Japan Hunts the Humpback. Now Comes the Backlash. By ANDREW C. REVKIN November 25, 2007

THE ritual has been the same for nearly 20 years. Japan, while adhering to a 1986 moratorium on commercial whaling, has sent sturdy ships to Antarctic waters and, more recently, parts of the Pacific Ocean to kill hundreds of whales in the name of scientific research.
Vessels from the groups Sea Shepherd and Greenpeace tail and harass the whaling fleet, while strong protests are lodged by environmental groups, many marine biologists, and officials from the United States, Australia and other countries. But this year those complaints have intensified, largely because Japan has added a new animal to its planned harvest of more than 1,400 whales from seven species — the humpback, Megaptera novaeangliae.
Japan hopes to kill 50 of these endangered whales, which have long held a place in the public’s imagination with their other-worldly songs, habit of rocketing their 30-plus tons out of the sea and migrations of up to 10,000 miles a year. Melville once described the humpback as “the most gamesome and lighthearted of all the whales.”
Whaling nearly wiped it out, reducing the humpback’s numbers to perhaps a 1,000 by the mid-1960s. Today, estimates put the total at roughly 30,000. They are considered at high risk of extinction by the World Conservation Union.
“Humpbacks are some of the most wonderful and mysterious creatures in the ocean, with the longest vocalization produced by any animal, including humans, with their bouts of song that last up to 23 hours,” said David Rothenberg, a professor of philosophy and music at the New Jersey Institute of Technology and author of a forthcoming book on whale songs and science.
“We still do not know why they need to sing so extensively, and we ought to leave these whales alone for enough years to find out,” he said.
Once a top target of whalers because they swim close to shore, the humpback is now the centerpiece of another enterprise, whale watching, which by some measures is a billion-dollar-a-year business, making it larger in inflation-adjusted dollars than commercial whaling was even at its peak.
There is some thought among foes of whaling that Japan picked this marquee species intentionally to test the resolve of anti-whaling nations and groups.
“If there’s no reaction to this, my suspicion is they’ll expand the hunt quickly,” said Roger Payne, one of the biologists who first documented the low, resonant, ocean-spanning song of the species, and who is president of a whale conservation group, Ocean Alliance.
The director general of Japan’s Institute for Cetacean Research, Minoru Morimoto, has defended the program, saying, “Japan’s research is a long-term scientific program that is obtaining biological and ecosystem information required for proper management.”
(There is no ban or limit on such harvests, even though most of the meat is sold commercially in Japan.)
The Japan Whaling Association, a private group representing the whaling operations, has described complaints as cultural imperialism on its Web site, whaling.jp:
“Asking Japan to abandon this part of its culture,” the association says, “would compare to Australians being asked to stop eating meat pies, Americans being asked to stop eating hamburgers and the English being asked to go without fish and chips.”