Research 'little more than a sham'
AFTER two decades of scientific whaling, Japan should be a leading authority on whale biology. No other country in history has ever killed and cut up as many whales for the sake of research.
But the more science that Japan does on whales, the more other scientists see evidence that it is a sham.
After 7000 minkes were killed in the first Japanese Antarctic Research Program (JARPA), it was reviewed by the International Whaling Commission's scientific committee.
The review by the best whale scientists from 31 countries found the program could have improved the management of minke whales in the Southern Ocean. But this outcome was not realised. Instead, despite the toll in whales, the review found its objectives were largely unachieved.
Now that JARPA II has escalated the whaling effort by moving into two threatened species, fin and humpback whales, it faces the same problem, according to whaling commission scientists led by Australia's Nick Gales.
"A lethal research program that targets low priority science, with a demonstrably low likelihood of achieving its stated objectives, appears unsupportable when viewed in a scientific context," Dr Gales wrote this month in the journal Nature. "It is time to acknowledge that the debate about research whaling has little or nothing to do with science."
Japan's enthusiasm for research on whales coincided with the imposition of the global moratorium on commercial whaling in 1986. At the same time, its fishing companies chartered their whaling vessels to the Government's newly formed Institute for Cetacean Research.
Using a loophole in the commission's regulations that allows any country to issue its own lethal research permit, the Government licensed the institute to catch 300 minke whales each year in the Antarctic.
The factory ship became the research fleet mother ship. The chasers became sighting/sampling vessels. When a minke was caught, boxed and frozen it was not whale meat, it was "the by-product of research".
The whalers set out with twin scientific objectives: to estimate the whales' biological parameters to improve stock management, and to understand the minkes' role in the Antarctic marine ecosystem.
When JARPA was reviewed by the commission it had failed to achieve some of the most basic steps towards these objectives. There was "relatively little progress" in understanding what place minkes had in Antarctic waters; data on minke abundance was so poor it could mean anything from a decline to an increase in numbers; and efforts to find out the species's natural mortality were such a failure that it was effectively unknown. But before this review had even reported to the commission the next program, JARPA II, was announced.
In the Japanese scientific world, humpbacks began to outrank minkes in the Antarctic in 1997-98, and the fin's habitat was expanding. Minkes were thinner and maturing younger under this pressure, according to JARPA II. To find out about this phenomenon, whalers had to begin killing humpbacks, fins, and - oddly - many more minkes.
Repeated resolutions of the commission condemning Japan's program have had no effect.