Spatial and Seasonal Distribution of American Whaling and Whales in the Age of Sail

Abstract

American whalemen sailed out of ports on the east coast of the United States and in California from the 18th to early 20th centuries, searching for whales throughout the world’s oceans. From an initial focus on sperm whales (Physeter macrocephalus) and right whales (Eubalaena spp.), the array of targeted whales expanded to include bowhead whales (Balaena mysticetus), humpback whales (Megaptera novaeangliae), and gray whales (Eschrichtius robustus). Extensive records of American whaling in the form of daily entries in whaling voyage logbooks contain a great deal of information about where and when the whalemen found whales. We plotted daily locations where the several species of whales were observed, both those caught and those sighted but not caught, on world maps to illustrate the spatial and temporal distribution of both American whaling activity and the whales. The patterns shown on the maps provide the basis for various inferences concerning the historical distribution of the target whales prior to and during this episode of global whaling.

Crowdsourcing Modern and Historical Data Identifies Sperm Whale (Physeter macrocephalus) Habitat Offshore of South-Western Australia

“…The Townsend Yankee whaling data were removed from the final species distribution model produced with Maxent due to the sparse distribution offshore and inconsistent results of presence over depth (median depth ∼ −5000 m). This study concurs with Smith, T. D. et al (2012) and Torres et al (2013) that data such as these may be better suited for studies on a global scale, rather than a regional scale. When crowdsourcing a variety of spatial and temporal data, it is critical to consider the suitability of each to include in a species distribution model.…”

“…With regards to the results from the crowdsourced data, there is known location bias for historical Yankee whaling effort in the presence points of the Townsend charts (Smith, T. D. et al, 2012). However, a "crowding effect" of inaccurate point locations may be more of a problem with coastal species such as humpbacks than with offshore species such as sperm whales (Bannister et al, 2008).…”

“…Topographic information, including slope and Grid cell size was a consideration in how all data were plotted in ArcGIS and Maxent. To deal with the location bias in the Townsend Yankee whaling data where the mean vessel location error was estimated to be 0.22 • latitude (about 24 km) and 0.54 • longitude (about 34 km) (Smith, T. D. et al, 2012;Torres et al, 2013) point and kernel density distributions of historical data were computed in 15 nautical mile grid cells over the study area using the Spatial Analyst tool.…”

Obstacles and Opportunities of Using a Mobile App for Marine Mammal Research

“…Similarly, these methods can be applied to marine mammal research as well. Examples of marine mammal citizen science research include: the American Cetacean Society surveys [22,23] annual volunteer cetacean counts in Hawaii [24], specific species projects [25,26], and analyses of historical whaling records [5,[27][28][29][30].…”

Managing direct and indirect threats to marine ecosystems to balance multiple objectives

“…We show several populations remain depleted or at very low numbers presently, including blue and fin whales in the Atlantic/Indian area, which declined to very low numbers during the mid-20 th century, and southern right whales in the Pacific, which were heavily depleted long before commercial 20 th century whaling began (Reeves & Smith 2007;Smith et al 2012). For these species, high harvests combined with slow reproductive rates due to their long life span resulted in narrow population bottlenecks, which has likely hindered their ability to recover as fast as some of the other species.…”