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Nice strawman, but Japanese whalers don't hunt threatened species like the blue whale.

https://iwc.int/table_permit

The solution is the same - monitoring the populations and setting quotas accordingly.

But is effective management possible? The IWC was founded in 1946 to manage whaling, and the moratorium came in 1982. So they couldn't figure it out over four decades. From the Wikipedia article on the IWC, I noticed this:

At the IWC's annual meeting in 1991, the Scientific Committee submitted its finding that there existed approximately 761,000 minke whales in Antarctic waters, 87,000 in the northeast Atlantic, and 25,000 in the North Pacific. With such populations, it was submitted, 2000 minke whales could be harvested annually without endangering the population.

That's 2000 animals per year. Suppose 10 countries want to hunt whales. That's 200 whales per country. Have a look at this chart on historical catches. There's a table too. Do you think countries would abide by such a low catch number? Have a look at this article. All while the IWC existed to "manage" things. Of course, we could all agree that only Japan and Norway can hunt substantial numbers, but I don't think that is really fair to the rest of the world.

I think managing whale hunting is like providing safe injection rooms for addicts rather than telling people to eat healthy food. It isn't an activity that should be treated as normal. I don't trust countries to be honest in their reporting, and I think that the way whales are killed is barbaric and many of them suffer.

For whales, some of the whale species are in direct competition with otherwise sustainable fishing, and some are even threatening other vulnerable marine life that's at risk of extinction. Sure, if we stopped overharvesting and polluting the oceans, it would be less of a problem, but fat chance of that.

Fair enough, but at the end of the day, I think that humans will have to face their impact on the planet, particularly with regard to overharvesting. Since 1985, 55,073 whales have been harvested by IWC countries. If that isn't enough to protect other species, we need a new plan.

Please correct me if I am wrong but whale populations in the world have been recovering. And multiple species are less than a decade away from not being endangered any more. So the opposition to whaling is from people who don't want to kill whales per se. I am not arguing for premature killing of whales that leads to extinction and I know that has been as issue in the past. But that problem for most areas is going away. And it really only remains a big problem in Oceania. But if you eat meat and your culture eats whales why not eat them? I know that many people here don't eat meat and that is increasing in the Bay Area but consider that not everyone lives in that cultural bubble.

And using whale products for other purposes such as for their skins and oil is much better for the environment than making synthetic products from crude oil. Generally animal products produce fewer allergies and have fewer carcinogens than synthetic materials.

So isn't all the griping here just a matter of people who never want sustainable whaling to resume. But they don't have that right. If they don't want to eat whales or use their skins - that's fine - but they don't have the right to ram down their viewpoints down everyone else's throats, particularly other countries. It reminds me of abortion - if you don't like it, then don't have one but leave other people alone.

You are easily impressed. Go read the original report rather than press accounts. She's got some valid points, such as her justified criticism of the unnecessary expletives and being correct that some of these systems do generate in the frequency ranges some whales can hear. On other points she's seriously confused. For example, she's wrong that an airgun source was involved, and whales generate amazingly loud echolocation sounds of their own, so their ears aren't *that* sensitive to damage. It's just an anecdote, but colleagues of mine have seen whales *following* smaller airgun arrays in order to get the fish that are stunned within a few metres of the source. They must be pretty tough if they'll go in that close (a few hundred metres) by choice.

And excuse me if I'm no more impressed by the way she can dish out unnecessary expletives than the other guy. Not exactly taking the "high road".

Yes. Can you explain why low-frequency active sonar used by the military is relevant to this event in Madagascar? Do you have secret military knowledge that it was in use here? I'm sure that the committee of experts that did the study would find this interesting. Otherwise, this isn't LFAS. The modelling in the report has the signal strength from the echosounder drop below 120dB in about 15km distance from the source. It's not the same thing.

The linkage between *military* active sonar systems and cetacean injury is reasonably well-established. By contrast, this is the first time anyone has suggested a linkage between echosounders and any harm to cetaceans, even though these systems have been used world-wide for decades. Even the report that claims there is a connection to these Madagascar strandings says that. Read the darn thing.

The transmit (source) transducers for the EM120 multibeam echo sounder in question (read the actual report) are 78.6mm long by 760mm wide. Not particularly big, although there is an array of them. Also not airguns or anything to do with high-pressure air.

Well something doesn't add up here, because multibeam sonar is used around the world and has been for decades, and this is the first I've ever heard of an association with whales beaching. The report says that as well (see below). I mean, the whole coastline of the US out to at least 200km out is mapped with it, huge swaths of the North Sea, all over the world. Most of the detailed bathymetry imagery you find in Google Earth is from multibeam.

By contrast, naval active sonar has been commonly associated with incidents of whales beaching themselves (there was an incident near Cuba a few years ago that was pretty clear-cut), and it is vastly more powerful stuff than multibeam echosounding.

"The kind that several sources have indicated were used by ExxonMobile inject high pressure air into the water"

Which sources? I've seen some general articles mention 12kHz source signals, which jives with what's typically used for multibeam sonar. I've seen a couple of those accounts also refer to "seismic" sources, but that's not really the right term, except in a very general sense (it's all sound, whether used for echo sounding or for subsurface reflection seismic). I think some people are confusing typical airguns, which are used for seismic work (lower frequency for penetrating into the sea floor) versus the high-frequency electronic transducers used for multibeam sonar, which as the other AC mentions, aren't much bigger than a shoebox. Yes, the whole tool in that NOAA photo you link to is pretty big, but the transducers are those little rectangular and square surfaces on the end of it, which aren't that big. Multibeam transducers aren't individually any bigger than that, but they are often deployed in an array that is pointed in slightly different directions, and that will cover more area depending upon the instrument. But they aren't airguns. I don't even think airguns are capable of generating sounds effectively at those frequencies.

If you read the actual report, you'll discover that it mentions two artificial sound sources in the area: 1) a seismic survey, which did use an airgun source, and 2) the multibeam echosounder survey.

Except with regards to the seismic survey, the report says:
"While aspects of this event will remain unknown, the ISRP systematically excluded or deemed highly unlikely nearly all potential reasons for the animals leaving their typical pelagic habitat and entering the Loza Lagoon (an extremely atypical area for this species). This included the use of seismic airguns in an offshore seismic survey several days after the whales were already in the lagoon system, which was originally speculated to have played some role but in the view of the ISRP clearly did not."

With regards to the multibeam echosounder, they say: "The exception was a high-power 12 kHz multi-beam echosounder system (MBES) operated intermittently by a survey vessel moving in a directed manner down the shelf-break the day before the event, to an area ~65 km offshore from the first known stranding location."

There is no mention that the sound source for the multibeam was anything other than what is routinely used for such projects: transducers. I think it's only the popular press that is mixing up the mention of the airguns in an irrelevant, later seismic survey and the echosounder. If you have information to the contrary, it would be interesting. The report also says:

"This is the first known such marine mammal mass stranding event closely associated with relatively high-frequency mapping sonar systems."

Which is my understanding as well. This is a very unusual event and there is good cause for being skeptical of it. The report summary has a whole paragraph remarking on how unusual this is when there are so many multibeam surveys, including other ones in Madag

If you read the actual report, you'll see these statements:

"There is no uneqiovocal and easily identifiable single cause of this event,"

"This is the first known such marine mammal mass stranding event closely associated with relatively high-frequency mapping sonar systems,"

"MBES systems (similar) to the 12 kHz source used in this case are in fact commonly used in hydrographic surveys around the world over large areas without such events being previously documented."

"There may well be a very low probability that the operation of such sources will induce marine mammal strandings,"