Counting Whales in the North Atlantic IN THEIR REPORT “WHALES BEFORE WHALING in the North Atlantic ” (25 July, p. 508), J.
genetic markers, that humpback, minke, and fin whale populations in the North Atlantic were once much larger than previ-ously thought, which goes against the current “wisdom ” in International Whaling Commission (IWC) circles. This discrep-ancy may have several explanations. The conventional estimat...
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| Language: | English |
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| Online Access: | http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.662.6107 http://palumbi.stanford.edu/manuscripts/Palumbi+and+Roman+2004.pdf |
| Summary: | genetic markers, that humpback, minke, and fin whale populations in the North Atlantic were once much larger than previ-ously thought, which goes against the current “wisdom ” in International Whaling Commission (IWC) circles. This discrep-ancy may have several explanations. The conventional estimates of the orig-inal population sizes—i.e., before the onset of industrial whaling—have mostly been obtained by adding the cumulative catches recorded in logbooks to recent direct esti-mates from sighting surveys. This gives notional upper limits to the original numbers, which are corrected downward to |
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