Morishita's ''multiple analysis'' of the whaling issue [Morishita J. Multiple analysis of the whaling issue: Understanding the dispute by a matrix. Marine Policy 2006;30:802-8] is essentially a restatement of the Government of Japan's whaling policy, which confuses the issue through selective use of data, unsubstantiated facts, and the vilification of opposing perspectives. Here, we deconstruct the major problems with Morishita's article and provide an alternative view of the whaling dispute. For many people in this debate, the issue is not that some whales are not abundant, but that the whaling industry cannot be trusted to regulate itself or to honestly assess the status of potentially exploitable populations. This suspicion has its origin in Japan's poor use of science, its often implausible stock assessments, its insistence that culling is an appropriate way to manage marine mammal populations, and its relatively recent falsification of whaling and fisheries catch data combined with a refusal to accept true transparency in catch and market monitoring. Japanese policy on whaling cannot be viewed in isolation, but is part of a larger framework involving a perceived right to secure unlimited access to global marine resources. Whaling is inextricably tied to the international fisheries agreements on which Japan is strongly dependent; thus, concessions made at the IWC would have potentially serious ramifications in other fora. r
An essential component of risk assessment is identification whether individuals will be exposed to a risk. This requires information on the proportion of the population exposed, for how long, and during what activity (i.e., feeding, migrating, and breeding). Using satellite telemetry data for humpback and blue whales feeding and migratory regions in Antarctica, California, and Bering Sea, we modeled the potential exposure of individuals to an acoustic disturbance. Foraging and transit regions along the tracks were identified and the time spent foraging in each region calculated. A simulated seismic survey was randomly placed (100 iterations) within the habitat of each of species and the amount of time individual animals were exposed determined. A large disturbance (i.e. 100 km) only exposed 6% of the population of humpback whales in Antarctica and 19% blue whales off California. In contrast, humpback whales in the Bering Sea experienced high exposure with only a 5 km disturbance. This approach can be used to develop a framework for estimating the likelihood that a given animal population would be exposed to disturbance and to develop general risk assessment guidelines.
The ever-increasing human demand for fossil fuels has resulted in the expansion of oil exploration efforts to waters over the continental shelf. These waters are largely utilized by a complex biological community. Large baleen whales, in particular, utilize continental shelf waters as breeding and calving grounds, foraging grounds, and also as migration corridors. We developed a dynamic approach to estimate the likelihood that individuals from different populations of blue whales Balaenoptera musculus and humpback whales Megaptera novaeangliae could be exposed to idealized, simulated seismic surveys as they move over the continental shelf. Animal tracking data for the different populations were filtered, and behaviors (transit and foraging) were inferred from the tracks using hidden Markov models. We simulated a range of conditions of exposure by having the source of noise affecting a circular area of different radii (5, 25, 50 and 100 km), moving along a gridded transect of 270 and 2500 km2 at a constant speed of 9 km h-1, and starting the simulated surveys every week of the year. Our approach allowed us to identify the temporal variability in the susceptibility of the different populations under study, as we ran the simulations for an entire year, allowing us to identify periods when the surveys would have an intensified effect on whales. Our results highlight the importance of understanding the behavior and ecology of individuals in a site-specific context when considering the likelihood of exposure to anthropogenic disturbances, as the habitat utilization patterns of each population are highly variable.
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