How to save the whale

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?

Today, Japan will announce plans to slaughter an extra 260 whales in the North Pacific, on top of its annual kill of 500 Minke whales in the Antarctic. Although the International Whaling Commission (IWC) has held a moratorium on whale hunting since 1986, over the past five years Japan has issued itself "scientific permits" which the country claims allow it to continue hunting. Japan's latest proposals on extending its whaling will be announced at the IWC's annual conference which begins this week in Shimonoseki, Japan.

Many of the countries affiliated to the IWC see the Japanese permit system as a way of circumventing 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. Japans says 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.

Many critics of whale hunting disagree. Dr Vassili Papastavrou, the International Federation for Animal Welfare's (IFAW) whale expert, says that the Japanese are paying lip-service to science in order to continue whaling. "What they are doing has no scientific value," he says, "it is 101 things to do with a dead whale."

Dr Nick Gales has stepped into the controversy having developed a unique and non-lethal way of obtaining similar data to the Japanese – by sampling whale faeces. Gales, from the Antarctic Section of the Department of the Environment in Australia, will also be presenting his research at this week's conference. Carried out on blue and baleen whales, the research shows that that DNA analysis can reveal what the whales are eating, what kinds of parasites they harbour, their sex and each individual's identity.

By killing whales the Japanese say 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.

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 a worldwide catch of 280 million to 500 million tons of fish a year. When these statistics were presented to the IWC, 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 argues 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.

However, removing whales would not necessarily increase fish stocks because whales may not actually eat the same kind of fish as humans. And, 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. Dr Peter Yodzis, from the University of Guelph, Canada, says: "Female sperm whales feed at depths greater than those occupied by commercially fished species."

Yodzis explains that whales eat fish predators too, and thus by removing the whales, the predators would actually increase and fish stocks would decrease. He cites examples which show that 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.

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."

Dr Naoko Funahashi, the IFAW's representative in Japan, disagrees: "They say it is for science. 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, 902 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. And several species of whales were fished which were not covered by Japan's own scientific whaling programme. 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 endangered. Masayuki Komatsu, author of The Truth about the Whaling Dispute, which represents Japanese fishing interests throughout the world, describes the anti-whaling lobby as "whale-huggers" who target "urban lonely hearts" with Greenpeace propaganda.

The Japanese, he says, have a rich tradition of eating whale meat and marine fish and that no other country has the right to censor their historical diet.