Japanese study finds whales are losing blubber
A new study released by Japanese scientists suggests that whales are losing their blubber:
Measurements taken from more than 4,500 minke whales slaughtered since the late 1980s reveal the animals have lost significant amounts of blubber, and are getting thinner at a worrying speed. The team says its study offers the first evidence that global warming could be harming whales, because it restricts their food supplies. And they say the discovery could only have been made by killing the animals.
Crucially for the Japanese, the results have been published in a mainstream western scientific journal — a move that has dismayed campaigners, who say it could offer scientific whaling a veneer of respectability, and bolster Japan’s efforts to hunt more whales.
Anti-whaling groups, which frequently claim Japan is conducting no real research through its whaling program, have condemned the study as unethical.
[hat tip to FG]
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There were a handfull of peer-reviewed papers before from this multi-year, multi-person “research” project. It is still only a sorry excuse for commercial whaling, no question about that.
The individuals in overfished fish populations usually decrease in size due to the fishing pressure. Possibly the same is happening in the mink whale population as well. So, the Japanese whaling might actually be to blame for this effect they discovered.
Body sizes (and thus indirectly blubber) can be measured without killing whales.
Btw, the impact factor of Polar Biology is 1.734 In the section “Ecology” it ranks 52 of 116, according to the publishing house. Not exactly a newsworthy scientific triumph to publish there is it (I myself alone did much better last year)? That was worth the lives of 4500 whales? I don’t think so.
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“That was worth the lives of 4500 whales? I don’t think so.”
I don’t think so either. It was having whale meat available at the local supermarket made the trip worthwhile, just like having bacon available is worth the lives of thousands of pigs a year, or having steak available is worth the lives of thousands of cows, etc.
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Juat how do you get an accurate body size measurement from a whale? And given that the minke whale population is a few hundred thousand, is a few thousand relly “over” hunting?
How does Polar Biology rate among similar polar biology journals?
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“Just how do you get an accurate body size measurement from a whale?”
Well you start by buying her a few drinks at the bar….
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Blubber thickness can be measured by ultrasound.
I don’t know if the size decrease is really due to hunting pressure. That was educated speculation. A large part of the whales killed by the Japanese last year were pregnant females. These things tend to change population structures.
In any case, IMO this one publication does not justify these large whaling operations as research-motivated.
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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.
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Ultrasonic measurement of blubber thickness in right whales MJ Moore et al. – J. Cetacean Res. Mngmt, 2001
>I wonder how killing small number of whales can change the whole population structure.
The number was not so small, ~1% of the population per year. Killing a crucial part of the population (pregnat females) could very well have an effect.
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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.
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262 out of 505 killed Mink whales.
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klauscore:
At what rate to sexually mature Minke Whales reproduce? If adult females give birth to calves every couple years, I wouldn’t find that figure to be very shocking.
I don’t know (I hope this doesn’t give anyone ideas to do some “research” now
).
Shocking or not, what I am arguing is that this kind of hunting might alter the population structure.
Pregnant females might be easier to catch.
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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.
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Klauscore “There were a handfull of peer-reviewed papers before from this multi-year, multi-person “research” project.”
Here is the list of peer-reviewed research papers by Japanese research whaling.
http://www.icrwhale.org/03-A-a-08a.htm
You would not call them “a handful”, unless you have tens of fingers. Don’t get fooled by environmental activists.
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If you actually look at the list, you would see that they list a lot of letters to the editors, technical
reports, proceedings and other NOT peer reviewed publications.
Some of the journals are completely unknown and published only in Japanese – hardly the international scientific literature I’m talking about. “Bulletin of the Yamagata Prefectural Museum” Uuuh.
Believe me, there is very, very, little real science coming out of this “research”. Don’t fool yourself.
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How desperate you are to protect your false statement!
They are all reviewed publications.
“Completely unknown” by whom?
Is a paper “published only in Japanese” any worse than a paper published only in English? Maybe you are so ethnocentric to believe so.
Lets see how honest you are by looking at 2007 publication. There were 7 research papers based on Japanese research whaling in that year, which were published in,
Japanese Journal of Zoo Wildlife and Medicine
http://sciencelinks.jp/j-east/journal/J/L4311A/2006.php
Mammal Review
http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/journal.asp?ref=0305-1838&site=1
J. Cetacean Res. Manage
http://www.iwcoffice.org/publications/JCRM.htm
Journal of Reproduction and Development
http://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/browse/jrd
Zoological Science (2 reports)
http://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/browse/zsj/-char/en
Molecular Ecology
http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/journal.asp?ref=0962-1083&site=1
Some may be less known but the majority is well established in the field, in spite of your intention to make people believe otherwise.
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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.
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So how many papers would be needed to justify it?
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So is this controversy over over-fishing or is it an animal rights issue? I imagine that the scientific community would force the Japanese to slow down if the whale populations were critical, as happened with cod fishing in the Atlantic.
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Yeah, losing their blubber on the grill before being served up at an izakaya.
Anyone had the tonkatsu version of whale? It didn’t strike me as very extraordinary; not at all what I would consider majestic meat. It went well with the togarashi served alongside it.
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I have to say I am unimpressed with the taste of whale meat in general. Had it a few times and I doubt I’ll try it again.
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I can’t see how this sort of finding justifies the need to over-fish Minke whales either. Arguably, we can learn all sorts of things by sacrificing the lives of animals, but unless there is a pressing need for this (such as a desperately hungry human population) why do it? And it certainly does not justify butchering the whales indiscriminately. If we had people gunning for us like this, some of us humans would burn off a lot more blubber too.
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I think opponents of whaling need to say why, in each case, they are opponents of whaling. If it is merely an argument about preservation, then they have admitted that, all things being equal, killing whales per se is not unethical. The issue becomes one about about numbers – i.e.: “How many whales would make an acceptable cull?”.
If the issue is about saving sensitive beautiful creatures that are “intelligent”, that is clearly ridiculous. Magpies can pass some of the same tests used to measure whale intelligence. And was it a whale that discovered advanced calculus or invented the lightbulb? I don’t think so. The difference between a whale and a fish is that a whale breathes air, can turn a few more tricks and tastes better, depending on how it is cooked.
If the issue is about cruelty, I would much rather eat a whale that lives a good life in its natural habitat and then dies suddenly than a cow that spends its life wallowing in an enclosed cage full of faeces developing all manner of infestations and then watches its peers die one by one before it shuffles off its own mortal coil.
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You just eat the wrong cows. Buy beef from more enlightened (warmer) areas, where they can be free to roam all year round.
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. Whale was not eaten for its gourmet properties, but because it was cheap: the major period for whale-eating in Japan was in the post-war years when it was a cheap beef substitute, served in school lunches etc (with the blessing of the US). 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.
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“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.
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“The only evidence I’ve seen to support it is testimony from my older Japanese friends”
That’s exactly the age group that grew up on it.
It is important to know why they want to eat it as the Japanese whaling propaganda goes on about how it is an intergral part of Japanese cuisine and tradition, makes direct comparisons between whale and the predominant/stereotypical food of the nation it is directing its propaganda at, but in reality it was minor and inshore until the Meiji period, not huge after that, though there was some modern whaling going on, and peaked in the postwar years. If they would just come out and say “hey, it’s good stuff,” then fine. But trying to make it seem a quintessential part of Japanese cuisine is deceptive.
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“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.”
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The propaganda I refer to is what is put out for Western ‘consumption,’ not what normal Japanese say. I am thinking here of statements and reports made by ‘Japan’ when for example Australia and NZ rattle the fences about whaling in their backyard. The self-serving propaganda that equates whales with meat pies (for Down Under) or hamburger in the national cuisine psyche.
Fish was not exactly ‘minor’ before the Edo period.
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Shouldn’t this article read: “Japanese study finds whales are losing blubber during a taste test”?
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And yet people oppose this kind of delicious research.
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who cares?
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Couldn’t opponents of whaling just as easily argue that, over time, the fatter, slower whales were killed off by commercial whaling? Or couldn’t proponents of evolution argue that this is “survival of the fittest” and that the whales are evolving to evade their new predator, man? To just take some data and arbitrarily attribute its cause to global warming is scientifically irresponsible.
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LOL, big surprise.
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The team says its study offers the first evidence that global warming could be harming whales, because it restricts their food supplies. And they say the discovery could only have been made by killing the animals.
Wow!!! So the anti-whaling groups have to attack not only JP whaling boats but also other boats of which the countries have been refusing to decrease CO2 emission. If not, they will be hypocrite!!!!!
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