Japan to double whale catch

Japan announced this week at the International Whaling Commission in the city of Ulsan, South Korea, that it will more than double its annual whale catch for scientific purposes in what critics say may turn the tide against decades of protecting the sea mammals.

Activists have fiercely condemned the move, and antiwhaling Australia passed a nonbinding resolution Wednesday calling on Japan to halt the program, which is allowed under IWC rules.

While votes on various measures at the week-long plenary have narrowly favored the antiwhaling camp, the IWC may be on the verge of moving away from being a conservation-minded organization back to being the whaling regulation body it started out as in 1946. Most resolutions have only been passed by a margin of three or four votes.

More nations from Asia, Northern Europe, Africa, and the Caribbean are now saying that the 66-member group ought to be less concerned with protecting whales than with promoting more hands-on environmental management as some whale species have recovered.

Japan points in particular to a surge in the number of minke whales. Whale researchers here have found that minke whales have swelled by a factor of 10 in the last 100 years to over 934,000 and are contributing to the depletion of fish stocks around the world. Other population estimates of the minke range between half a million to well over a million.

This not only hurts the international fishing industry "but also coincides with an alarming drop in numbers of other whale species," says Masayuki Komatsu, a director at a fisheries research agency affiliated with the Japanese government. He points in particular to the plight of the blue whale, which number a mere 2,000 or so today. "If you do the math on the amount of fish that minke whales require to survive, that leaves much less food for the blue whale," he says.

But he adds any increase in the minke whale catch will have to be "handled very carefully" due to likely resulting changes in the ecosystem.

However, other scientists dispute the dangers whales pose to commercial fishing. Kristin Kaschner, a marine biologist at Canada's University of British Columbia in Vancouver, found that human fishing and whale feeding take place in completely different zones of the ocean, according to Agence France-Presse.

Japan plans to double its annual catch of minkes to 935 from 440 and add up to 50 larger fin and humpback whales to the list within a few years under its new scientific research program. The program is widely seen as a cover for a limited amount of commercial whaling by staunchly conservationist nations such as Australia and New Zealand. Scientists from the antiwhaling lobby refused to review Japan's new plan in Ulsan claiming it lacked credibility, but didn't submit any evidence refuting Tokyo's position that some whale species have recovered, despite being invited to do so.

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