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Japan Defends Scientific Value of New Plan To Kill 333 Minke Whales (sciencemag.org)
sciencehabit writes with news that Japan plans on killing 333 minke whales this year as part of their whale research program in the Antarctic Ocean. "We did our best to try to meet the criteria established by the ICJ and we have decided to implement our research plan because we are confident we have completed our scientific homework," Joji Morishita, the nation's representative to the International Whaling Commission said. Science reports: "Japan has resumed its controversial lethal research whaling because it wants to determine how many minke whales can be harvested sustainably while studying the environment, Joji Morishita, the nation's representative to the International Whaling Commission (IWC), told a press conference today. 'We'd like to find out how the marine ecosystem of the Antarctic Ocean is actually shifting or changing and not just look at whales but [also at] krill and the oceanographic situation,' Morishita said.
Japan's whaling fleet last week departed for the southern seas for the first time since the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ordered the nation to halt its research whaling in March 2014. The court ruled that Japan's JARPA II program, which sought to take some 850 minke whales, 50 fin whales, and 50 humpback whales, was not for the purposes of scientific research as stipulated in the International Convention for the Regulation of Whaling. The convention allows countries to kill whales for research."
Japan's whaling fleet last week departed for the southern seas for the first time since the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ordered the nation to halt its research whaling in March 2014. The court ruled that Japan's JARPA II program, which sought to take some 850 minke whales, 50 fin whales, and 50 humpback whales, was not for the purposes of scientific research as stipulated in the International Convention for the Regulation of Whaling. The convention allows countries to kill whales for research."
I thought we were done with this shit. No one in the world believes Japan actually cares about the research and their "research program" has been debunked by the ICJ the one time it did come under scrutiny.
Heck even Terry Prachett made a joke about it in the discworld series:
"The Kappamaki, a whaling research ship, was currently researching the question: How many whales can you catch in one week?"
The way I read the summary, it amounts to "we are researching how many minke whales we can kill before it becomes unsustainable". So basically they will stop doing it once the population no longer can sustain itself.
Japan will know the minimum number of minke whales needed for a sustainable environment. Unfortunately, we won't have that minimum number here on Earth.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
One wonders if one would get the go ahead to perform the same experiment substituting "Japanese Whale Scientist" for "Mink Whale"... how many would we need to cull in order to put an end to such ridiculous idea and an end to hunting and killing these amazing animals?
And, unlike them, the fruits of our hunting won't make it onto any dinner plates...
Yes all of them and the Japanese even admit that but claim it's a byproduct of the research. This is why their hunt is illegal because international courts ruled that there is no scientific merit to their programme that requires killing of the whales and yet all the meat ends up being sold for profit.
This is an illegal commercial hunt and the courts have determined it as such. Pretending there is any actual science here is nothing more than a well destroyed lie at this point.
Japan has created itself a real problem now, because it expects countries like China to respect international law over it's territorial disputes with China, whilst defying international law in the southern oceans to carry out illegal commercial hunts. At this point Japan cannot rationally complain if China does further tighten it's stance on disputed territory because it can't on one hand pretend international law governing the seas only applies to everyone else. It could just pull out of the IWC of course like Norway, but again they want to pretend they're good players in international diplomacy land and sign up to laws so that they can try and hold others to them when it suits. Essentially Japan wants it cake, and wants to eat it too.
The fact is, how much a country will listen to you when you cry international law, will depend on how many you sign up to and how well you adhere to it yourself. Japan basically now has no credibility on this front and cannot really complain when countries like China ignore it's cries. If Chinese boats fish in waters Japan claims then it's frankly tough shit, not a leg to stand on.
The dead whales are intended to be used as some sort of alternative medicine.
So remember that for next time somebody tells you that atleast alternative medicine can't hurt.
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A large part of the reason Minke whales have such a large population are because they've had to fill the void left by the decimation of other species of whale - whale help to fertilise the oceans by spreading nutrients around, which in turn help grow fish stocks by making sure ample food is present.
Should the population of large whales increase, the population of Minke whales will decrease to a point of equilibrium determined by survival of the fittest. The problem is that populations of whales typically take decades to return to their natural levels of balance, thus it'll take a long time before blue whales and so forth can reach a population size at which they would naturally be expected to achieve.
So species such as Minke whales are able to fill the void the missing blue whales otherwise would, thus it's irrelevant that there are lots of them - you need a certain level of whale biomass to prevent problematic algae build up, and to help keep fish stocks healthy amongst other things. Hence, just because Minke whales are well populated doesn't make it okay to hunt them, it just means that as yet unrecovered populations of other previously over-hunted whale species will be coupled with reduced Minke populations and in turn will mean we end up with a level of whale biomass too small to perform it's task in the ecosystem to a suitable degree. This in turns leads to environmental problems and reduction of fish stocks.
The IUCN simply ranks species based on how at threat they are from extinction - this isn't simply a question of population, for example, some plant species have healthy population numbers in the hundreds of thousands, but only grow on rocky outcrops that are tagged for potential mining - in that case the population numbers are good, but the threat of extinction is still high. What the IUCN does not do is take into account the impact of hunting a species, thus it's not true that a least concern ranking on the IUCN list correlates with "Okay to hunt". It's possible for something to be near extinct, but fine to hunt to extinction because it has little relevance to it's ecosystem, just as it's for something to be least concern, but still a bad idea to hunt as in this case. Suggesting that because something is ranked as least concern that it must be okay to hunt is a completely invalid way to interpret IUCN rankings because that's not what they measure - it's a measure of population health and NOT a measure of population value within the ecosystem.
There has been a particular focus on whales over the years for precisely the fact that they have a high ecosystem value, more recently the same is beginning to be realised for sharks also having long been characterised as evil pointless predators. Contrary to what the Japanese, Icelanders and so forth will tell you, the IWC itself, and the ICJs rulings are as they are not because of emotion, but because they're important to help make sure we can maintain healthy oceans. This something we're already struggling to do as is with over-fishing in general, much more so if we end up with even greater reduced fish stocks due to ecosystem problems due to whale over-hunting.
So species such as Minke whales are able to fill the void the missing blue whales otherwise would, thus it's irrelevant that there are lots of them - you need a certain level of whale biomass to prevent problematic algae build up, and to help keep fish stocks healthy amongst other things. Hence, just because Minke whales are well populated doesn't make it okay to hunt them, it just means that as yet unrecovered populations of other previously over-hunted whale species will be coupled with reduced Minke populations and in turn will mean we end up with a level of whale biomass too small to perform it's task in the ecosystem to a suitable degree. This in turns leads to environmental problems and reduction of fish stocks.
I don't think it's completely irrelevant. If there is a huge number of minke whales then they are competing with the "actually endangered" species and thinning them out a little might actually help the other endangered whale species.
That being said, I think Japan's premise is laughable and an insult to the rest of the world. I would much rather them say "we believe that reducing the minke whale population will help other whale populations recover" or even "we believe there are plenty of minke whales and are going to harvest some just because". 333 whales out of 500k is not going to hurt the minke whale population but they shouldn't claim it is scientific research.