing blubber

Blubber thickness can be measured by ultrasound.

How blubber thickness of whales swimming in the ocean can be determined by ultrasound? Would you mind to give me some references in peer-reviewed journals?

A large part of the whales killed by the Japanese last year were pregnant females. These things tend to change population structures.

Then it is highly likely that a large part of female whales in the area are pregnant. I wonder how killing small number of whales can change the whole population structure.

Klauscore “A large part of the whales killed by the Japanese last year were pregnant females.”

Would you tell me what the proportion of pregnant female whales was? Surely, you know the numbers.

klauscore (2008-08-28 11:13:17),

Thank you for the reference. That paper is almost an invited paper published in a special issue of the journal of Cetacean Research and Management. The JCRM is not even listed in the Journal Citation Reports, so it has NO impact factor available. Also, it seems the authors of the paper have not published papers that utilized the ultrasonic method after they first published the JCRM paper.

By searching Entrez PubMed (the most comprehensive database in the field of biology) with the keywords “blubber + thickness + ultrasonic”, I can find only one paper that mentioned the ultrasonic method. The paper described ultrasonic measurement of the blubber thickness of CAPTIVE sea lions.

I wonder why the number of the papers related to the ultrasonic method is so limited. The most likely explanation is that the method is impractical.

Listing a letter to the editor ect. as a publication is academic dishonesty. That is NOT a reviewed publication, you are wrong!

Papers published only in Japanese are not part of the international scientific literature, like papers published in German, my native language, sorry!

A “hand full” does not mean exactly 10, but “a few”. This Japanese pseudo research institute has published very poorly, no question about that. 6 papers (by a whole institute, per year!) from killing ~1000 whales??? *Obviously* this is only an excuse for commercial whaling. No false statements here!

These people are a disgrace for Japanese science, which otherwise has much to offer.

“I’ve had whale and I’ve had fish, and you would need to be a master to get whale to taste better than (some) fish.”

I’ve had both too. I think it is more a matter of how it is cooked, what your preferences are and what you feel like on the day. It also depends on species, or so I am told. There is no one “whale meat” apparently.

I think I read somewhere that it wasn’t just a protein source during the occupation; industrial whale culls went all the way back to the Meiji period. In any case, whale was certainly culled (more wastefully so) by enlightened Western nations like Australia and NZ all the way up to the 1960s.

And therein lies the rub. Western nations saw whales predominantly as a source of fuel. When petroleum replaced whale blubber, there was no use for whales in most western nations. It was then perhaps inevitable that when environmentalism became a political force, the governments of such nations would seize on ‘saving the whales’ as a low-cost environmental policy to placate the greenies and whales became the first success story, and therefore symbol, of the green movement.

As for enlightened cows, if it is one that has had a good life and suffers a terrible end, it really makes to me no difference whether a cow is terrestrial or aquatic.

“The people who grew up on that, or the fishing towns who prospered thanks to that demand, are the ones who want it back from little more than nostalgia.”

That’s rather a broad statement. And an oft-repeated one. I wonder how true it is. The only evidence I’ve seen to support it is testimony from my older Japanese friends and polls that show that younger people would choose beef over whale, given the choice. But so what? Younger people would probably choose beef over venison elsewhere.

In any case, who cares why they want to eat it? I eat beef because I was brought up in a nation that encourages its consumption. A hindi might object to my diet, but unless there are more compelling reasons than cultural difference to discourage me from eating it, I don’t see why I should give a hoot.

“Japanese whaling propaganda goes on about how it is an intergral part of Japanese cuisine and tradition”

Does it? It can’t be very effective propaganda, because you don’t hear it much from the chattering classes. In fact, most people don’t seem to talk about it much at all. It seems to me to be a non-issue in Japan. Some people like it and some people don’t. Like venison, really. As for me, I liked some of the whale that I had (the bacon, oooooh, the bacon, the steak and the karaage), not liked some of the whale that I’ve had (the blubber – bleeeh – let whitey have it for his lanterns) and been kind of neutral about some types (the sashimi).

“but in reality it was minor and inshore until the Meiji period”

Yes but then again, so was meat and even fish…

“But trying to make it seem a quintessential part of Japanese cuisine is deceptive.”

Again, I’ve very seldom heard anybody try to pass it off as “quitessential”. Sure, there might be people who try and advertise it that way, but I’m sure in Australia they do the same thing with sausages. All that I’ve heard is that “there is a tradition” and “it is cultural imperialism to tell us that some of our population can’t enjoy whale from time to time.” You know as well as I do that most people don’t eat it more than once or so a year, if that. Certainly nobody I know tries to frame it as a quintessential (or typical) part of their “Japanese” diet. Actually, the first time I had it ordered for me, my mates were oohing and aahing over the fact that they were going to try whale bacon for the first time. From memory, I don’t think they even realised that eating whale was “something not done where this guy is from.”