Collateral Damage -- Great Whale By-Catch Figures

Apology to readers - this is yet a another post about Japan and whaling. If you are looking for good reads on Japanese politics and nothing else, see Okumura Jun's look at Sunday's election results (Link) and Joe Jones's plunge into what the weekly magazines have been printing about Tokyo Governor-elect Masuzoe Yo'ichi's unconventional private life (Link).


Minke Whale, accidentally drowned in a fishing net, prior to processing. Hakodate, Hokkaido, 2007.

The whale wars go on in the South Pacific, most recently dragging the government of New Zealand into a conflict that inflicts brutal costs on Japan's international reputation. (Link)

Meanwhile, without fanfare or activists with television contracts, a meaningless drowning of thousands of cetaceans is taking place in the fishing nets of every ocean-faring nation. Whatever the figure is, the numbers of cetaceans large and small being killed as collateral damage to the ocean's being strip mined of fish is many, many times the numbers killed by Japanese hunters (I cannot, for example, imagine any whale lasting for long in China's half of the East China Sea). Most of this killing goes on unreported, the remains being cut away and left to the ocean's scavengers.

We have some idea of the level of carnage taking place in the near waters of Japan because, unlike most countries, a dead whale in a  net around here has market value. The Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries provides a thorough accounting of the sale of whales mistakenly killed -- precisely because they end up in the nation's food markets.

The number of great whales -- whales currently under an International Whaling Commission moratorium -- caught and processed due to accidents is surprisingly large:

Year / number of great whales landed and processed

2006 / 151
2007 / 158
2008 / 136
2009 / 122
2010 / 135
2011 / 126

Over 95% of the great whales accidentally caught and brought in for processing are Minke . Most of the remainder are Humpbacks, with only a rare drowned Eastern Gray, Fin or Pacific Right Whale making its way into the MAFF figures. Sperm Whales, which are toothed whales, are recorded as baleen whales -- the last recorded instance of one being one caught and processed coming in 2006.

The high percentage of Minke is almost certainly due to the huge population of Minke relative the populations of other great whales. Physical bulk also probably plays a part -- large whales like Fins being probably too big to tow into port.

Why are the by-catch figures significant?

1) The number of whales processed as by-catch is larger than the number of whales caught by Japan’s small-scale coastal hunt for Baird’s Beaked Whale, the one big-bodied whale commercial hunt still in existence.

2) While the dolphin meat trade seems a sham, the whale meat trade is clearly economically viable. It is worth a fishing crew’s while to tow a huge creature into port for butchering, using equipment not meant for such an endeavor.

3) While participation in the pelagic North and South Pacific hunts, the small-scale coastal hunt and the dolphin hunt are restricted to a small number of persons in a tiny number of local communities, the by-catch take is national, with whales being butchered and their meat wholesaled in ports in 23 of Japan’s 47 prefectures.

One of the prevailing and self-serving myths of the anti-whaling movement is that the IWC moratorium of 1986 ended commercial whaling. Even discounting the pelagic "research" hunts (why no one in the activist community does diddly about the North Pacific JARPN pelagic hunt has always been a mystery to me) commercial whaling activity in Japan simply shifted to non-IWC protected species. As for IWC-protected whales, their meat is being cut up and sold all over Japan, in what is a fairly sizable, if ostensibly accidental, trade.

For annual figures (Japanese language only) for whale by-catch, the form of distribution of meat, by prefecture and species, see: http://www.jfa.maff.go.jp/j/whale/w_document/index.html


Later - Meanwhile, from the Department of Unlikely Invitations comes a potentially very stupid proposal regarding Ambassador Caroline Kennedy and the Taiji dolphin hunt. (Link)

Hat tip to reader BF.

Original image source: Stranding Network Hokkaido

Not That Many Dolphins Killed - An Update

The Fisheries Research Agency (Suisan Sogo Kenkyujo - pictured above) has an opening for a small cetaceans data specialist.  Applicants have to possess a Ph.D. in a relevant discipline or have a Ph.D. completed by the start of the employment term. The position is open to both men and women researchers, with full maternity and child leave benefits.

The applicant would be expected among other duties to be able to calculate the maximum harvestable yield of dolphins and whales in Japan's near seas. If you have a Ph.D. in cetacean studies or statistical biology there is a job waiting for you in the Kanazawa district of Yokohama City.  Your application, however, is due TOMORROW (February 7).

Here is the pdf of full job description. (Link - J)

What of interest to me is the figure in the body the job description of "approximately 2,000 head" as the total number of 9 species of dolphins and small whales killed in harpoon and drive hunts in 2012. This is the strongest evidence so far, in the absence of official figures, that my guess of a week ago -- that the quoted canonical figure of up to 22,000 small cetaceans being killed each year in Japanese hunts -- is off by an order of magnitude.

It seems that aside from the smaller Short Finned Pilot Whale harpoon hunt of Okinawa (about 34 animals), the smaller Baird's Beaked Whale hunt of Wadaura, Chiba Prefecture (24 animals) and a tiny (10?) number of Baird's being landed in Hokkaido, the only area still in the business of hunting small cetaceans is Taiji, in Wakayama Prefecture. Activists watching the drive hunts there have counted approximately 600 dolphin killed in the first four months of the hunting season (Link). This number of kills at this point in the season would indicate that the"approximately 2,000 head" figure for all small cetaceans is the new Japan normal.

The 2,000 figure, an 80% drop from the number being killed only five years ago, would also validate another of my suspicions: that there is no commercial market for dolphin meat. It is basically a free good, a supply searching for a demand, a by-product, now, of a need to kill dolphins in order to provide a cover story for Taiji's lucrative live dolphin trade.

Not That Many Dolphins Killed

Trending this morning is a figure, 22,000, for the number of small cetaceans (dolphins and small whales) harvested by Japanese hunters each year (Link).

This figure is inflated. The real figure is certainly less than 10,000, probably fewer than 3,000.

Until the triple disaster of 11 March 2011, the bulk of the nation's dolphin killings were carried out by hunters working out of ports in Iwate Prefecture, with smaller numbers of killings carried out by boats departing from Miyagi and Hokkaido ports. The targets of these hunts were Dall's porpoises (Ishi iruka - Phocoenoides dalli), a small oceanic species. The hunt was conducted well offshore (meaning virtually no photographs or video record exist of it) with harpoons.

Below is the table, the most recent one available (Calendar Year 2010) of the total number of kills of various species of dolphins and small whales -- the latter term being something of a misnomer in the case of the Baird's Beaked Whale (Tsuchikujira - Berardius baidii) which is as big as the IWC-moratorium restricted Minke Whale (Minke kujira - Balaenoptera acutorostrata)*.

Click on above image to open in a larger window.

(Source)

According to these government figures, the total number of small cetaceans killed in 2010 was 6,615. As the report explains the Dall's porpoise kill number is an estimate, based on the total weight of meat processed divided by a general figure of about 50kg of meat per porpoise. The number of dolphins killed outside outside the Dall's porpoise hunt was 1,696, with the bulk of that, 1,629 kills, being done by Wakayama hunters, almost all whom were probably were homeported in the infamous town of Taiji.

2010 was a particular bad year for small cetacean hunting. However, even in 2009, the last good year on record, the total number of small cetaceans killed was 10,501, with the difference coming almost entirely from the Dall's porpoise hunt. This figure is significantly less than the total number of kills allowed under the quotas of the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries. MAFF's 2013-2014 quotas for all small cetaceans combined, the lowest total ever, is 17,217. (Link - J)

When the tsunami wiped out the fishing gear and ports of Iwate and Miyagi, the Dall's porpoise hunt vanished (the tsunami also ended the Miyagi-based Baird's Beaked Whale hunt). The Dall's hunt has since struggled to reestablish itself -- see page 45-2 of this Japanese language only report from the Fisheries Research Agency. An enterprising journalist might want to ask the Reconstruction Minister what proportion of Tohoku reconstruction funds have been consecrated, if any, to reestablishing the Dall's porpoise meat industry.

With the Iwate hunt moribund, Japan's dolphin industry must rely on the Wakayama hunt for meat. There is, however, no evidence that Wakayama hunters have stepped up the pace of their activities. If there were a crisis in supply one would at least expect MAFF officials to increase the quota number for the species (bottlenose, striped, Risso's, pan-tropical) hunted by Wakayama hunters. While MAFF did revise the Wakayama quota upward last year, the rise was risible, with the total number of kills permitted in 2013~2014 season still below the number permitted in 2011~2012:

MAFF quotas for small cetaceans, Wakayama Prefecture hunts
Season / total kills permitted

2010~2011 / 2,760
2011~2012 / 2,674
2012~2013 / 2,589
2013~2014 / 2,604

(Sources: Link - J and Link - J)

Assuming -- and it is an immense assumption -- that the Wakayama hunters managed to use up all their quota, and the hunters in prefectures outside the Tohoku used up theirs, the total number of small cetaceans hunted this fiscal year would be 4,177.

To get some sense of how unlikely that is, the MAFF quota for Hokkaido harpooners is 1,221 Dall porpoises in 2013-14. In 2010, the last recorded year of the Hokkaido hunt, the number of porpoises taken was 116. Shizuoka hunters are permitted 250 kills under this year's quota -- yet no Shizuoka landings have been reported for over a decade.

The 22,000 figure in the CNN essay is clearly wrong. Likely as not, it is wrong by an order of magnitude.

Later - This post has been revised to include data from previous years's quotas for the Wakayama dolphin hunts.

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* Virtually all contemporary images and video of cetaceans being butchered come from the Baird's Beaked Whale hunt run out of Wadaura in Chiba Prefecture. This is due both to the community's relative proximity to Tokyo and its willingness to serve as a showcase for Japan's bid to resume small-scale coastal commercial whaling for Minke Whale.