Is Global Warming Threatening the Whales?
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The World Wildlife Fund recently issued a report claiming that global warming is threatening the Blue Whale. An scientists familiar with the research cited by the WWF, however, said the group wasa making a “leap of faith” not necessarily supported by the data. Who’s right?
Blue whales feed on krill. The krill in turn feed off of microscopic algae that are released from melting ice in the Antarctic. Krill populations have declined substantially over the past few decades. Therefore, according to the WWF, rising temperatures are reducing the sea ice that are home for the algae, and thereby lowering the krill population, which will eventually reduce blue whale populations.
For further support of this hypothesis, WWF cites a February report by the British Antarctic Survey which found that the total supply of krill is now almost equal to the total demand placed on the krill population by the various species that feed on it. The WWF also notes that some researchers belive that the total level of sea ice declined by as much as 25 percent between the mid-1950s and mid-1970s.
But can the WWF reasonably conclude from those two facts that global warming poses a threat to the blue whale?
The BBC contacted Keith Richard, an expert on krill with the British Antarctic Survey. Reid told the BBC that,
The work that has been done [and which the WWF cited] is based on those predators that breed on land, so the range over which they can get krill is quite restricted. This doesn’t affect whales in the same way. There is a huge area which can have krill and that is accessible to whales. Penguins and seals, on the other hand, have to come back to land to breed and feed their young.
…To take the available evidence and generalize it up to a level of saying that the blue whale’s recover is endangered seems to me to require a fair leap of faith.
So the decline in krill only affects land-based species such as seals. Could there be an alternative explanation to WWF’s global warming hypothesis to explain why the supply of krill is almost equal to the demand for those species? Yes, actually. Reid hints at it in telling the BBC that “determining whether that’s because of a reduction in krill or an increase in the number of mouths to feed is very difficult to work out.”
As the WWF is certainly aware, in 1983 the European Economic Community — acting at the behest of environmental and animal rights groups — banned the import of seal pelts which, combined with many country-specific bans on seal hunting, ended up crippling that industry. With the drastic reduction in the seal hunt, the seal population has exploded over the past 20 years. In some colonies of fur bearing seals that have been closely followed by researchers, the population is doubling every five years.
Add to that commercial exploitation of krill, and there are a wide range of possible reasons for the relative parity between supply and demand of krill for land-based species.
WWF does deserve credit, however, for being more honest than some of the mainstream environmental groups about its global warming goals. While everybody now seems focused on whether or not the Kyoto treaty can be revived, the WWF at least recognizes that the Kyoto Protocol’s requirements would essentially do nothing to alleviate global warming assuming the climate models are correct. The WWF says that the world needs to at least double the reductions proposed by Kyoto.
Source:
Climate row touches blue whales. Alex Kirby, The BBC, July 19, 2001.
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