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Nomads of the Sea
Despite their gigantic size, whales are among the least understood of earth's creatures. they exist untamed and usually unseen in the trakless ocean, only in the past century has man begun to fathom their lives and travels.
This National Geographic map represents an ambitious effort to chart their ranges and migrations. Shaded areas distinguish the home waters of six species of the great whales: fin, humpback, sperm, gray, bowhead, and right. ...
The hunting of whales as a commercial pursuit began in the Middle Ages when Basque seamen in small craft harpooned right whales migrating down the French and Spanish coasts. Shore whaling also existed in medieval Japan, and spread to northern Europe and the east coast of North America by the end of the 17th century. In the 19th century deep-sea whaling boomed as a major enterprise, with hundreds of sailing ships ranging the oceans. At the sight of a spout, oar-driven boats would be dropped into the water. Whalers armed with harpoons and lances would attack the powerful beast, whose oil would light their countrymen's lamps.
In modern times the scene shifts to a swift, diesel-powered catcher boat, from whose bow a man fires an explosive-tipped harpoon into a hapless whale. A factory ship then strips the carcass in less than an hour for its tons of meat earmarked for use as human or animal food, and its oil, used in margarine, cosmetics, and industrial lubricants.
Ironically, most of what we know about the whales' movement and habits comes from this deadly whaling experience. The six species already mentioned, together with the prodigious blue whale, have long stempted man with their abundant yields of oil and meat, and, as a result, have lured ships across the seven seas. From these voyages have come valuable accounts of whale distribution. Zoologist Charles Townsend, for example, made a singular contribution to the study of whales when, in the 1930s, he charted in great detail the times and places of kills made by hundreds of whaling vessels. Tagging studies, undertaken during the era of modern whaling, have also furnished information on the direction and timing of cetacean movements.
By the 1940s many great-whale populations had suffered serious, and in some cases, devastating losses. Confronted with dwindling numbers, whaling nations in 1946 formed the International Whaling Commission (IWC). This agency is responsible for the conservation of the world's whales through hunting bans for some species, kill quotas for others, size limits, monitoring catches, and exchange of scientific information.
The self-interest of its membership and lack of enforcement poswers, however, limited the IWC's effectivemess until recently. In the past five years the 16-member body has lowered quotas by 40 percent, and the Soviet Union and Japan, the world's two principal whaling nations, are now abiding by the ceilings. The major whaling countries that remain outside the IWC – Spain, Portugal, Peru, Chile, and South Korea – account for less than 10 percent of the catch, and are under pressure to join the league.
The latest quotas theoretically assure that all species of great whales will surivive. What probably will become extinct is the whaling industry, victim of the mounting costs and a growing number of substitutes for whale products. Perhaps then, Herman Melville's estimation of the whale as the earth's more durable creature will prove something more than a heady dream: “... if ever the world is to be again flooded ... then the eternal whale will still survive, and rearing upon the topmost crest of the equatorial flood, spout his frothed defiance to the skies.”
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