Hunted and rammed, whales may die from heartbreak too
Paris: More than two decades after the start of a leaky moratorium on whale hunting, the most majestic of sea mammals have made little headway in recovering their once robust populations, say experts.
Despite the moratorium on commercial hunting of big whales, voted in 1986, Japan, Norway and Iceland continue to cull more than 2,000 each year, mainly minke, along with smaller numbers of humpback, fin and sei.
Some species, all parties agree, are hovering on the edge of extinction. The North Pacific and North Atlantic right whales along with the gray whale, have each been reduced to a few hundred survivors.
For Yves Paccalet, a French naturalist who helped push through the 1986 moratorium, the intelligent and highly-social Blue whales may be so exhausted from their centuries-long combat with humankind that they have simply have given up the fight.
“The psychological consequences of our aggression have compromised their will to live,” said Paccalet. AFP
Blue whale song is getting ‘deeper’
The haunting calls of the world’s largest animal — the blue whale — are increasingly getting ‘deeper’. Biologists found that the tone of rhythmic pulses and moans of the blue whales has become steadily lower as their population have slowly recovered after nearly being wiped out. Professor John Hildebrand, who led the study, says blue whale calls have decreased to around 15Htz last year as compared to 22Htz some decades back. Both the frequencies are inaudible to humans. “As their numbers slowly increased after the devastation by whaling, they are having to communicate over smaller distances so their songs don’t need to be as loud and they can make them deeper,” the Sunday Telegraph quoted Hildebrand as saying. <<back
