BBC News 26 Jun 08;
As opponents of whaling agree to seek an arrangement with countries who still hunt, Richard Black at the International Whaling Commission meeting in Chile reflects on our relationship with whales and with nature in general.
A couple of years ago, reports of an imaginary conversation between President George Bush and a top adviser were doing the rounds on e-mail between people who, like me, love a bit of satire in their daily life.
In it, the president asks, "Who's the president of China?"
The adviser replies, "Yes, Hu's the president of China", which Hu Jintao indeed is.
The president comes back with, "That's what I'm asking you, who's the president of China?"
And the conversation goes round and round like this until the adviser suggests sending for Kofi, as in Kofi Annan, then the UN secretary general.
"Yes, let's have some coffee," the president replies.
The 'right' whale
As I was preparing for the whaling commission meeting, I found something similar on the website of a pro-whaling campaign group - yes, such organisations do exist - which imagined Mr Bush and Condoleezza Rice discussing the right whale.
These huge beasts originally got their name because they swam slowly and floated after being killed, making them the right whales to hunt.
Right whales have not been hunted for years now, but the North Atlantic species is probably heading for extinction because ships - notably US ones - keep colliding with them.
So the campaign group, the High North Alliance from northern Norway, imagines Ms Rice taking the right whale's plight to her boss:
"How can we save these critters?" asks the president.
Ms Rice replies: "Well, sir, we'll have to shut down lots of US shipping, dramatically reduce speed limits, restrict vessels to areas that are really inconvenient and spend millions of dollars in research to see how we can build up the population of these whales."
At which Mr Bush concludes: "The right whale? Sounds like the wrong whale to me, Condi. Go criticise those Japanese some more."
The 'forgotten' whale
To the High North Alliance, the US is guilty of hypocrisy. It wants to save some whales at the right price. But, once the price becomes too high, once shipping or climate change enter as threats, the right whale quickly becomes the wrong whale.
A similar charge is laid by some at Australia, which in recent years has gone humpback-whale-crazy.
As whale-watching has grown, this charmingly ugly acrobat of the oceans has apparently become a national totem equal in rank to Kylie Minogue, Shane Warne and ice-cold beer.
Nothing aroused Aussie anger so much as Japan's plan to add humpbacks to their annual Antarctic hunt.
"They're our humpbacks," was the cry.
Politicians raged, newspapers thundered, activists campaigned.
What was lost in the mix was that Japan had also started targeting fin whales, which are more threatened than humpbacks. But, because the fins carried no value in Australia, they were forgotten.
Question of value
I was not the only one to find this disturbing. Some conservation groups felt it too.
What was the campaign for? For whales or for whales' value to humans?
And what form does that value take?
Over the past few years, environment groups have been pushing the argument that whale-watching is much more profitable than whale hunting, and that the two are incompatible.
Now, I understand the logic of trying to make the anti-whaling argument in economic terms but where does that leave species that do not perform for tourists, like the poor fins?
Do whales become just a resource to be preserved if they are of use to us?
The question of how we value nature is going to become much bigger politically over the next few years.
Nature's balance sheet
There is a major research project under way aiming to quantify the costs and benefits of nature in human economic terms.
It is modelled on the Stern Review that finally made economic ministries wake up to the issue of climate change.
The natural world processes our waste, provides our water and gives us the root material for our farming.
If governments can see how much this is worth, perhaps they will put money into protecting these resources.
But here is a thought. What happens to a hypothetical piece of marshland that supports rare birds but also disease-carrying insects?
If we conclude that the insects' costs to society are higher than the birds' benefits, does it become legitimate to drain the marsh and send the birds to extinction?
I do not have answers to any of this. Certainly, across the world, nature is crumbling under human hands and, if expressing that in dollars and euros and pounds and yen can halt the slide, then by all means give it a try.
But, as I look out from my window at the snow-capped hills surrounding Santiago, I cannot help feeling that we risk losing what nature is if we couch its value in human terms.
Whales are about more than profits from eco-tourism or the costs of slowing down ships.
They are part of nature's balance sheet, not ours.
Valuing nature in dollar terms might result in the right whale being saved. It's unlikely to do anything for the wrong whale.
Counting whales: A fluky business
Richard Black, BBC News 26 Jun 08;
In an era when we can track the lineage of humanity using DNA and monitor deforestation from space, you might think scientists would have come up with a more sophisticated way of counting whales than standing on the bridge of a ship with a pair of binoculars.
If so, you would be wrong - mostly.
Many decades after they were first used, sighting surveys are still the standard way of estimimating how many whales there are in the oceans.
"There are many variables that can affect your ability to see whales - that can include obvious things like weather, ice conditions, depending on where you are," says Greg Donovan, the genial Irishman who heads up the scientific programme of the International Whaling Commission (IWC), the global body charged with regulating whale hunting and conserving the giant cetaceans.
"But essentially, you look hard until you see either a blow or a body; and then you record it, plus the distance and the angle to where you see it."
Counting whales should matter, wherever you stand on the rights and wrongs of hunting.
Good estimates would be needed for setting quotas if commercial whaling should ever be revived - as appears to some degree possible, now that the IWC has decided at this year's annual meeting to embark on a process of reform, perhaps leading to compromise.
They are needed to set quotas for the subsistence hunts performed by indigenous peoples in Greenland, Russia, the US and the Caribbean; and they are definitely needed for conservation.
So if this is the case - and the IWC is just one body putting resources into gathering numbers - why is it that estimates for some populations are so imprecise?
Gray areas
Some species can be counted easily.
Gray whales and bowheads follow set migration routes and can be counted from shore; the individual patterns of tails help identify humpbacks, producing better estimates.
But for the species most hunted today, the minke, sightings from ships - sometimes augmented by aerial surveys - are just about the only option.
The IWC puts the Southern Ocean minke population as anywhere between 510,000 and 1,140,000.
But that estimate dates from the 1980s; and despite reams of data gathered since and hints of a decline, the scientists have yet to agree a more up-to-date figure.
For minkes off the west coast of Greenland, the estimates run from 3,600 to 32,000 - a huge margin of error. A factor of five separates the lowest and highest possible estimates of the fin whale population in the same area.
"If you think about what we're trying to do, we're trying to estimate numbers of animals that spend very large parts of their time completely out of sight," says Mr Donovan.
"So I don't think people should be surprised (that we don't have more exact numbers). The important thing if we want to use this for conservation is that we don't over-estimate; in a sense, under-estimating is a better mistake to make."
Starting line
Apart from the weather, which can get in the way of any observations, there are other limitations to how accurate surveys can be.
"One of the potential error sources is that because we're humans, there are of course individual differences between skills or capabilities to observe," says Yoshihiro Fujise, director of Japan's Institute of Cetacean Research (ICR), whose ships the IWC uses for its annual Antarctic sighting expeditions.
"So to minimise that error we rotate the observers. On the research vessel, we place five to six observers on the upper bridge; and then we place more still higher up in the vessel, and all the observers use binoculars so they can see the whales."
Before a survey starts, a course is plotted which is designed to give representative coverage through the area being studied, often in a zig-zag path.
"The whales are in the survey area, wherever they want to be; and what we do is we cover the area as specified by the course line so we will encounter the whales in a manner which is fairly random," says Dr Fujise.
But there are limitations. The vessels usually used in the Antarctic are not ice-strengthened, so they cannot go close to the ice edge, which may be a productive feeding ground for species like the minke that eat krill.
Vassili Papastavrou, a whale biologist with the International Fund for Animal Welfare (Ifaw), has issues with the basic methodology.
"Some of the whales in your path will be underwater when you go past, so you won't see them," he says.
"Whales that are further away from the boat are less likely to be seen than ones that are close to the boat; and in the case of some species, we think they might react to the boat."
His main concern is that observers have to estimate the distance between the boat and the whale they spot - a vital component of the data, but something, he says, that humans are just not very good at.
"And many years ago, at a scientific committee meeting of the IWC, one of the committee members said he knew of no other scientific endeavour where the main data item was guessed."
To groups such as Ifaw, the population uncertainties represent one more reason why commercial whaling should stay banned.
Managing uncertainty
Over the years, researchers have developed computer models designed to turn these uncertainties and the raw numbers of whales sighted into a reasonably truthful picture of what is known and what is not.
In essence, the models gauge the likely scale of the uncertainties, generating what Donald Rumsfeld might have called "a half-known unknown".
"The most important component, particularly if you're not looking for an abundance estimate for a coffee-table book but for management, is that you capture all the uncertainty there is," says Greg Donovan.
"I can't tell you how many whales there are in a particular area. What I can say is the likelihood is that it lies between this number and that number; and anyone who tells you there are exactly 4,623 whales somewhere is lying."
Taking precautions
Faced with these uncertainties, how safe is it to set catch levels at all?
The IWC believes in principle it is possible, and does set them for subsistence whaling.
On the commercial whaling side, quotas higher than zero would imply lifting the 1986 global moratorium; so even though a mechanism exists for setting them, none have been.
Norway, Iceland and Japan - the three active hunting nations - set their own quotas, to a greater or lesser extent using the IWC's methodology.
"We set all quotas on the basis of the precautionary approach, and all uncertainties are taken into account," says Iceland's whaling commissioner Stefan Asmundsson.
"And if you look at, for example, where you have a stock size which counts tens of thousands and we're taking 40 animals, you don't have to have a PhD in biology to realise that taking 40 animals from such a large population is not going to have any measurable impact."
In fact, he says, Iceland's politicians have tended to set quotas below the limits suggested by its scientists - a very different picture from many commercial fisheries, such as the North Sea, where governments routinely force quotas above and beyond what scientists say is wise.
Sudden surprise
But Iceland also provides an example of the limitations of trying to measure population sizes.
Over a five year period between 2001 and 2006, its minke whale population apparently declined by 25% - a huge fall in such a short space of time.
Probably the minkes just went somewhere else in search of food.
But that is not certain. Proving it would need more data, more sightings, and more expeditions than anyone is prepared to pay for.
As Greg Donovan emphasises, it is an expensive business.
"I'm in the process of working with other colleagues to design a full survey of the Mediterranean and the Black Sea.
"That's going to require something like 14 boats, three aeroplanes, and well over 150 researchers; but it's important, because fundamental conservation science requires good information on numbers."
Can other methods come in and fill in the gaps in the sighting record?
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For some species, acoustic methods are definitely an option. The sharp clicks generated by sperm whales can be tracked, counted and archived using simple sonar arrays.
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It is much more difficult for species such as humpbacks and blue whales, with their meandering songs.
Satellite imagery does not yet have sufficient resolution, though Ifaw has been trying to interest at least one major IT company in looking at the possibilities.
So the chances are that if you head down to the Southern Ocean in 10 years' time, you will still find old-fashioned human observers out on deck scanning the seas for whales.
You will still find estimates for some whale populations that are full of uncertainties.
And you will still find people arguing about whether that means it is safe from an ecological point of view to hunt whales.
