"THAR SHE BLOWS!"

Evening Post, Volume CXXV, Issue 36, 12 February 1938, Page 10

"THAR SHE BLOWS!"

WHALE CONSERVATION

NATIONS IN AGREEMENT

JAPAN STANDS OUT

On Monday the British exploration ship' Discovery II is to leave Dunedin for the Antarctic, where an important part of the scientific work to be carried out will have to do with research into the movements of whales, whale conservation, and the exercise of an "oversight into the whaling industry, which has been threatened with virtual extinction as a result of unrestricted slaughter by modern whale gun and factory ship methods.

"The Scientific American" sees ground for hope of saving the industry, thanks to the common sense and co-operation "of eleven Governments representing both the economic interests of the %vhaling industry and the broad interest of science. Japan; alone among the nations which en- , gage in whaling in a big way, has stood out from signing the conservation agreement. The world will know the answer to -the effort made by the contracting nations, within a few years. • Last'year, after protracted meetings, the" delegates of the whaling nations —Norway, those of the British nations which do whaling, the Irish Free State, the United States, arid Germany —came to an agreement which is to be tried out for at least one year. Game laws are now to be applied to whales. Since the participants have known that with present methods an early extinction of their source of living was in clear sight, the chances are that the agreement will be made to work and that it will be extended from year to year. These, game laws of the international whaling industry went into effect in the Antarctic regions on December 8, and whaling will continue only until March 7, when a closed season will begin. : GENERAL AND PARTICULAR RESTRICTIONS. Some species of,whales are to be protected completely: right whales, grey whales, cow whales with calves, and immature whales. To cramp the style of the greediest individuals, the pay of the gunners is no longer to depend merely on.the number of whales they kill. Moreover, '•whaling;vessels must keep full records of all whales .-killed.-; .'■ ,•• ■■■■:■ -; - -. , . In general, there are two kinds of whales—those; that have teeth and can use them fiercely, and the .great,tooths less hulks which feed wholly by sifting vast volumes of water through whalebone sieves in order to. obtain its content of those Jiny forms of life collectively called -plankton and found in special abundance in the waters of the Arctic and Antarctic because these cold waters are , the richest in nutrient ' salts. . ■■.-■-.■ ■ ■ '

The toothed sperm whale may not be killed if less than 35ft in length, and the female of this species, may not be killed at all. The blue whale, the largest of them all, must reach a length of 70ft before it is now eligible for the kill.; This is one of the sieve feeders, with a bulk sometimes of 85 tons and with room inside to stuff three jumbo elephants plus the largest dinosaur that ever lived. Yet it is supported wholly on near-microscopic mincemeat and its throat is so small that it would have choked to death on Jonah's head,alone. Other restrictions prohibit, over vast areas of ocean, including the whole Atlantic north of, Patagonia,,the use of those too-efficient, mechanised "floating factories"—steamships that skid whales up inclines into their opened maws and treat them on the broad -seas. - ■■'■ - ■ :;.':.,•. SAVING TEE IND^TRY FKOM ... •' ITSELF. , : Before these restrictions could be applied intelligently it was necessary to learn about the lives of whales. Here one might think the old whalers could tell us the whole story, but this is an. illusion, for whalers have been interested in making their living, not in natural history. So two English vessels, the Discovery and the William Scoresby, have been patiently plodding up and down the seas for the past dozen years snooping, everywhere into the ways of whales—their movements and migrations, their food, and their everything. They have marked 4000 whales with darts: another version of bird-banding, and with a similar purpose. More than 90 of these 4000 darts have been returned by. whalers.

To strike a sane middle-of-the-road course between the dreams of the sentimentalists who would see none of our forests put, arid the hogs who would, see none: left, conservationists now regard trees in the light of a crop and aim to provide for the futureenough. So with the whaling conservationists —whales are to be run exactly as a crop, for there is little sen-, timent in the question. The purpose is simply to see that the whaling industry is provided , with "enough" whales—the meaning of enough being expressed in permanent terms and not in those of a short-sighted decade or two. This, therefore, is game protection on a grand and romantic scale. May it save the whale from going the tragic way of the buffalo.