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Anti-Whaling Group Using Drones To Find Whalers
FatLittleMonkey writes "Anti-whaling group Sea Shepherd is using aerial drones to find and track factory ships used by Japanese whalers. The group claims the tactic shortened the Japanese whaling season last year by a month, saving 200 whales, and this year they've spotted the factory ship even earlier."
I don't get the opposition to hunting non-endangered whales. The whales being hunted(mostly minke whales), are nowhere near endangered, so why is there just so much opposition to the whaling? Do these people really have nothing better to do with their time and money than harassing fishing boats? Maybe they should just get into Magic the Gathering instead, eats time and money like nothing else....
Also have these people actually tried whale meat? It's delicious.
Monstar L
There's a lot of people on the planet, and so a lot of time being spent by them, why does the small amount of time these people spend grate on you that much? What do you spend your time doing?
Actually much of the whaling has been happening illegally in australian waters, and believe me, firearms would absolutely be the last straw in our governments very thin patience with these poachers.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
There is fuss about both of those, perhaps you aren't aware of it.
http://www.nasco.int/ for Salmon
http://www.tunaresearch.org/ for Tuna
And you forgot cod: http://www.greenpeace.org.uk/media/press-releases/greenpeace-ship-sails-to-save-north-sea-cod
And to be fair to them, while I don't see myself joining their fight, at least they have the balls to stand up for something, sure there are problems in the world, but most people don't bother addressing those problems either. Apathy, not whale conservationists, is our biggest enemy.
In other news, Sea Shepherd are a conservation group, they defend all marine species, including Tuna (for which they have been doing a major Mediterranean campaign). You should check the width of their action before pointing out “boo, there are other fish species endangered, so you get no points for protecting one and not all of them!”.
Interesting that while TFA is about clever use of technology in a space where it's not obvious, most slashdotters seem more interested in bashing the group of people using this technology for not following their (very traditional and anthropocentric) view of life. Nice.
No wit here.
Actually much of the whaling has been happening illegally in australian waters, and believe me, firearms would absolutely be the last straw in our governments very thin patience with these poachers.
Mod Parent up.
Public Opinion has in the region is around 90-10 against the Whalers, especially after the Sea Shepherd Stunt.
The Australian Navy has been requested to intervene on both sides in the last few years. Refused to take sides at this point.
General feeling is the Activists could prob take it a few steps further iwthout getting into trouble whereas the Japanese have pushed to the limits already.
Sonic weapons on both sides will be the next escalation step. However as this article is about communication and intelligence is vital.
If they know where the mother ship is they know how far out the whaling ships can reach and therefore act to drive the whales out of the way.
The danger comes where they know the Whaling ship has spotted a whale and is actively hunting it.
They will attempt to get in the line of sight of the harpoon, acid/gumsplash the harpoon mechanism, anything to stop the shot.
I'd be willing to bet that the minute the Japanese whaling fleet took a missile shot at the drone, the Australian navy would be all over them. The Japanese don't need that kind of bad PR at this point in time.
The waters they are fishing in are waters claimed by Australia but not recognised by Japan - Australia claim control over most of the southern ocean, well outside of the normal economic zone limits, and thus Japan has a valid reason to not recognise Australian control. Japan also doesn't recognise the economic area Australia claim off the coast of Antarctica, so once again the claim is in dispute.
It's hardly as black and white as you put it - and I support the abolition of whaling.
Here's a picture of the drone!
Won't swear to it, but I'm pretty sure that our guns could reach higher than a drone could fly. Of course, those were navy main deck guns, and whalers don't have anything as big, or as powerful available to them.
What whalers MIGHT get hold of, are some missiles. Shoulder launched SAM missiles, if they can acquire a lock on the drone. Drones are rather stealthy, lacking a lot of the heat, radio, and/or magnetism associated with older and/or ancient aircraft. So - you rely on sight? Fly-by-wire?
But, when you get down to it, I think the Iranians have the best idea. Just use some radio equipment to jam communications, the GPS spoof it into landing on the water, recover the blasted thing yourself, and the Greenies are out one drone.
All that said - I do wish the Japanese would quit hunting whales. It's not like they are going to starve without them. Back in the day when there were tens of thousands of any given species, and mankind only captured a few dozen whales per year, things were cool. Today, the population is just to damned low, and we've become to damned efficient. Extinction threatens, and that just sucks.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
That doesn't really matter. Drones have the extremely desirable property of having a tiny signature in pretty much any field.
Tiny radar signature ...
Tiny heat signature
Tiny visual signature
Tiny audible signature
These things ... well they are tiny. Finding them is ridiculously difficult, even for advanced military hardware.
Due to earth's athmosphere (ie. the wind generating small lensing effects) the smallest object you can find from 100km distance is about 15x15 cm. That's the theoretical limit. Let's say you can get military hardware half as good as that, well then you can find a 1m x 10cm drone from about 400 km distance. Since drones fly at a stupid altitude (we're talking 50 meters or maybe less), finding them from sea level is not possible at all, so basically they'd need a plane in the air less than 400 km from the drone. And this is assuming they don't make it really hard (paint the bottom to look like a cloud, paint the top to look like the sea, use a light nonconductive material for wings and don't let the engine's heat leak into the structure itself. Or better yet : use an engine that's too powerfull, run it at really low settings, so it doesn't get hot in the first place. Not hard, especially in tiny planes).
(that's also the problem for terrorism using these things. Even over US soil, assuming the autopilot is not stupid (and the RC doesn't give it away), doesn't fly over bases and the like, the US military needs to have a spyplane will be very invasive privacy-wise. But once a few muslims figure this out ... the discussion is basically over, and the choice is between the military being able to see the pattern on your swimshorts in your own backyard live, or random explosions in cities).
Isn't there an international standard of a 200 mile influence from a nation's shores, subject to negotiation of overlapping districts?
Regardless, the Japanese claims of "scientific research" seem like a flimsy excuse for the slaughter. Whales are intelligent, emotional creatures like dolphins. They communicate over vast distances. Just because they're not human doesn't mean we should be slaughtering them any more than we should primates.
They're too far up the evolutionary chain to be treated as common food animals.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
While sea sheppards were definitely harassing the whaling vessel with Ady Gil, it is hard to watch the footage and not see it as that the Ady Gil was rammed by the whalers. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Brw6JN0lQXY&feature=related
those are not australia's waters. australia's grandiose claims are not accepted by the international community. there is no poaching, just hunting in international waters.
Think my numbers are off by a lot? I'll be happy to read any citations you might find on the subject. But, no matter what numbers we might find, we'll just come back to the fact that in olden days, iron men in wooden ships went out to take a modest number of whales from the sea. Today, men go out in huge iron factory ships to process entire pods of whales.
By 1500 most of the desirable whales in the Bay of Biscay were gone. The large sailing ships ventured further and further away – as far as Newfoundland.
However, by the early 1600 and 1700s commercial merchant ship owners realized the profits of the whaling trade and a shift began toward large scale whaling by companies.
1500-1800, Europeans (Dutch, English, Basques, etc) were actively fishing the Atlantic, and not just single ships, but fleets of a couple dozen or more.
We have been doing this for a long, long time.
Really? Ever own a cat. They have brains the size of a walnut yet each has their own personality. Mine would pout if they wanted to be close and I pushed them away. They'd play tricks on me. They knew when I didn't feel well, their behavior changed.
It used to be that people owning slaves in the South thought of them as farm animals as well, devoid of intelligent thought. If you have it drilled into you that other creatures are nothing more than automatons, then you will treat them like that regardless.