The smallest of the great whales usually about 35ft long and weighing about nine tons
Posted in General on 05. Sep, 2010
The smallest of the great whales, usually about 35ft long and weighing about nine tons. This is the whale that is most commonly seen around the coasts of Britain and it is the main object of the summer whale hunt by Norwegian and Icelandic boats.* ANTARCTIC MINKE WHALEBalaenoptera bonaerensis Slightly larger version of the North Atlantic minke. Because it was the smallest, it was targeted last during the centuries of commercial whaling, so it is still relatively abundant. The main target of the Japanese whale hunt, for “scientific” reasons.* FIN WHALEBalaenoptera physalus. The second-largest of all the whales, exceeded only by the blue whale Can be 75ft long and weigh 75 tons.
“People don’t realise how significant it is and how close it is. The world needs to be alerted to it.”The whaling moratorium, voted through at the IWC meeting in Brighton in 1982 and brought in four years later, has been a rare environmental success story. It was intended originally, not as an outright and permanent ban on whaling, but as a pause to give whale stocks time to recover while their numbers were assessed comprehensively, and new ways of managing huting were introduced, based on the close study of whale population dynamics.Most anti-whaling countries, including Britain, are now firmly of the view that commercial whaling should never resume. Britain’s original position was to be “guided by the science” but that view has hardened over the years, and the UK now believes “that properly regulated whale watching is the only truly sustainable use of whales and other cetaceans [dolphins and porpoises]“.HUNTED: THE MAIN TARGETS* COMMON MINKE WHALEBalaenoptera acutorostrata. This year, he thinks, they will.”This would be the most enormous setback for whale and dolphin conservation,” he said. Some of the newcomers, such as Mongolia and Mali, do not even have a coastline.Mark Simmonds, international director of science for the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society, believes the Japanese already had their majority at last year’s IWC meeting in South Korea but administrative hitches meant they were not able to exercise it.
Over the past six years, at least 14 nations have been recruited to the IWC as Japan’s supporters, most of which have no whaling tradition. Trade sanctions should certainly be a possibility.” Mr Singh added: “I have been attending IWC meetings for years, and a number of resolutions which have been passed aimed at stopping scientific whaling have had no effect whatsoever. Diplomatic demarches, notes to Japan, have had no effect either.”If there is any seriousness in terms of saving whales, this seems to be the way.”But time is pressing if the anti-whaling countries want to act, because in June, at the IWC meeting to be held in St Kitts and Nevis in the Caribbean, the whaling nations seem likely to secure a voting majority for the first time.It would be the result of an intense diplomatic campaign by Japan to get small developing countries to join the IWC and vote in its favour, by offering them substantial aid. We think the like-minded countries should look at them.”They need to take this issue to the International Court, because international pressure is required. Japan ignores it.Some campaigners are now calling for the anti-whaling countries – the so-called “like-minded” group, led by Australia, New Zealand, the US and Britain – to take legal action against Japan over the “scientific” whaling issue.”Scientific whaling needs to be stopped, and legal action needs to be taken against Japan in the International Court,” said Joth Singh, director of wildlife and habitats for the International Fund for Animal Welfare.”We believe there is, in fact, an opportunity to do that, and we have contracted a lawyer in Australia who has done an evalutation of the possibilities of legal action. “Politicians who are supposed to be anti-whaling especially need to wake up to it, and press their governments to put as much effort into saving the world’s whale populations as the whaling countries are doing to exploit them.”Greenpeace has decided to take the fight directly to the Japanese, and has sent two of its large campaigning vessels, Arctic Sunrise and Esperanza, to the Southern Ocean to try to hinder whaling operations directly. Four days before Christmas, the Norwegian government announced it would increase its 2006 whale hunting quota by a further 250 animals to 1,052, following a unanimous recommendation by the Storting (Norwegian parliament).Iceland, which recommenced whaling three years ago, also under the “scientific” label, killed 39 minkes last year and is expected to hunt a similar number in 2006.That all adds up to by far the bloodiest bout of whale slaughter since the days of full-scale commercial whaling and has greatly angered environmental campaigners.”People should wake up to the scale of what is happening this year,” said the whaling campaigner for Greenpeace UK, Willie McKenzie.