Good News on Whales

The International Union for the Conservations of Nature (IUCN) says that some large whale species are gradually rebounding thanks to the 1986 moratorium on whale hunting. On the IUCN’s new Red List of endangered species, the status of humpback whales, southern right whales, and common minke whales has been upgraded from “vulnerable” or “lower risk” to “least concern.” A quarter of all whale species remain threatened with extinction, however, including the fin whale, the sei whale, and the blue whale, the largest creature ever to have lived on earth. Entanglement in fishing gear remains a serious danger to small whale species, many of which are still at risk. Norway, which has continued to hunt minke whales despite the ban by the International Whaling Commission, said the upgraded status of several large whale species means that the blanket ban on whaling should be rescinded. Even with recent improvement, numbers of whales worldwide remain a fraction of what they were before the age of industrial whaling.