2 blue whale wavelets

3 Whaling Confrontations Intensify

A dear colleague of Interspecies.com, Jun Hoshikawa, has recently been hired as president of Greenpeace Japan. As everyone who reads this newsletter knows, for years we have been recommending that Western anti-whaling organizations stop producing quite so many protests that promote indignation in North America and Europe, and redirect a bit more of their righteous energy to engage the Japanese people directly about the horrors of their government's whaling policy. If anyone can devise a new long term strategy, it is Jun. Fluent in English, it was he who also translated my first book into Japanese. Below, is the latest about this winter's confrontations in Antarctica.

THE SOUTHERN OCEAN, January 12, 2006 — As whale hunting intensified today, Greenpeace activists continued to confront the Japanese fleet, putting themselves between the harpoon and the whale and holding a banner reading, “Gorton’s Stop the Whale Killing Now,” in front of the ship as it pulled in the carcass of a harpooned whale. The international environmental organization has been confronting the Japanese whaling fleet for more than a month and is calling on Gorton’s to persuade parent company Nissui, which owns one third of the Japanese whaling fleet, to respect public opinion and end the whale slaughter. Nissui’s U.S. headquarters is in Redmond, WA.

“People need to know that the so-called trusted fisherman is an accomplice in these killings,” said Nathan Santry, a Greenpeace activist driving one of the small inflatable boats. “Instead of wielding the harpoon, this company needs to wield its power and protect these whales.”  According to a 2005 report prepared by the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA), Nissui, a Japanese company that purchased Gorton’s of Gloucester in 2001, is also a major shareholder of Kyodo Senpaku, which owns and operates the Japanese whaling fleet. When contacted, Gorton officials denied any of the findings in the report and stated that the company was “against whaling of any kind.”  The company also turned down requests from Greenpeace, the Humane Society and EIA for a meeting.

“Gorton’s cannot afford to just stand by and deny all responsibility to the whaling done by its parent company,” said John Hocevar, Greenpeace Oceans Specialist. “While Gorton’s is standing by and watching the whale killings, Americans across the country are starting to take action to defend them.” Later this month, Greenpeace will launch its first series of whale watching parties, which will allow people across the country to take action and protect the whales. During these parties, people will view striking video footage of Greenpeace actions to stop whaling in the Southern Ocean, and plan activities to pressure Gorton’s to take responsibility for their role in commercial whaling.

Although there is currently a global ban on commercial whaling, six Japanese whaling ships left on November 8 for the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary in Antarctica, using the guise of "scientific research" to justify the hunt. The Fisheries Agency of Japan intends to more than double its kill this year and will include endangered whales. The Japanese government has not responded to protests from around the world or to the International Whaling Commission, which during its recent meeting, called on Japan to abandon its whaling program.

This just in: Hostility to Japan reached a new level on Jan. 19, when Greenpeace activists dumped the stinking corpse of a 20-ton, 56-foot fin whale at the Japanese embassy in Berlin. The Baltic sea whale had recently died of natural causes. They were making the dramatic point that cadavers of whales that had died naturally are very much available for "scientific research" -- and therefore that Japan's rationale for its southern-sea hunt was completely unnecessary, even by Japan's duplicitous standards.

4 Belly of the Whale Music

Now that you may have read the monkey story, understood the woodpecker to be an aerial photograph, and grokked the wavelet images as graphic renderings of actual whale calls, allow me to provide the full interspecies media treatment by including some new music. Our Belly of the whale co-production with Greenmuseum.org, will be released by Important Records later this spring. The source material includes underwater calls by seals, dolphins, lobsters, walrus, great whales, and tiny shrimp. Over the next few months we'll include some of the individual compositions in this newsletter. This month's selection, entitled Pelagic Cycle, is by digital composer Janus Kober of Friday Harbor WA. Dig the kick drum, created from the call of an Antarctic Weddell seal.

5 Humpback Gratitude

In January, ten different people sent me various versions of a story describing a humpback whale being freed by divers from a tangle of crab trap lines near the Farallon Islands (California coast). When the lines were finally cut, the whale nudged its rescuers and flapped around in what marine experts said was a rare and remarkable encounter.

"It felt to me like it was thanking us, knowing that it was free and that we had helped it," James Moskito, one of the rescue divers, said Tuesday. "It stopped about a foot away from me, pushed me around a little bit and had some fun." Sunday's daring rescue was the first successful attempt on the West Coast to free an entangled humpback, said Shelbi Stoudt, stranding manager for the Marine Mammal Center in Marin County. The 45- to 50-foot female humpback, estimated to weigh 50 tons, was on the humpbacks' usual migratory route between the Northern California coast and Baja California when it became entangled in the nylon ropes that link crab pots.

It was spotted by a crab fisherman at 8:30 a.m. Sunday in the open water east of the Farallones, about 18 miles off the coast of San Francisco. Mick Menigoz of Novato, who organizes whale watching and shark diving expeditions on his boat the New Superfish, got a call for help Sunday morning, alerted the Marine Mammal Center and gathered a team of divers. By 2:30 p.m., the rescuers had reached the whale and evaluated the situation. Team members realized the only way to save the endangered leviathan was to dive into the water and cut the ropes.

"I was the first diver in the water, and my heart sank when I saw all the lines wrapped around it," said Moskito, a 40-year-old who works with "Great White Adventures," a cage-diving outfit that contracts with Menigoz. "I really didn't think we were going to be able to save it." 20 crab-pot ropes, which are 240 feet long with weights every 60 feet, were wrapped around the animal. Rope was wrapped at least four times around the tail, the back and the left front flipper, and there was a line in the whale's mouth. The combined weight was pulling the whale downward, forcing it to struggle mightily to keep its blow-hole out of the water.

Moskito and three other divers spent about an hour cutting the ropes while the whale floated passively in the water giving off a strange kind of vibration. "When I was cutting the line going through the mouth, its eye was there winking at me, watching me," Moskito said. "It was an epic moment of my life."

When the whale realized it was free, it began swimming around in circles, according to the rescuers. Moskito said it swam to each diver, nuzzled him and then swam to the next one. "It seemed kind of affectionate, like a dog that's happy to see you,'' Moskito said. "I never felt threatened. It was an amazing, unbelievable experience."

Before 1900, an estimated 15,000 humpbacks lived in the North Pacific, but the population was severely reduced by commercial whaling. In the 20th century, their numbers dwindled to fewer than 1,000. An international ban on commercial whaling was instituted in 1964, but humpbacks are still endangered. Between 5,000 and 7,500 humpbacks are left in the world's oceans, and many of those survivors migrate through the Gulf of the Farallones National Marine Sanctuary.

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