New Scientist
New Scientist was founded in 1956, this internationally-focused weekly British magazine aims at giving readers exhaustive information on recent worldwide developments in science from a scientific, technical and philosophical perspective. The magazine, based in London, is published in English by Reed Business Information, a Reed Elsevier subsidiary, and has US and Australian editions as well. The current Editor is Jeremy Webb, a professional physician. The New Scientist is widely read by both scientists and the general public, and often used as an information source for articles in the general press. The New Scientist website provides articles from the magazine’s weekly print edition as well as daily science updates.
www.newscientist.com
The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) is a specialized agency of the United Nations. It was founded on 16 October 1945 in Quebec City, Quebec, Canada. In 1951 its...
Peter Singer is Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University and Laureate Professor at the University of Melbourne. His books include Practical Ethics, One World, and, most recently, The Life You...
Arnaud Gossement is a lawyer at the Paris Bar for environmental law and energy. He has a PhD in Law from Paris I University Panthéon-Sorbonne and he is a lecturer at Sciences Po Paris. He has also...
Achim Steiner est le directeur exécutif du Programme des Nations Unies pour l'Environnement (PNUE). Auparavant, il a exercé de hautes fonctions à la Commission mondiale des barrages puis à l'Union...
Antoine F. Goetschel is a laywer who specializes in animal rights.
Alistair Gammell is director of the Chagos campaign, a project of the Pew Environment Group’s Global Ocean Legacy initiative to help secure the establishment of large, world-class marine reserves. ...
Dr. Ahmed Djoghlaf is the Executive Secretary of the Convention on Biological Diversity established by the United Nations. An Algerian national, Dr. Djoghlaf has pursued a impressive diplomatic...
George Monbiot is a well-known investigation reporter and columnist for the British newspaper “The Guardian” as well as a member of the BBC Wildlife magazine’s advisory board. He is also the author...
Susan Lieberman is Deputy Director of The Pew Environment Group and head of the Cites Pew Delegation at the CITES summit in Doha.
Julia Marton-Lefèvre is the Director General of International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).Photo: IUCN
Fred Pearce is journalist specialized in the environment and development. He was born in the United Kingdom and studied geography in the University of Cambridge. His latest book is When the Rivers...
Carl Zimmer travaille comme journaliste spécialiste des questions scientifiques et environnementales. Il a rédigé 6 livres et s’intéresse à des domaines aussi variés que la recherche dans les...
Silvia Ribeiro et Kathy Jo Wetter travaillent toutes deux en tant que chercheuses pour l'Action Group on Erosion, Technology and Concentration (ETC Group).
New Scientist was founded in 1956, this internationally-focused weekly British magazine aims at giving readers exhaustive information on recent worldwide developments in science from a scientific,...
Brendan Moyle is a conservationist from New Zealand. Long ago, he used to study tiny pseudoscorpions as a zoologist. He got a PhD in economics because it was rather obvious that a lot of conservation...
New Scientist was founded in 1956, this internationally-focused weekly British magazine aims at giving readers exhaustive information on recent worldwide developments in science from a scientific,...
IUCN : Created in 1948, the World Conservation Union or International Union for the Conservation ofr Nature (IUCN) brings together 81 States, 120 government agencies, 800 plus NGOs, and some 10,000...
Jean-Michel SEVERINO has been CEO of France’s international development agency (AFD) since 2001. After graduating from the Ecole Nationale d’Administration and the Institut d’Etudes Politiques de...
The Ramsar Convention is an international treaty for the conservation and sustainable use of wetlands, aiming to stop their degradation and disappearance, today and tomorrow, by recognizing their...
François RAMADE, an agricultural engineer who holds a doctoral post-graduate degree in science, is a professor emeritus at the Université Paris-Sud (Orsay). He is a former President of the Société...
New Scientist was founded in 1956, this internationally-focused weekly British magazine aims at giving readers exhaustive information on recent worldwide developments in science from a scientific,...
Solenn Honorine holds degrees from Sciences Po (Bordeaux), the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and the Ecole Supérieure de Journalisme in Lille. Ms. Honorine is a French freelance...
Janet LARSEN is the Director of Research at the Earth Policy Institute (a non-profit environmental research organisation) and holds a degree in Earth Systems from Stanford University. Formerly a...
Why Japan's whaling activities are not research
25/06/2009 12:23 pm
IN 1986, the International Whaling Commission (IWC) imposed a moratorium on commercial whaling to allow stocks to replenish. However, this ongoing ban allows member nations to grant themselves special permits to kill whales for scientific research, with the proviso that the whale meat is utilised following data collection.
Only Japan holds a special permit. Its current research programme, which started in 2000 and is run by the Japanese Institute of Cetacean Research (ICR), proposes to kill more than 1000 whales a year in the Antarctic and the western north Pacific. The stated objectives are to determine the population structure and feeding habits of several whale species, including endangered fin and sei whales, in order to "manage" stocks.
Japan has already been widely criticised for its whaling, which is generally seen as a thinly disguised hunting operation. But with the 2009 IWC meeting looming, it is worth rehearsing the arguments against scientific whaling.
Although Japan's early results produced useful information, recent advances in non-lethal techniques such as biopsies mean that data can now be obtained without killing whales. Similarly, it is no longer necessary to kill whales to work out what they have been eating, as this can be determined from DNA in samples of faeces.
The scientific impact of the research is also limited. Relatively little research is published in international peer-reviewed journals, compared with research programmes on other marine mammals such as dolphins. According to the ICR, scientific whaling has produced 152 publications in peer-reviewed journals since 1994. However, just 58 of these papers were published in international journals. The rest were IWC reports or articles published in domestic journals, largely in Japanese. Most of the findings are not circulated among the wider scientific community, and the failure to subject papers to impartial review renders the value of much of this literature questionable.
Whether the results from scientific whaling are useful for stock management has also been questioned. The Scientific Committee of the IWC has explicitly stated that the results generated by the Japanese Whale Research Program in the Antarctic (JARPA) "were not required for management". Independent research shows that the data may overestimate whale abundance by up to 80 per cent (Marine Ecology Progress Series, vol 242, p 295).
Finally, given that there is considerable variation in the capacity of different whale populations to recover from stock depletion (Marine Mammal Science, vol 24, p 183), the value of the research for understanding populations outside the Antarctic and western north Pacific - which may one day be reconsidered for commercial whaling - is limited. This fundamentally undermines the justification for scientific whaling.
Why Japan's whaling activities are not research
17 June 2009 by Nichola Raihani et Tim Clutton-Brock
Magazine issue N° 2713 - June
© New Scientist, Reed Business Information
Did you enjoy this piece of news ?
Subscribe to our daily newsletter Join us on Facebook Follow us on Twitter
Signaler un abus
| Rose |
ICR whale research I can not beleive what the ICR is doing. Stating they are doing research when all they are doing is killing beautiful whales. The ICR should be ashamed of them selves. Killing 1000 whales a year is rediculous. If there are non lethal research that can be done, then that is what should be done. I don't know how the ICR can sleep at night. |
