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Genetic Study Provides Estimate of Whale Populations
ChopsMIDI writes "Many more whales were hunted in the 18th century than thought, a genetic study of the North Atlantic animals suggests. U.S. researchers say the International Whaling Commission may be underestimating by tenfold the number of whales in the seas before hunting began."
Why, in this day-in-age, would whale hunting be useful? What can be produced from a dead whale that doesn't have a better alternative in-use already? My limited knowledge of the history of whaling tells me the most important product was whale oil. It's really hard to believe that other forms of oil are more expensive to produce than what it must cost to hunt whales. The hide, perhaps?
As far as the study goes, it is easy to have suspicions about the motives of the researchers. If the motive is to determine long-ago whale populations so that someone can either justify or prevent future whaling, a study coming from university is likely to be shifted toward the latter. In this case it's Stanford and one of the main researchers (Prof. Palumbi) is a "protected marine reserves" advocate.
If this is junk science I don't really care if it prevents whaling; I'm fairly certain the world will survive without the practice. But extrapolating the history of species through genetic analysis is a young field and it would suck to have it be generally discounted before we see what is possible. The moment the political class decides that the results of research might actually matter politically, the who-what-when-where-why of research gets politicized too.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
previously, the population was estimated by using the logbooks from the whalers. these results were generally in line with the amount of whale oil sold.
I'm not going to defend the study's numbers, since I haven't read the study, except to say genetic studies of human populations have come to similar counts using different methods. This is only the first such study of whales so we need some more to have the level of confidence we need in the number. This is especially true considering it's disagreement with log books.
But I also have some doubt in the old numbers. One of my great grandfathers was a whaler. He would sometimes go out in small independent parties without log books and occationally brought back a whale from these adventures. He had a great story about a whale that he speared and shot at from his one man boat for more than a day before pulling him in. He still had the gun and you can bet my eyes widened as when he handed it over to me in the telling of the story. -- Of course, if you listened to my great grandmother more often than not he came home from his whaling expeditions brused and battered with no whale in tow. The question is how many whales died from their injuries without ever providing a log entry or lamp oil? Whaling was the dot com of an earlier era except it lasted much longer. It is possible that for every whale lost by the most organized and successful whalers, that left log books behind to be scoured today, the less organized ones lost many more.