Animals

Back in the 19th century it was custom for men to go out hunting for large whales such as the Sperm and Right Whales. The only whale that they stayed away from were the Blue Whales because they were too large, fast, and powerful for the devices that they used.

It wasn’t until 1864 when a Norwegian fisherman by the name of Svend Foyn created harpoons that were attached to a steamboat and were specially designed to be large enough to catch the Blue Whale. At first the weapons were too hard to use and they found little to no results. So Foyn went back and worked on the harpoon till he perfected it into the harpoon gun – which he than distributed to the different whaling stations around Finnmark and Norway.

Soon blue whales were being hunted in Iceland (1883), the Faroe Islands (1894), Newfoundland (1898), and Spitsbergen (1903). In 1904-05 the first blue whales were taken off South Georgia. By 1925, with the advent of the stern slipway in factory ships, and the use of steam-driven whale catchers, the catch of blue whales, and baleen whales as a whole, in the Antarctic and sub-Antarctic began to increase dramatically.

Between 1930 and 1931, these ships killed 29,400 Blue Whales in the Antarctic alone. By the end of World War II populations had been significantly depleted, and in 1946 the first quotas restricting international trade in whales were introduced, but they were ineffective because of the lack of differentiation between species.

Rare species could be hunted on an equal footing with those found in relative abundance. Blue Whale hunting was banned in the 1960s by the International Whaling Commission, and illegal whaling by the USSR finally halted in the 1970s, by which time 330,000 Blue Whales had been killed in the Antarctic, 33,000 in the rest of the Southern Hemisphere, 8,200 in the North Pacific, and 7,000 in the North Atlantic. The largest original population, in the Antarctic, had been reduced to 0.15% of their initial numbers.

Whale hunters had clearly driven the Blue Whale to near-extinction, but rather than taking smaller harvests over a longer period, whalers continued to deplete the population. In hindsight, had the whaling industry taken into account monitoring and regulation by marine biologists, more whales might have been commercially available, albeit over a longer time span.

The population dynamics involved in harvesting long-lived mammals are quite different from those involved in harvesting shorter-lived fish. Due to longer rates of reproduction (gestation of more than a year) and smaller litter size (one or two calves), whale populations recover much more slowly than the populations of smaller animals, which tend to invest less time and resources in individual young.