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Whale catches fail to fill quotas

Nature Ecology & Evolution volume 4, pages 1000–1001 (2020)Cite this article

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To the Editor — The exploitation of whales ignites strong emotions among professionals and laypersons alike1. The pressure Norway puts on whales is twofold: directly by the commissioned hunting of minke whales, Balaenoptera acutorostrata, in the northeast Atlantic Ocean and, in the Southern Ocean, indirectly by escalating harvesting of krill, Euphausia superba — the major food source for the great baleen whales2.

The trend is indisputable — the annual catches fail to fill the quotas (Fig. 1, Supplementary Data 1). The hunting season in 2019 reveals a historically low catch equal to only one-third of the TAC. The obvious question is why is there such a discrepancy? The Norwegian whale hunting trade is dwindling and no longer lucrative, and the below-quota catches are attributed to a variety of circumstantial reasons such as poor weather conditions, fewer vessels and recently shrunk revenues from domestic sales and export of whale products to the Japanese market5. For any healthy stock, one would expect that ‘the higher the effort — the higher the catch’. Before the moratorium (1946–1987), the annual effort invested in Norwegian minke whale hunting involved between 50 and 350 vessels. After the moratorium (1993–2019), 10–34 vessels rendered annual catches of 429–736 animals. But contrary to expectations, the post-moratorium catch and effort are unrelated (Supplementary Data 1). This leaves open the core question — what about the stock size?

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Fig. 1: The hunt for minke whale, Balaenoptera acutorostrata, in the northeast Atlantic Ocean.

Minke whale image courtesy of Kirsten Hjørne (http://gallerihjoerne.dk/).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Arctic and Marine Biology, UiT – The Arctic University of Norway, Tromsø, Norway

    Jørgen Schou Christiansen

  2. Environmental and Marine Biology, Åbo Akademi University, Turku, Finland

    Jørgen Schou Christiansen

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  1. Jørgen Schou Christiansen
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Correspondence to Jørgen Schou Christiansen.

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Supplementary information

Supplementary Data 1

Basic statistics of commissioned minke whale catches (1938–2019), hunting vessels (1946–2019) and quotas (1975–2019).

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Christiansen, J.S. Whale catches fail to fill quotas. Nat Ecol Evol 4, 1000–1001 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-020-1223-5

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