David @ Tokyo

Following on from their specialising in whale poo to determine what whales eat in their diet, last year we got a whiff of another effort of theirs to figure out (roughly) how old a whale is by doing genetic analysis on skin that has been shed.

As is always the way, they have re-released this information again this year, and still nothing has changed. The technique still hasn't been developed, and the fact they are trying to develop such a technique at all is a concession that lethal research is the only way to obtain age information about whales.

Some thoughts:

- Even if one day it works for one whale, how practical would it be to apply it to 850 randomly selected whales in the JARPA II survey area around Antarctica? Perhaps Greenpeace activists in inflatables could amuse themselves by trying to see how much whale skin they could gather, to help answer this question. Look for some more whale poo while they are at it.

- What is the point of this anyway? Whale age information is not being gathered just for the hell of it - those interested in it are interested in it because they want to use the information in population modelling to aid in the setting of safe commercial whaling catch limits. Whether whales are killed for science or directly for dinner, the whales do not care much, I believe. But, as Nick Gales notes at the end of the article, they see some political benefit in the development of such techniques, and so long as they don't regard this as a waste of time, good on them. Would be nice if they'd try to contribute to real conservation efforts though.

Labels: Nick Gales, non-lethal research, Whaling