LONDON: Commercial whaling has resulted in the deaths of three million whales over the last century. That’s according to an estimate in a new study called Emptying the Oceans: A Summary of Industrial Whaling Catches in the 20th Century. Researchers are calling it “the largest hunt in human history.”
As whaling transformed into an industrialized enterprise in the late 19th century, the number of whales that were killed increased rapidly, and calls to curb the practice began as early as the 1920s, when more than 175,000 whales were already being taken worldwide. Whaling hit its peak in the 1950s, with a catch of more than 469,000 whales in the Southern Hemisphere alone.
The new study, co-authored by Robert C. Rocha of the New Bedford Whaling Museum, National Marine Mammal Laboratory researcher Phillip J. Clapham, and Yulia V. Ivaschenko, takes into account International Whaling Commission databases as well as corrected numbers associated with the Soviet whale catch. The report found that the two most-hunted species were fin whales (874,000 killed) and sperm whales (761,000 killed)—more than half of the whales caught in the 20th century.
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