Japan is planning to kill more whales in the name of research. But could new techniques give them the information they need without the slaughter? Sanjida O’Connell reports.

The Independent - Monday 20 May 2002

Today Japan will announce plans to slaughter an extra 260 whales in the North Pacific in addition to a yearly kill of 500 Minke whales in the Antarctic. The International Whaling Convention (IWC) has had a moratorium on whale hunting since 1986, but over the last 5 years Japan has issued itself scientific permits which the country claims allow it to continue hunting. Japan’s new proposal will be announced at the IWC’s annual conference which begins today in Shimonoseki, Japan. Many of the countries affiliated to the IWC see the Japanese permit system as a way of getting around the moratorium. The counter-argument put forward by the Japanese government’s Institute of Cetacean Research (ICR) in Tokyo is that it is necessary to kill whales in order to provide much needed scientific data which will help all countries manage whale stocks. They add that since it would be a waste to dispose of the rest of the whale, whales caught for research purposes can legitimately end up in Japanese restaurants. Dr Vassili Papastavrou, the International Federation for Animal Welfare’s whale expert, says that the Japanese are merely paying lipservice to science in order to continue whaling, “What they are doing has no scientific value, it is 101 things to do with a dead whale.”

Dr Nick Gales, originally an albatross biologist, has stepped into the middle of this controversy. He has developed a unique and non-lethal way of obtaining very similar data to the Japanese – by sampling whale faeces. Gales, from the Antarctic Section of the Department of the Environment in Australia, will be presenting his research at the conference. Gales maintains that collection and storage of whale faeces is a simple matter but admits that the technique’s main limitation is the necessity to observe a whale defecating. He says, “This limitation can largely be overcome through broad collaborations with scientists who routinely spend time working in the vicinity of feeding (and therefore defecating) whales.” His research, carried out on blue and baleen whales, shows that DNA analysis can reveal what the whales are eating, what kinds of parasites they harbour, their sex and individual identity.

DNA analysis has been carried out on whales before. It is possible to harpoon a whale non-lethally and extract a blubber sample. Although the sample contains genetic material, it cannot tell researchers what the whales are eating. This is crucially important to the Japanese, amongst other nations. By killing whales, they are able to examine their stomach contents and determine what the animals have been eating. Japan believes its fishing industry is in decline because whales eat so much fish. For example, they claim their tuna catches are down by a third because false killer whales are clever enough to eat tuna caught on long hooks without impaling themselves.

The head of the ICR, Dr Seiji Ohsumi, calculated that whales eat between three and six times the amount of fish humans eat. This amounts to an worldwide catch of 280 to 500 million tons of fish a year. When these statistics were presented to the IWC (they have not been published in a reputable scientific journal) many of the anti-whaling countries protested that the figures were erroneous because they were based on false estimations and that no one really knows how many whales are left. The ICR argue that this figure must be even higher given that their estimations were based on 35 populations of whales, not the 80 groups of whales known to exist throughout the world.

Whales undoubtedly do eat vast quantities of fish, but saying that since whales eat fish, we need to kill whales, is simplistic. Removing whales would not necessarily increase fish stocks for a number of reasons. Whales may not actually eat the same kind of fish as humans. Even when whales and fishermen both fish the same species, they could be catching different age classes which will have a different effect on the overall fish population. Whales often do not fish in the same area at the same time as us. Dr Peter Yodzis, from the University of Guelph, Canada, says, “Female sperm whales feed at depths greater than those occupied by commercially fished species.” He adds, “It can be argued, both on the basis of predator-prey dynamics and on the simple grounds that humans (unlike natural predators) have access both to powerful technology and to an abundance of alternative resources, that fisheries are more likely to affect the predator populations than the other way round.”

Yodzis has made a brave attempt to unravel the issue. First he stresses how complex the situation really is. For a start, whales eat fish predators too, thus by removing the whales, the predators would actually increase and fish stocks would decrease. He cites examples which show that it is the other way around - marine predators frequently suffer due to human overfishing: the collapse of the Peruvian anchovy stock caused a decline in the sea bird population; the collapse of the capelin stock in the Barents sea resulted in an 80 per cent decrease in common murres, and overfishing pollocks has nearly wiped out Steller sea lions in Alaska. The US National Marine Fisheries Service said that the proposed pollock fishing industry for 2002 is “likely to jeopardise the continued existence of the western population of Steller sea lions. “ In a food web Yodzis helped create for the Benguela ecosystem which supports a major fishing industry as well as predators such as whales, dolphins and fur seals, there are 28 million possible links between eater and eaten. A diagram of this food web looks like a macrame model made by a mad man.

Creating ecosystem models for whale species is difficult given the current paucity of data and the extensive computer power required. To carry out an experiment (such as removing whales and seeing how this affects fish populations) would be practically impossible and for it have scientific value would have to be replicated and could, Yodzis calculates, take a millennium.

So is the Japanese approach to whale research nothing but an excuse to obtain more whale meat? “Absolutely not,” says Joji Morishita, Deputy Director of the Japanese Government’s Fisheries Agency, “Japan’s whale research programmes are perfectly legal. It is not a ‘loophole’ or ‘illegal’ or ‘commercial whaling in disguise’ as the anti-whaling rhetoric suggests. Income from the sale of by-products –meat - is used to partially offset the cost of the research.” “They say it is for science,” says Dr Naoko Funahashi, the IFAW’s representative in Japan. “We believe it is for profit. Meat and other ‘by-products’ are sold on the commercial market, and the profit goes back to the ICR which conducts this ‘scientific’ whaling. Without those ‘by-products’, the institute, the companies which own the whaling fleets, and several whale meat traders will not survive.” According to Funahashi’s research, which will be presented at the IWC, a total of 902 different kinds of whale meat products were on the Japanese market between May 2001 and January 2002. Nearly half of all the Minke whales sold in Japan were, according to DNA analysis, from a protected group of whales. Neither was meat from Bryde’s whales caught in the North Pacific (which is an area Japan believes it is allowed to fish), and several species of whales were fished which were not covered by Japan’s own scientific whaling programme.

Another scientific paper submitted to the IWC also claims that Japan can be less than honest. The government has always been reluctant to release exact figures but has recently given statistics for the number of whales fished between 1965 and 1978. The figures are three times higher than the actual numbers Japan presented for those years at the time. These results may make many nations question the validity of Japan’s scientific research if the data they present are felt to be unreliable.
Even if one does not believe the science research plan, some Japanese argue that they have every right to catch whales, particularly of species they no longer consider to be endangered. Masayuki Komatsu, author of ‘The Truth about the Whaling Dispute’, represents Japanese fishing interests throughout the world. His book is a rant, he calls the anti-whaling lobby, “whale-huggers” who target “urban lonely hearts” with Greenpeace propaganda, but he makes the point that the Japanese like to eat whale meat and marine fish and that no other country has the right to censor their diet.