Microsoft Word - Gales et al humpback whale catches.doc

11/12/07

A Case For Killing Humpback Whales?

NICHOLAS J. GALES

, PHILLIP J. CLAPHAM

2,3

, C. SCOTT BAKER

3,4, 5

Australian Centre for Applied Marine Mammal Science, Australian Antarctic Division,

Channel Highway, Kingston, Tasmania 7050, Australia

National Marine Mammal Laboratory, Alaska Fisheries Science Center, NOAA, 7600 Sand

Point Way NE, Seattle, WA 98115, USA

South Pacific Whale Research Consortium, Box 3069, Avarua, Rarotonga, Cook Islands

Marine Mammal Institute and Department of Fisheries and Wildlife, Oregon State

University, 2030 SE Marine Science Dr, Newport Oregon 97365 USA

School of Biological Sciences, University of Auckland, Private Bag 92019, Auckland, New

Zealand

During the austral summer of 2007/08, hunting of Southern Hemisphere (SH) humpback

whales will recommence after almost half a century of protection. The stated rationale for this

hunt, by the Government of Japan (GoJ), is to gather important scientific information for use

in management. If the scientific need was defensible, and the proponents had accommodated

reasonable conservation concerns, then criticisms of the hunt would be limited to

philosophical issues. This is not the case. The program's research objectives are unlikely to

be achieved by lethal methods and do not address the principal research needs for SH

humpback whales identified by the International Whaling Commission (IWC).

Japan's Antarctic scientific whaling dates to 1987, the year after the moratorium on

commercial whaling. During the next 18 years, this controversial program (known as

"JARPA") killed almost 7,000 Antarctic minke whales, sustaining a domestic commercial

market in whale meat (Normile 2000). In 2005, the GoJ announced plans for a new,

substantially expanded research program called JARPA II (Government of Japan 2005, Gales

et al. 2005). After completion of the first two `feasibility' years, the full-scale program is

scheduled to begin in the austral summer of 2007/08, with an annual kill of up to 935 minke

whales, 50 fin whales and 50 humpback whales.

Unlike Antarctic minke whales, which were never a primary target of commercial whaling,

fin and humpback whales were hunted intensively and reduced to low numbers throughout

the SH. From 1904 to 1986, more than 200,000 humpbacks and 720,000 fin whales were

killed (Clapham and Baker 2002). Although humpback whales appear to be recovering in

some areas, there are other populations (such as Fiji, New Caledonia, Tonga and New

Zealand) that remain small despite decades of protection. It is of particular concern that

whales from these depleted breeding stocks migrate into the JARPA II whaling grounds,

Nature Precedings : hdl:10101/npre.2007.1313.1 : Posted 12 Nov 2007

where it will be impossible for a harpooner to distinguish them from animals from larger,

recovering populations.

When the JARPA II proposal was presented to the IWC's Scientific Committee (SC), it led

to considerable controversy. Members from over half of the national delegations authored a

paper criticising JARPA II's scientific basis, further noting that it was inappropriate to review

the new proposal before Japan had given the IWC an opportunity to assess the results of the

preceding 18-year JARPA program (Childerhouse et al. 2006). That review (eventually held

in December 2006 (IWC 2008)), concluded that JARPA had `the potential to improve

management of minke whales in the Southern Ocean', but that such an outcome had not been

realised, despite nearly two decades of effort by a large and well-funded research laboratory

in Tokyo. The review concluded that the major JARPA objectives were largely unachieved,

notably:

· The data were not required under the IWC's accepted method of managing whale

populations and assigning catch limits;

· Efforts to estimate natural mortality had produced confidence intervals that `spanned

such a wide range that the parameter remains effectively unknown';

· Data on trends in abundance were so imprecise that they could be interpreted as

consistent with anything from a decline to an increase; and,

· Efforts to elucidate the role of whales in the Antarctic marine ecosystem had led to

`relatively little progress, even allowing for the complexities of the subject'.

Despite these failings, and the near-parity in the methodologies used in JARPA and JARPA

II, the GoJ stated at the 2007 IWC SC meeting that the objectives and methods of the full-

scale JARPA II program would remain unchanged from the original proposal.

Broadly speaking, JARPA II aims to monitor the Antarctic ecosystem by examining how

three species of whale (minke, fin and humpback) interact with each other and with their

environment (Government of Japan 2005). The GoJ intends to do this primarily by measuring

or estimating parameters such as age, stomach content mass and prey species, blubber

thickness and reproductive status of hunted animals, set against limited measurements of the

physical and biological environment from which the whales are taken. These data are

intended for use in models that examine the degree of presumed competition among these

whales, and to develop a new, multi-species management procedure. The primary objective

of this procedure is to accelerate the recovery of the largest and most valuable whale species

Nature Precedings : hdl:10101/npre.2007.1313.1 : Posted 12 Nov 2007

11/12/07

(e.g. blue and fin whales) through the culling of less valuable and more numerous species

such as minke and humpback whales. These objectives are being pursued despite the fact

that there is little evidence for competition among the species concerned, that culling is a

crude and ineffective method of managing species, and that the models being employed in

JARPA II simplify or ignore key variables involved in this complex ecosystem.

So what will be learned from the inclusion of humpback and fin whales in the JARPA II

hunt? The GoJ argues in its proposal that the sample sizes for these two species (50 each

annually) were derived to measure trends in pregnancy rates and age at sexual maturity.

During the original 18-year JARPA program the GoJ attempted to measure these same

parameters in Antarctic minke whales, but could detect no significant trends despite having

an annual sample size that was almost an order of magnitude greater than those planned for

humpback and fin whales. The use of the same methodologies and smaller sample sizes will

clearly result in even less power to detect such changes. Reliable estimates of reproductive

rates in humpback whales are much more likely to come from some of the many long-term

studies of individual whales (e.g. Barlow and Clapham 1997).

A more fundamental question is whether JARPA II will contribute to filling the knowledge

gaps and research needs required for management of these species. For this, the IWC has a

formal process known as the Comprehensive Assessment: `an in-depth evaluation of the

status of all whale stocks in the light of management objectives and procedures that would

include the examination of current stock size, recent population trends, carrying capacity and

productivity' (IWC 2007a). A Comprehensive Assessment of SH humpback whales has been

underway since 2000, and was the subject of a four-day IWC workshop in 2006 (IWC

2007b), which Japan attended. The key research priorities were identified as follows:

· Describe the genetic structure of seven putative SH breeding populations;

· Quantify the complex linkages between high-latitude feeding grounds and breeding

stocks; and,

· Estimate the abundance of breeding stocks.

To this end, the workshop recommended methodological approaches that included genetic

analysis from skin samples; analysis of photo-identification, acoustics and historical marking

data; improving resolution of historical catch data; satellite-monitored telemetry studies;

sighting surveys; and the further development and refinement of assessment models.

Nature Precedings : hdl:10101/npre.2007.1313.1 : Posted 12 Nov 2007

With the exception of sightings surveys, JARPA II will address none of these objectives

through its lethal research program, particularly since the GoJ continues to ignore the critical

need for research in breeding areas (JARPA II operates exclusively on the whales' feeding

grounds).

The belated protection afforded by the IWC to the world's populations of humpback

whales (IWC 2007) has been a remarkable success, with some populations recovering from

levels that were arguably close to extinction. Scientists using non-lethal techniques in large-

scale research programs have added enormously to our knowledge of this species. In

particular, international collaborative studies in the North Atlantic (Palsbøll et al. 1997),

North Pacific (Calambokidis et al. 2001) and SH (Pomilla and Rosenbaum 2005, Olavarrìa et

al. 2007) have combined photo-identification and genetic techniques to obtain high-precision

assessments of abundance and population structure across entire ocean basins. Remaining

knowledge gaps in the SH can be filled with similar integrated, non-lethal studies (Baker and

Clapham 2004).

The promulgation of a lethal research program that targets low-priority science, with a

demonstrably low likelihood of achieving its stated objectives, appears unsupportable when

viewed solely in a scientific context. However, under the 1986 IWC moratorium, commercial

whaling is banned until such time as a three-quarters majority of member nations vote to

overturn it, and agree to the conditions that would govern any resumption of whaling.

Furthermore, members would also need to abolish the Southern Ocean Sanctuary, which

currently prohibits commercial whaling in the waters where JARPA II is being conducted.

Thus, for the GoJ the only legal option for whaling during the moratorium and within the

Sanctuary is to conduct a hunt for scientific purposes, as allowed by Article VIII of the 1946

International Convention for the Regulation of Whaling (ICRW) (9).

Japan has been exploiting this provision for several decades, to the point where its annual

hunt now equates to more than half the total catches for scientific research by all nations in

the past half-century (Gales et al. 2005). These actions have not been without protest, but

multiple IWC resolutions and multinational demarches have had no effect, and an unresolved

stand-off remains.

It is now clear that the scientific whaling provision of the ICRW is being used for a purpose

and to an extent never intended when it was drafted, a point which even a leading Norwegian

proponent of whaling acknowledges (Morell 2007). Japan's proposal to kill humpback

whales is not scientifically credible, and will potentially disrupt ongoing non-lethal research

programs directed at filling knowledge gaps identified for the Comprehensive Assessment.

Nature Precedings : hdl:10101/npre.2007.1313.1 : Posted 12 Nov 2007

11/12/07

The IWC has been presented with yet more lethal studies that have little relevance to

identified key research objectives, and which could threaten humpback whales from depleted

populations that mix on the Antarctic feeding grounds with animals from larger stocks.

Given that the GoJ remains impervious to any influence from the broader scientific

community, it is time to acknowledge that the debate about research whaling has little or

nothing to do with science. Indeed, by insisting that this form of whaling is scientifically

valid, Japan forces the SC to remain dead-locked, ultimately to the detriment of the IWC's

credibility and function. Although the threat of scientific whaling to small, unrecovered

stocks is an urgent topic for scientific investigation, Japan's justification for the imminent

hunt of 50 humpback whales, together with 50 fin and almost 1,000 minke whales, must be

debated in the larger context of policy, politics and national obligations to international

agreements.

References cited

Normile D. 2000. Japan's whaling program carries heavy baggage. Science 289: 2264-2265.

Government of Japan. 2005. Plan for the second phase of the Japanese whale research

program under special permit in the Antarctic (JARPA II). Paper SC/57/O1 presented

to the IWC Scientific Committee. Available from International Whaling

Commission, Cambridge, UK.

Gales NJ, et al. 2005. Japan's whaling plan under scrutiny: useful science or unregulated

commercial whaling? Nature 435: 883-884.

Clapham P, Baker CS. 2002. Modern whaling. In: Perrin, W.F., Würsig, B. and Thewissen,

J.G.M. (eds.) Encyclopedia of Marine Mammals, pp. 1328-1332. Academic Press,

San Diego.

Childerhouse SJ, et al. 2006. Comments on the Government of Japan's proposal for a

second phase of special permit whaling in Antarctica (JARPA II). Journal of Cetacean

Research and Management 8 (suppl.) 260-261.

IWC. 2007a. Schedule, International Convention for the Regulation of Whaling,

Washington, DC, 2 December 1946, as modified May 2007. International Whaling

Commission, Cambridge, UK.

IWC. 2007b. Report of the Scientific Committee 2006. Journal of Cetacean Research and

Management 9 (suppl.)

Nature Precedings : hdl:10101/npre.2007.1313.1 : Posted 12 Nov 2007

IWC. 2008. Report of the Scientific Committee 2007. Journal of Cetacean Research and

Management 10 (suppl.) Forthcoming.

Barlow J, Clapham PJ. 1997. A new birth-interval approach to estimating demographic

parameters of humpback whales. Ecology 78: 535-546.

Palsbøll PJ, et al. 1997. Genetic tagging of humpback whales. Nature 388: 767-769.

Calambokidis J, 2001. Movements and population structure of humpback whales in the

North Pacific. Marine Mammal Science 17: 769-794.

Pomilla C, Rosenbaum, HC. 2005. Against the current: an inter-oceanic whale migration

event. Biology Letters 1: 476-479.

Olavarría C, et al. 2007. Population structure of humpback whales throughout the South

Pacific, and the origin of the eastern Polynesian breeding grounds. Marine Ecology

Progress Series 330: 257-268.

Baker CS, Clapham PJ. 2004. Modeling the past and future of whales and whaling. Trends

in Ecology and Evolution 19: 365-371.

Morrell V. 2007. Killing whales for science? Science 316: 532-534.

The authors are all members of the International Whaling Commission's Scientific

Committee.

Nature Precedings : hdl:10101/npre.2007.1313.1 : Posted 12 Nov 2007