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Article Excerpt
Introduction
The great whales of the Southern Ocean were extensively exploited by modern whaling methods, with the first catches made in the Falkland Islands Dependencies region of IWC Management Area II in 1904 (Tonnesson and Johnsen,1982; Hart, 2006). Exploitation went through several phases. Populations of humpback whales, Megaptera novaeangliae, and blue whales, Balaenoptera musculus, around South Georgia crashed around the time of World War 1, and further exploitation occurred in other regions into the 1930's. There was a hiatus in whaling during World War II, but large-scale catches resumed in Antarctic waters after 1945.
As is now well known, between 1947 and 1973 the Soviet Union conducted large-scale illegal whaling throughout much of the North Pacific, Indian, South Atlantic, and Southern Oceans (Yablokov, 1994, 1995; Yablokov et al., 1998; Ivashchenko et al., 2007; Berzin, 2008; Clapham and Ivashchenko, 2009). This campaign involved the killing of animals of all ages and species, irrespective of quotas, regulations, and protected status established at the time by the International Whaling Commission (IWC). Much of the true catch data have now been made available through the efforts of former Soviet biologists working aboard the various factory ships involved; these data involve the number of animals taken, and sometimes additional details such as location of catch and biological characteristics of the whales.
In the Southern Hemisphere alone, almost 100,000 whales were secretly killed by the U.S.S.R. and not reported to the IWC (Yablokov et al., 1998; Clapham and Baker, 2002). Of this total, some 46,000 were humpback whales. Although the locations (general or specific) of most of these catches have been revealed, many discrepancies and gaps have remained which have complicated efforts to determine the potential impact of these takes on the stocks concerned. Here, we detail illegal Soviet catches of humpback whales in the Antarctic region during 1947- 73, and we attempt to assign these catches to each of the six management areas (termed Areas I-VI) defined by the IWC (IWC, 1980 and Fig. 1). We also provide data on humpback whale catches by factory fleet, as well as total catches (by the U.S.S.R. and other nations) for Areas IV, V, and VI.
[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]
Data Sources
From 1947 to 1973, Soviet catches of humpback whales were made by four floating factory fleets, which operated at various times during the period: Slava (1946-66), Sovetskaya Ukraina (195-973), Yuri Dolgorukiy (1960-1973), and Sovetskaya Rossiya (1961-73). The total catch during the entire period was 48,702 humpbacks; only 2,710 of these catches were reported to the IWC.
Here and previously, the first source for these catch records was Soviet Antarctic Whaling Data (1947-1972) (Yablokov,1995, commonly referred to by the color of its cover as "the green volume"). This provides details of reported vs. true catch data for each of the four floating factory fleets; in many but not all cases these catches are broken down by Area. However, there are two inconsistencies in this record:
1) If Area totals for each whaling season and factory ship are summed from the individual tables, they sometimes do not agree with the summary totals given for each factory ship for the entire period of operation. Sometimes this is because catches which were not assigned to Area are omitted from the summary table's totals; sometimes it appears to be a simple mathematical error.
2) Some data shown in catch summaries provided by Zemsky et al. (1995, 1996) are not...
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