DRAFT RECOVERY PLAN FOR THE FIN WHALE BALAENOPTERA PHYSALUS AND SEI WHALE BALAENOPTERA BOREALIS

• Main Authors: Randall R. Reeves, Gregory K. Silber, P. Michael Payne
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: 1998
• Subjects: Greenland; Pacific; Balaenoptera borealis; Balaenoptera musculus; Balaenoptera physalus; baleen whale; Fin whale; Iceland; Megaptera novaeangliae; North Atlantic; Sei Whale
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.597.2270; http://www.cresli.org/cresli/pdf documents/finwhale.pdf

Fin whales, Balaenoptera physalus, are widely distributed in the world’s oceans. Most stocks were depleted by modern whaling, but there are still tens of thousands of fin whales worldwide. Commercial whaling for this species ended in the North Pacific in 1976 and the North Atlantic in 1987. Fin whales are still hunted, however, in Greenland, subject to catch limits under the International Whaling Commission’s “aboriginal subsistence whaling” scheme. Although reliable and recent estimates of fin whale abundance are available for large portions of the North Atlantic Ocean, this is not the case for most of the North Pacific Ocean. Moreover, the status of stocks in both of these ocean basins, stated in terms of present population size relative to “initial” (pre-whaling, or carrying capacity) level, is uncertain. Sei whales, Balaenoptera borealis, were hunted by modern whalers primarily after the preferred larger (or more easily taken) baleen whale species had been seriously depleted, including the right (Eubalaena spp.), humpback (Megaptera novaeangliae), gray (Eschrichtius robustus), blue (Balaenoptera musculus), and fin whales. Most stocks of sei whales were reduced, some of them drastically, by whaling in the 1950's through the early 1970's. International protection only began in the 1970's for this species, and the sei whale continued to be exploited in the North Atlantic, by Iceland, through 1986. Of the commercially-exploited “great whales,” the sei whale is one of the least well studied, and the current status of most sei whale stocks is poorly known.