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Sushi shop owner Katsuji Furuuchi offers whale sushi made from a lump of minke meat and pieces of blubber, in Ayukawahama, Miyagi Prefecture. (Kazuhiro Nogi/AFP/Getty Images)
Despite relentless battles with conservation groups, Japan’s whale hunt for research continues annually. Japan argues the research is to track whale populations in support of their bid to lift the ban on commercial whaling. However, there is dispute within the research community on the relevance of that research.
Last year, Japan caught and killed 507 whales for research, and the whale meat was then sold in Japan for consumption. Although there is a ban on commercial whaling, it is stipulated by the 1946 International Convention for the Regulation of Whaling that any whales caught for research should then be processed and sold.
Last week Japanese whaling ships left the Antarctic Ocean, cutting short this season’s research expedition. Hampered by conservation group Sea Shepherd, the Japanese fleet caught only 172 of their targeted 850 whales (plus or minus 10 percent). For the last seven years Sea Shepherd has used its fleet to physically block the whaling ships.
The international body governing whaling, the International Whaling Commission (IWC), allows whaling for scientific study. However the value of the research conducted by Japan’s government-led Institute of Cetacean Research (ICR) is not subject to peer review. The International Whaling Commission does not require Japan to prove the value of its research.
The moratorium on commercial whaling was put in place by the IWC in 1982 because of a lack of scientific data on the precise status of whale stocks. Japan’s ICR says the purpose of its research is to “resolve the lack of scientific evidence concerning Antarctic minke whales.”
According ICR, their research on minke whales includes information “such as age at sexual maturity, age at physical maturity, growth curve, blubber thickness, and stomach content change over the years.”
After studying the genetics, biology, and body shape of minkes, ICR concluded there are two large stocks in the research area in the Antarctic, where there were originally believed to be six. ICR says it needs to therefore monitor changes in the Antarctic ecosystem to understand how the whales adapt to shifts in the ecosystem, “to provide scientific basis for comprehensive management of whale resources.”
However, some marine biologists doubt the connection between the lethal research ICR is carrying out, and its stated research goals.
Dr. Phillip Clapham, who heads the Cetacean Assessment and Ecology Program at the National Marine Mammal Laboratory in Seattle, says only a small portion of the ICR’s research is relevant to whale population management.
The ICR produces “a plethora of papers that concern topics of no relevance to [whale population] management, and which frequently focus on (to put it mildly) arcane topics. For example, serum biochemistry of minke whales may be academically interesting to some, but it has no application to assessing the status of whale populations,” wrote Clapham in an e-mail.
Clapham is also on the Scientific Committee of the IWC, as one of the commission’s 200 advisers who review the science and rules that govern whaling.
The controversy over scientific whaling has been a long struggle between pro- and anti-whaling member-nations of the commission.
In 2005, Japan proposed a new research plan arguing the need to expand their study of whales because the Antarctic’s ecosystem is undergoing change. Sixty-three scientists representing 16 of the 30 members of the IWC signed a paper contesting the claims in Japan’s research proposal.
Japan’s research whaling activities is the single most controversial issue within the IWC, often dividing the organization into two camps.
