Japan’s return to commercial whaling in 2019 has left few buyers for Iceland’s meat
Iceland, one of the only countries that still hunts whales commercially, along with Norway and Japan, plans to end whaling from 2024 as demand dwindles, the fisheries minister has said.
“There are few justifications to authorise the whale hunt beyond 2024,” when current quotas expire, Svandis Svavarsdóttir, a member of the Left Green party, wrote in Morgunblaðið newspaper.
Continue reading...Research is first to document coordinated female-led pods ramming world’s largest animal and eating its tongue before it dies
From snatching sea lions off beaches to stunning fish with a strike of their tails, orcas are renowned for their highly specialised hunting techniques passed down over generations. Now, for the first time, killer whales have been recorded hunting the planet’s largest animal – the blue whale – in coordinated and brutal attacks.
Female-led pods of killer whales, also known as orcas, have been recorded killing and eating blue whales in three separate attacks off the coast of Australia since 2019, according to a paper published in Marine Mammal Science.
Continue reading...The resumption of killing whales for profit for the first time in over 30 years is offering little cause for celebration
You don’t have to look far to find evidence of Wada’s centuries-old connection to whaling. Visitors to the town on Japan’s Pacific coast are greeted by a replica skeleton of a blue whale before entering a museum devoted to the behemoths of the ocean.
At a local restaurant, diners eat deep-fried whale cutlet and buy cetacean-themed gifts at a neighbouring gift shop. At the edge of the water stands a wooden deck where harpooned whales are butchered before being sold to wholesalers and restaurants.
Continue reading...Judgment rules company can blast sound waves in search for oil along South Africa’s eastern coastline
Royal Dutch Shell will move ahead with seismic tests to explore for oil in vital whale breeding grounds along South Africa’s eastern coastline after a court dismissed an 11th-hour legal challenge by environmental groups.
The judgment, by a South African high court, allows Shell to begin firing within days extremely loud sound waves through the relatively untouched marine environment of the Wild Coast, which is home to whales, dolphins and seals.
Continue reading...Type of whale immortalised in Moby-Dick has only been spotted handful of times this century
It is the most mythic animal in the ocean: a white sperm whale, filmed on Monday by Leo van Toly, watching from a Dutch merchant ship off Jamaica. Moving gracefully, outrageously pale against the blue waters of the Caribbean, for any fans of Moby-Dick, Herman Melville’s book of 1851, this vision is a CGI animation come to life.
Sperm whales are generally grey, black or even brown in appearance. Hal Whitehead, an expert on the species, told the Guardian: “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a fully white sperm whale. I have seen ones with quite a lot of white on them, usually in patches on and near the belly.”
Continue reading...A rare encounter was caught on video at Puerto Madryn, Argentina when a southern rIght whale seemingly plays with a woman on a paddleboard and pushes the board gently forward, observing its movement as it swims directly beneath it.
"They are rare moments, it is something that is prohibited," said Oscar Comes, a local water-sports tourism operator. "It isn't like you can go in a kayak, standup board, a boat, or whatever, to look for the animal."
Continue reading...For those aboard a recent whale watching cruise off Cape Cod, the decomposing carcass of a year-old humpback calf floating in the waters of the Stellwagen Bank national marine sanctuary made for a heartbreaking sight.
Related: Experience: I was attacked by two sharks at once
Continue reading...A satellite tag which unexpectedly kept working for a year has followed one whale’s 15,000km journey across three oceans
A loud bang shatters the winter calm of Port Ross, in New Zealand’s remote Auckland Islands, and the small inflatable boat is rocked by the swirl of a 40-ton whale being swallowed up by the cold, dark water.
When it resurfaces, the team of scientists are happy to see their US$3,200 satellite tag securely fixed to his side. The whale, whom they have nicknamed “Bill”, slips away into the ocean, the tag transmitting his movements. A few days later, researchers watch as he starts heading west towards Australia.
Continue reading...Some experts fear climate crisis is leading creatures back to area where they were hunted almost to extinction
Blue whales, the world’s largest mammals, are returning to Spain’s Atlantic coast after an absence of more than 40 years.
The first one was spotted off the coast of Galicia in north-west Spain in 2017 by Bruno Díaz, a marine biologist who is head of the Bottlenose Dolphin Research Institute in O Grove, Galicia.
Continue reading...The MSC’s coveted blue tick is the world’s biggest, and some say best, fishery ecolabel. So why is it in the headlines – and does it really do what it says on the tin?
This month, two right whales in the Gulf of St Lawrence were found entangled in fishing gear. One, a female, was first spotted entangled off Cape Cod last year, but rescuers were not able to fully free her; the other, a male, is believed to have become entangled in the Gulf.
Hunted to near extinction before a partial whaling ban in 1935, North Atlantic right whales are once more critically endangered, with only 356 left. The main threat remains human contact: entanglement in fishing gear, and ship strikes. Fatal encounters, caused in part by the whales’ migratory shift into Canada’s snow crab grounds, have soared: more than a tenth of the population died or were seriously injured between 2017 and 2021, mostly in Canada and New England.
Continue reading...When people learned he vocalized at a much higher pitch than other whales, they wondered: could other whales hear him? Was he plaintively calling, never hearing a reply? Was he lonely?
The loneliest whale in the world lives in the north Pacific. Scientists have been tracking him on and off for more than 30 years – listening to his vocalizations as he swims back and forth across his patch of ocean, calling into the void and waiting for a reply that never comes. That’s the story, anyway. The makers of a new documentary set out to find the truth – and the whale – but what they discovered is that a whale struggling to be heard may not be that unusual at all.
The tale has its origins in the cold war, when the US military deployed a network of hydrophones across the ocean floor to listen for Soviet submarines. In the process, operators also picked up unexpected background noises, including a series of strange, low-frequency moans initially attributed to an unknown “Jezebel Monster” but later identified as the deep, rumbling calls of blue and fin whales. By the end of the 1980s, with the cold war spluttering to an end, the Pentagon made the network available to whale researchers. Among them was William Watkins, a pioneer in identifying and tracking marine mammals by the sounds they make.
Continue reading...After more than 20 years watching from the cliffs of Botany Bay, Wayne Reynolds’ passion is having tangible results
He may have seen it tens of thousands of times before but when Wayne Reynolds spots a whale emerging from the water, he reacts with the excitement of a child pointing out a rollercoaster at an amusement park.
“Oh wow, there’s a minke and her calf,” he yells out with boyish enthusiasm from the rocky cliff at Potter Point in Kurnell, in Sydney’s south. “I just go into auto-mode, I can’t help it.”
Continue reading...Michael Packard, 56, was spat out after half a minute but expert says experience would have been ‘totally freaky’ for the whale
A New England lobsterman has described the moment he realised he was trapped in the mouth of a humpback whale off the coast of Cape Cod.
“Oh my God, I’m in a whale’s mouth and he’s trying to swallow me. I thought to myself, ‘hey, this is it. I’m finally going to die. There’s no getting out of here,’’’ Michael Packard told a local news station in Provincetown, Massachusetts.
Continue reading...Researchers in Canada find that population did not make the 6,000km roundtrip in 2018-2019
As the ice melts at pace in the Arctic, the mining and shipping industry has carved itself an opportunity out of the crisis. Meanwhile, the marine ecosystem is left to coping with the heat, noise, pollution and the cascade of other changes that come with the upheaval of the environment.
Now researchers have found a whale species that typically migrates away from solid sea ice each autumn and returns every summer to feast on tiny crustaceans did not make the 6,000km (3,700-mile) roundtrip in 2018-2019.
Continue reading...Deaths discovered over a course of nine days are ‘just the tip of the iceberg’ for the species, says expert
Four dead gray whales have washed ashore on San Francisco Bay Area beaches in the last nine days, with experts saying on Friday one had been struck by a ship. They were trying to determine how the other three had died.
“It’s alarming to respond to four dead gray whales in just over a week because it really puts into perspective the current challenges faced by this species,” says Dr Padraig Duignan, the director of pathology at the Marine Mammal Center.
Continue reading...North Atlantic right whales gave birth over the winter in greater numbers than scientists have seen since 2015, an encouraging sign for researchers who became alarmed three years ago when the critically endangered species produced no known offspring at all.
Related: The new humpback? Calf sighting sparks hope for imperilled right whale
Continue reading...The annual arrival of migratory grey whales at El Vizcaíno sanctuary in Mexico has aided the region’s tourism industry. The whales travel about 5,600 miles from their summer feeding grounds in Alaska to mate and give birth in the warmer waters off north-western Mexico
Continue reading...‘He was called Hvaldimir and he would play in front of crowds at Hammerfest harbour in Norway. One woman dropped her phone and he fetched it for her’
In April 2019, a beluga whale appeared alongside fishing boats off the coast of Norway. He was wearing a harness. A fisherman called Joar Hesten freed him, and saw the harness had stamped on it “equipment of St Petersburg”. The media went crazy, with talk of a “spy whale”, and the creature was named Hvaldimir, a combination of hval, the Norwegian word for whale, and Vladimir, a nod to Russia’s President Putin.
The whale became famous. There were Instagram videos of him playing in Hammerfest harbour in front of crowds. One woman dropped her phone in the water and the whale fetched it for her. He would bring up bones from the depths to show people, almost like little gifts. It became this huge moment on social media: everyone in the country fell in love with the whale. Even the hardcore fishing villages melted for Hvaldimir.
Continue reading...Whalers’ logbooks show rapid drop in strike rate in north Pacific due to changes in cetacean behaviour
A remarkable new study on how whales behaved when attacked by humans in the 19th century has implications for the way they react to changes wreaked by humans in the 21st century.
The paper, published by the Royal Society on Wednesday, is authored by Hal Whitehead and Luke Rendell, pre-eminent scientists working with cetaceans, and Tim D Smith, a data scientist, and their research addresses an age-old question: if whales are so smart, why did they hang around to be killed? The answer? They didn’t.
Continue reading...Descend through the different zones of the ocean to discover its mesmerising marine life, how human pollutants are interfering – and what we can still do about it
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