Awhile ago I got to write on the new initiative by Greenpeace, entitled the Great Whale Trail. It was initiated in direct response to Japan’s strongly held views that they must kill numerous whales each year for what they called “scientific research.”

Greenpeace, rightfully so, disagreed hotly with this theory, and went about setting twenty satellite tags on humpbacks migrating out of New Caledonia and the Cook Islands. They worked in conjunction with scientists in the area, from the Cook Islands Whale Research and Opération Cétacés (New Caledonia).

The plan was to prove to the world that just as much research, if not more, can be gathered through non-lethal means.

Japan naively contradicted this theory, by saying that simply tracking a whale could not tell you whether it was male or female, pregnant, or various other factors. The simple and obvious explanation, is that no, of course you don’t need tracking to determine those factors. All you need to do is look at the whale!

Several months on, and the Great Whale Trail has been a great success.

Currently, all tags are currently offline, long before they reached the Antarctic feeding grounds. But before they went offline, the sheer amount of data collected was spectacular.

Whales headed off in different directions, in packs and alone, and the information received filled in migratory patterns that until now, had been a complete mystery to scientists. For example, though whales had been photographed in New Caledonia and in New Zealand, no one knew where they went in between.

One whale, named Saravah, made her way to the top of New Zealand’s east coast, before her tag went offline. Mikaela on the other hand, who departed from New Caledonia with Saravah, headed north along the western coast of New Caledonia, before heading west in to the area known as the Chesterfields.

The whales from the Cook Islands provided scientists with their greatest surprise. Instead of heading off individually like the New Caledonian whales, all eight whales started heading west. And though not travelling together, their group movement has posed more questions than it’s answered.

What surprised them further was that none of the whales, all the way in to October before their tags went offline ever showed any signs of turning towards Antarctica (October is late in the season). This differed from the Caledonian whales, who all but Mikaela headed south.

Greenpeace has made their point, and amazingly so. They have collected data that the Japanese could only hope for, and on their first attempt. In fact, the Japanese lethal studies program will yield almost no information on the research recommendations provided by the International Whaling Commission.

All of this adds up to one simple and irrefutable fact: you do not need to kill whales for research!

Greenpeace - Whale migration - the first scientific results are in

The Great Whale Trail

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