Exclusive

Prince of ‘whales’ :

Exploration into the fascinating world of whales

By Ranga CHANDRARATHNE

“My family and I were on a pilgrimage to Nagadipa island in the late 1940s and having visited the temple we were returning in our motor launch to Kayts and Jaffna. After being on the high seas about three miles out of Nagadipa, our engine failed in the motor launch and try as the driver and navigator did, it refused to budge. This went on for another one hour or so, and they were finally getting desperate and told us to pray to the gods to help them start the engine.

We drifted along in the current, and then out of the blue, to our astonishment and surprise , a huge animal jumped out of the water and fell with a terrific thud on the water splashing our boat. I have always been interested in animals and I recognised it as a whale. At the time I did not know what type of whale it was but when I got back to Colombo I checked in the books and worked out that it was a humpback whale.

The family in the boat were terrified and screamed at the sight of the whale jumping out of the water( called breeching ) . I , however , was absolutely thrilled and delighted by this whale jump. To add to their misery and my great pleasure after 15-20 minutes the whale jumped again and this time drenched the boat with sea water.( whales need to surface every 20 minutes or so to take in air as they are mammals ).The boat finally started and we reached Jaffna before dark.

Experience

Who was to know that this experience with the whale would remain etched in my memory all my life, and that I would continue this love affair, eventually ending up as the President of Project Jonah Australia (the premier whale and dolphin conservation society in Australia), and carry the fight to end the killing of whales by Norway, Iceland and Japan into the international arena, representing Australia which was in the forefront of this operation? We have successfully taken on the Norwegians, Japanese and other whale-killing nations, and have reduced an annual “harvest” of 70,000 – over 100,000 great whales,

some of them nearly 100 feet long and weighing 150 tons in weight, to a fraction of that number: 325 whales are now killed annually for “scientific purposes”.

Our concerted efforts, which included tremendous support from Patricia Lawson (our Vice-President), Jenny Talbot, Joy Lee, Clodagh Harrison and others, successfully brought down the original numbers of whales slaughtered each year. Greenpeace, Sea Shepherds, and other organizations were also of tremendous support, and took many great initiatives to prevent the slaughter of whales and dolphins.

In Sri Lanka the efforts of Dr Hiran Jayewardene of NARA, Anouk Ilangakoon (who has extensive knowledge of Sri Lanka’s marine mammals) and Gehan de Silva Wijeyeratne have been of great significance in whale conservation and whale watching.

We are justly proud of such an achievement. Whale numbers are now recovering, and Southern Right Whales are now being seen quite commonly off the South Australian coast. When I was in Australia in 2009, I happened to run into Andrew Tink, a former Liberal Minister in the Australian Cabinet, at the Beecroft Arcade. He got up, came across, and shook my hand. He was very sorry, he said, that my wife and I had returned to live in Sri Lanka, as it was Australia’s great loss. He added that whenever he sees whales off the coast of Sydney and New South Wales, or television footage of whales off the coast of New South Wales, it always reminds him of me, and of the magnificent job we did to preserve the whales of the world. Tears came into my eyes. It was a great honour to be remembered for such action in preserving the great whales. I am proud of the nickname I acquired in Australia ? “the Prince of Whales”.

Excerpts of the exclusive interview with Dr. Brendon Gooneratne.

Question: Reading Newspaper articles on yourself appearing here and abroad, I gathered that your interest in wildlife and nature goes back to your childhood. In fact, you had seen a Humpback whale at the tender age of 11 years and a carcass of a whale being washed ashore. Two contrasting images which have been registered in your memory and would have intuitively led to your lifelong commitment to protect whales and dolphins.

How do you revisit the history of whaling in diverse parts of the globe and eventually get the conservation effort spearheaded by organisations such as Project Jonah of which you are president?

History

Answer: The history of whaling is a sad and tragic one.

It has been ferocious, avaricious , irresponsible and carried out with complete disregard for the ecological consequences to the oceans. No moral or ethical considerations have been brought into play in assessing their significant life form in our oceans and from whom we can still have so much to learn to our advantage.

In the 1600s and 1700s there was some justification to kill whales because there was no oil for lighting purposes, candles,soap, heating and for other uses like lubrication. There was also the by-products of whales – whale oil for margarine, paints, crayons , whips, umbrellas in the 19th century ,whale meat, whalebone for corsets and other buttons like collar studs, and also a perfume produced from ambergris found in the body of the whale.

Whaling has been a long term industry in the world’s ports . London, Amsterdam, New York, Nantucket, nearly every port had indulged in some whaling. In fact, when the Third Fleet carrying convicts to Australia from England docked in Sydney in 1791, after discharging its cargo the captain went on to harpoon a sperm whale.

Whaling was conducted on a confrontational basis where whaling boats with harpoons in the hands of these whalers chased the whales in the seas and harpooned them .It was a very risky business and called for an immense amount of knowledge and of hard work and skill.

Because of the method of whaling manually, there was at least some way of controlling the killing of these great whales in smaller numbers. Some blue whales were 110 feet long and weighed 170 tons.

Then came motorised whaling where the harpoon was attached to the boat and was wound in a rotor system manipulated by a machine, with a grenade at the end of the anchor-like harpoon which was fired into the body of the whale , the grenade exploding in the body of the animal.Also helicopter spotter aircraft, radar – fitted, giving the whales no chance of escaping the harpoon grenade.

Besides, it was no longer necessary to tow the dead whales back to the shore to flense them and process them as there were factory ships that could boil the meat and produce oil on board the whaling ships.

So, the industry got bigger and more efficient in catching a greater number of whales and their numbers started diminishing in the early 1900s. It was estimated that over 100,000 great whales a year were being killed , some counts said 300,000 . Between 1835 and 1845 it was estimated that three quarters of the population of Southern Right whales around the shores of Australia was decimated. Whales produce young ones once in nearly two years, and usually only one at a time. So, with this great decimation of whales, came a drastic reduction in numbers in the seas. By the 1950s and 1960s it became very clear that many of the great whales were well on their way to extinction.

Majesty

Alarm bells started to ring and many people were confronted by a world without whales, if nothing was done about it. Their majesty, look alike to human behaviour and family life would all be lost . Also there were many things we did not know about whales , how they controlled the plankton population in the seas , and their control of crab eater seals and other sea creatures.

In 1946 The International Convention for the regulation of Whaling established the International Whaling Commission( IWC ) to regulate whaling world wide. This was done to conserve whale stocks while permitting the orderly development of the whaling industry. However, the overexploitation of whale stocks , and the changes in the world’s attitude to whaling forced the commission to become more concerned with whale conservation than with whale exploitation. Much to the dismay of the staff of the IWC who would lose their very lucrative jobs if whaling was totally banned,it finally resulted in the culmination of a moratorium on all commercial whaling from 1986 onwards. But whaling for scientific purposes and for subsistence whaling by indigenous peoples like the Inuit in Alaska and the northern Hemisphere was still allowed. All in all , a quota was granted for scientific whaling of 325 animals , mainly the smaller Minke whales with a further quota of a few bowhead whales for the Inuit.

Project Jonah was initiated in 1974 in Sydney as a conservation society and later on in Melbourne. I joined the organisation in 1974 as a Committee member , was elected as Vice President in a few years and was later elected President in 1989 .

In 1975 at the instigation of many organisations that had sprung up in Australia and elsewhere, the Australian Government established a commission of Inquiry into Whaling chaired by a retired Chief Justice of Australia – Sir Sydney Frost . This was largely possible because of the right and determined decision by Malcolm Fraser the then Prime Minister of Australia to establish this far reaching Commission.It was made possible because Malcolm Fraser’s young daughter Phoebe was a member of Project Jonah and constantly talked to her father at breakfast table why the horrendous pratice of whaling has to be banned. This inquiry went on for over two years and I too gave evidence at the inquiry. The conclusion of the inquiry was to stop whaling totally and to carry the message to the rest of the world to also do so.

The Report incorporated the scientific evidence submitted and was published by the Australian Government in two volumes running into hundred of pages. It is rightly considered to be a landmark in the history of man’s relationship with, and place in, the environment of our planet. This was the first of many fights people had in forcing governments to do something about preservation of the flora and fauna of the world and we were successful in achieving it for the first time. Australia then passed the Whale Protection Act in 1980.

Threat

Q: Commercial whaling has been a major threat to the protection of whales and dolphins which are considered to be small whales. Apart from being the President of Project Jonah from 1989 onwards , you were a member of the Australian delegation to the 42nd International Whaling Commission held in July 1990 where a major decision was made to indefinitely extend the Moratorium on Commercial Whaling . Despite the Indian Ocean Marine Affairs Cooperation ( IOMAC 11) conference which was held in Tanzania in September 1990 the resolution sponsoring a Permanent Indian Ocean Whale Sanctuary , Commercial Whaling remains as a major impediment in the protection of whales and dolphins. As the Chief Architect of this resolution which was ratified as a historic first in Colombo in July 1991, how do you perceive the current commercial whaling scenario ?

Impediment

A: You are in error when you say that Commercial Whaling remains a major impediment in the protection of Whales and Dolphins.

Commercial Whaling was banned from 1986 onwards and to this day it is not practised by the countries previously indulging in killing whales , primarily, Norway, Iceland and Japan. Only the scientific quota is adhered to.

That is why whale numbers have recovered in the world and there are numerous sightings of great whales and dolphins around the world. There are other factors that are now causing concern like plastics in the oceans, ocean pollution with garbage dumping, chemical pollution, fertiliser pollution and so on which have got to be addressed.

Q: It seems that despite impressive legislation and growing awareness in the importance of protecting whales and their contribution to marine ecology which meets the protein needs of more than half of humanity indiscriminate slaughter of whales and dolphins continue unabated . Could you, briefly , explain what the major species of whales are and what species have been threatened with extinction due to commercial whaling ?

Dolphins

A: You say that “Indiscriminate slaughter of whales and dolphins continue unabated” which is quite wrong. There is no whaling permitted now as I have said before but dolphins are still being killed as “fish” for the dry fish industry in Sri Lanka and elsewhere in the world . There are also hundreds of dolphins accidentally caught in the gill nets and other purse-seine nets , entangled in them and suffocating to death because they cannot swim to the surface to breathe air.

The great whales are :

Baleen Whales – with Baleen Plates in their mouths. They have no teeth.

Blue whales
Fin whales
Sei whales
Humpback whales
Bryde’s whales
Minke whales
Southern Right whales
Pygmy Right whales
Toothed whales

Sperm whales
Pygmy sperm whales
Killer whales
False killer whale
Pygmy killer whale
Pilot whale
Melon headed whale
Bottlenose dolphin.
Common dolphin

Indopacific Humpback
Dolphin
Spinner dolphin
Irrawaddy dolphin
Risso’s dolphin

Except for the Irrawaddy Dolphins and the Bowhead whales in the Alaskan region in the ice bound north, no other whale or dolphin is currently threatened with extinction. The change in the ecology of the habitat of the Irrawaddy dolphin is contributing to its loss in numbers together with the increase in human population , as is always the case. Even Blue Whales are mercifully coming back in larger numbers.

Q: What is the significant role that whales and dolphins play in marine ecology?

Role

A: There are some established facts regarding the role played by whales and dolphins;

(a) They regulate fish stocks in the sea by eating them, and not allowing any one species of fish to override the other. This was graphically seen when the whales stocks suddenly plummeted in the Antarctic ocean in the 1980s when it did not take long for nature to fill the vacuum with an enormous explosion in the numbers of the crab eater seals and Adelie penguins then numbering in their millions. The situation is now much better with the resumption of whale numbers in the oceans.

(b) Plankton is also regulated and thereby oxygen production is helped in the oceans by whales breathing in and out. Whales play a key part in the phytoplankton/krill/oxygen cycle and have done so for millions of years in the oceans.

There may be other beneficial results of whales being in the oceans for us to discover in the future.

Q: There are certain myths established over the years that material extracted from whales cannot be substituted. For instance, whales were being hunted for their meat,oil and bones. Are there substitutes for whale products ?

A: Every item previously taken from whales has been synthetically made by man- oil and petrol, kerosene for lighting,, transmission oil for automotive engines, all whalebone products, margarine production etc. have been produced elsewhere. There is absolutely no need to kill any whales or dolphins again in the future.

Q: Decades ago , some countries continued to slaughter whales in the name of “Scientific Whaling. “What were the actions taken by anti-whaling organisations such as Project Jonah against this practice?

Moratorium

A: Slaughtering of whales under the guise of “ Scientific Whaling “ was a trade off with the whaling nations who lost face with the advent of the moratorium on whaling in 1986. A very small quota of 325 Minke whales was permitted for the three nations still indulging in some scientific style whaling- Norway, Japan and Iceland. When one compares the slaughter of 100,000 - 300,000 Great whales more than 300 times the numbers of Minke whales now permitted to be caught for “ Scientific “ purposes it is a stupendous achievement by the majority of mankind.

It is my belief that whaling will totally stop in the next few years because there are no whalers now performing this job and they are going out of business. Also the whaling ships are not being used sufficiently regularly for them not to deteriorate and perish, and the economic upkeep of this is no longer viable. Besides , even the Japanese are no longer eating whale meat , which is considered to have quite an unpalatable taste to modern people.

Home truth

Q: It is not an exaggeration that environmental protection organisations such as Project Jonah have achieved significant victories in their anti- whaling campaign. However, it is a home truth that such anti - organizations alone cannot protect the dwindling whale and dolphin populations.Toothless legislation would also not help in this regard. What is the pro-active role that the international community and individual nation states can play in the protection of whales and dolphins who are in danger of possible extinction ?

A: The answer to this question is: Whale watching done in a scientific manner without harassment of the whales and dolphins. If planned well, human beings will prefer watching these magnificent creatures gambolling in the oceans than killing them and trying to eat unpalatable meat .

It is of interest to note some points about whaling and eating whale meat in Japan. The Japanese are the only nation that has built temples in memory of dead whales and to give thanks to these magnificent creatures who saved the human lives of many thousands following the massive atomic bombing in Hiroshima and Nagasaki when the Japanese would have been forced to go hungry and starve to death without whale meat.

An interesting fact about whaling involving Sri Lanka ( then called Ceylon under the British ):

In the 1940s during and following the Second World War the British Government in Ceylon proposed that a whaling station be set up in Mirissa to obtain whale meat for consumption, even to export to England where due to shortage of food whale meat was being served and sold in butchers shops.

The chief incumbent of The Mirissa temple organised such a massive campaign against this horrendous proposal that the British Government had to abandon the idea. This courageous and knowledgeable bhikku saved the whales that we now see off the coast of Sri Lanka , including Mirissa.

Whale watching

Q: Watching whales and dolphins at sea is an activity which can help increase public awareness of whales and dolphins, creating public opinion against the slaughter of whales and dolphins. As an anti – whaling activist, how effective would it be to promote whale and dolphin watching as an activity like surfing for tourists ?

A: It is the best form of conservation of whales and dolphins to have whale watching tours. The people who come to watch whales will be impressed no end and especially in Sri Lankan waters the Blue Whales are now confirmed as being around the seas right throughout the year and the chances are very good that they will see whales on any whale watching trip. Once seen, the majesty , the size, the spouting and the gambolling of the whales in the seas will never be forgotten, and those viewers will fight on behalf of whales and dolphins.

Q: As an anti – whaling crusader , what are your views on short term and long term measures that individual nation states and regional and international organizations can take to prevent whales from entering the encyclopaedia of extinct species of animals such as dinosaurs ?

A: What I just said in answer eight helps the most in the conservation of whales. In addition , a Whale Protection Act like the one which was passed in Australia in 1980 is essential to preserve these whales and dolphins , and to prevent them from “ entering into the encyclopaedia of extinct species of animals such as the dinosaurs”, as you said.

I would like to remind your readers that organisations like Project Jonah are entirely voluntary, whose members often pay for themselves to attend international conferences , and are a dedicated lot of people who continue to fight for the cause they believe in , with all good faith and commitment. We are very proud of our achievements on behalf of whale and dolphin conservation, and of humanity.