Whale farms as food source

Press, Volume CXII, Issue 33035, 30 September 1972, Page 12

Whale farms as food source

(By

DAVID GUNSTON)

The latest idea for avoiding the eventual menace of a world desperately short of food links the battle against global starvation with the very necessary preservation of financially the most valuable of all the world’s animals, the great oil-yielding whales.

It comes from Mr Gifford Pinchot, a biochemist at the Johns Hopkins University in America, and is quite simple: confine stocks of the huge blue, fin and humpback whales inside chosen Pacific coral atolls. Encourage with artificial fertilisers the growth of marine plankton in these waters, then farm the whales for oil and meat. This would have to be done soon, before the fastdwindling stocks of monster whales vanish altogether before the commercial greed of the remaining big whaling nations, especially Japan and Russia. But it would mean saving the whales from the swift extinction that now threatens them; and it would mean that mankind could rely upon a permanent source of food from the sea. As Pinchot points out, since three-quarters of the earth’s surface is covered by the oceans, they receive three times as much sunlight as the land area, and so "have the potential ability to produce much more food than the land.”

Ideal pens

"We still hunt the oceans rather than farm them,” he says, and suggests that coral atolls, with their natural roughly circular "fence” of coral reefs, would provide ideal, large-scale pens for captive, semi-domesticated whales. Inside such coral corrals the whales would be encouraged to breed naturally, feeding on the rich stocks of artificially-induced plankton food. 'Their slaughter would be rigidly controlled, and they would never be allowed to face extinction, as they are now in the Antarctic.

The suggestion is to step up the normal plankton content of the sea inside the atolls by introducing artificial fertilisers, and/or pumping in water from the sea depths nearby, which are rich in chemical nourishment. Mr Pinchot feels certain that once the minutest plankton took hold, it would

soon multiply until sufficient food for “harvestable animals” was available. Free from danger Because of their size, the giant whales would be easy to keep track of inside their sheltered atolls, and free from all danger. There, they could continue their marvellous natural process of converting zooplankton, or minute shrimp-like fodder, into meat and oil for hungry mankind. “It is a real tragedy that whales stand in danger of being exterminated by man,” Gifford Pinchot concludes. “The situation illustrates again the extreme shortsightedness of human beings. “These filter - feeding whales are in an unsual position in the food chain in the sea, since they are large and yet feed on tiny plankton. If they are exterminated, this extremely efficient mechanism for converting plants into animal protein will be lost forever.” Such a loss would be double, since science is hoping one day to discover how to produce human food from marine plankton direct. Without whales as a guide, this might never be achieved.