Whales and whaling

Where Found

Historically, whaling has occurred in all oceans and adjoining seas of the world. Despite a commercial ban on whaling by the International Whaling Commission (IWC) in 1986, a few nations still conducted whaling activities in the Arctic, Atlantic, Antarctic, and Pacific oceans in 2024. In 2019, Japan withdrew from the IWC in order to resume commercial whaling in the country's coastal waters.

Primary Uses

From the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries, many parts of whales were used for a variety of products. Whale oil provided an important source of lamp oil and wax for smokeless candles as well as a lubricant for precision machine parts. Whalebone was used as a stiffening component of many women’s garments. Whale meat and blubber have long been eaten by people in many parts of the world and continue to provide a source of protein for certain cultures.

Technical Definition

Whales belong to the order Cetacea, class Mammalia, phylum Vertebrata. This order consists of entirely aquatic mammals that are found in all the world’s oceans and adjoining seas as well as in some lakes and river systems. There are two orders of Cetaceans: Odontoceti, which have teeth, and Mysticeti, which have plates of baleen instead of teeth. Extant Cetaceans include forty-one genera and eighty-four species; approximately twenty-six species of whales have been exploited for commercial purposes, which led to the addition of the sei whale to the endangered species list in 2008.

Morphological adaptations of Cetaceans include front limbs modified into flippers, no hind limbs, a torpedo-shaped body, external nostrils in the form of blowholes, and, usually, a dorsal fin. Cetaceans have large brains, good eyesight, and good directional hearing underwater. Unlike most other mammals, cetaceans have no fur but do possess some hair in the embryonic stage. They have no sweat or sebaceous glands. A thick layer of blubber containing fat and oil lies just beneath the skin and assists in heat regulation; it is this layer of blubber, along with the meat, that has made whales a target of human hunting for thousands of years.

Description, Distribution, and Forms

Of the recognized species of modern whales, about twenty-six have been of commercial importance. The killer whale, Orcinus orca, is found in all oceans and adjoining seas, primarily in cooler regions. Killer whales, with their striking black and white coloration, are familiar to people because of their use as entertainment animals in amusement parks. There are two species of pilot whales: the long-finned (Globicephala melas) and the short-finned (G. macrorhynchus). The G. melas resides in cool temperate waters of the Southern Hemisphere and the North Atlantic, while the G. macrorhynchus is found in tropical and temperate waters of the Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific Oceans.

The sperm whale, Physeter catodon, made famous by Herman Melville’s epic novel Moby Dick (1852), was one of the most heavily hunted whales during the years of commercial whaling. It is found in all oceans of the world except in the polar ice fields. Another highly prized species for whalers was the gray whale, Eschrichtius robustus, which is often sought by those on whale watching excursions along the western coast of North America. The gray whale migrates along the coasts of Korea and Japan as well as the West Coast of North America from the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas to the Gulf of California. While the whaling industry had virtually exterminated gray whales from the Atlantic Ocean during the nineteenth century, two separate gray whale sightings in the Atlantic occurred in December 2023 and March 2024, first near Florida and later off the coast of Massachusetts. This marked the first confirmed gray whale sighting in the Atlantic in over 200 years.

The right whales, Eubalaena glacialis and Balaena mysticetus, are found in all oceans and adjoining seas of the world with the exception of tropical and South Polar regions. They were given the common name “right whales” by whalers who considered them the “right” or “proper” whales to catch because of the high volumes of oil and baleen they possessed. The Balaena mysticetus, known as the bowhead or Greenland right whale, has been important to Inuit hunters for thousands of years, but due to commercial whaling, pollution, and climate change, they were listed as endangered in 1973, where they remained in 2024. Although numbers of this species were estimated to be below ten thousand, hunting these whales for subsistence was still permitted in the 2020s in limited amounts for Alaskan and Canadian Inuit Peoples.

The whales of the Rorqual group have endured intensive exploitation for many years and populations of all species of this group are seriously depleted. The Rorquals include five species in the genus Balaenoptera, four of which occur in all of the world’s oceans and adjoining seas. These are B. acutorostrata, minke whale; B. borealis, sei whale; B. physalus, fin whale; and B. musculus, blue whale. Bryde’s whale, B. edeni, is found in tropical and warm temperate waters of the Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific oceans. Another Rorqual, the humpback whale, Megaptera novaeangliae, is found throughout the world’s oceans.

History

Subsistence whaling by coastal cultures has taken place for at least six thousand years. Depictions of whaling show up in the artwork of many of these cultures. Early methods of killing whales involved driving the whales to shore in order to beach them, or surrounding them with small boats and harpooning them with spears.

Basque hunters from Spain and France developed a fishery pursuing the right whale by around the year 1000 CE; when stocks close to the coast of Europe were depleted, they pursued the whales as far west as Newfoundland. For the following five hundred years, whaling techniques improved as demand for whale products increased. As the right whale was decimated on both sides of the Atlantic, whalers directed their attention to arctic waters where the bowhead whale was found. England, Spain, France, Denmark, and the Netherlands all sent whaling ships to Spitsbergen and developed bases from which ships could be sent to pursue the bowheads. In less than two hundred years, populations of bowheads, humpbacks, and gray whales, all of which tended to stay around coastal areas, were decimated.

From the early eighteenth century to the middle of the nineteenth century, the United States led the whaling industry by the pursuit of the sperm whale in deeper waters. At the height of this period of whaling history, almost seven hundred American ships operated throughout the world, and long deep-sea voyages were the norm. When the Civil War brought the destruction of much of the whaling fleet in the 1860s, American whaling declined. However, the 1864 development of the destructive on-board harpoon and bomb lance by Sven Foyn of Norway heralded a new era of whaling in which the blue, fin, and sei whales could be readily killed. In the early twentieth century, whaling stations were established in the Antarctic, and the humpback whale was added to the list of targeted species.

With the development of floating factories in the 1920s, whaling entered its most destructive period. Whales could be processed at sea, so ships could stay in remote waters for long periods of time. As blue whale stocks declined, pressure on the fin, sei, and sperm whales increased. After World War II, the main whaling nations were Japan, Norway, the Soviet Union, Great Britain, and the Netherlands.

The International Whaling Commission (IWC) was begun in 1946, aiming to promote the proper of whales and to govern the conduct of whaling throughout the world. The IWC has a mixed record of success in reining in certain countries such as Japan and Norway. Although commercial whaling was officially banned in 1986, Japan, Norway, and Iceland continued to conduct whaling activities in 2023, ostensibly for “research” purposes. Norway resumed commercial whaling for mike whales in 1993, despite remaining part of the IWC; Japan left the IWC and resumed commercial whaling in its coastal waters in 2019. Iceland separated from the IWC in 1991, and though they applied to reconcile with the commission in 2002, their commercial fishing activities in the early 2020s continued, including the endangered fin whale.

A few countries, such as the United States, continued to allow whale hunting in extremely special circumstances—for example, in the US, some Inuit and Alaska Native communities were allowed to engage in subsistence hunting of whales—although by the twenty-first century some Indigenous communities had voluntarily halted the practice.

All Cetaceans are on either Appendix 1 or 2 of the United Nations Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), and all are protected by the United States Marine Mammal Protection Act. Additionally, the Office of Protected Resources of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) lists eleven species as endangered under the Endangered Species Act.

Obtaining Whale Products

Early methods of obtaining whales involved harpooning or driving them into shallow water and beaching them. Sailing ships pursued whales in all waters of the world for hundreds of years, and rather primitive methods of harpooning and towing the animals to shore for processing were used.

In the mid-1800s, on-board harpoons were developed, and this greatly increased the rate of kill for whalers. However, a limitation remained in that the whaling ships still needed to tow the large mammals to shore in order for the meat and blubber to be economically processed. Floating factories allowed whales to be killed and processed at sea, and this greatly increased the number of whales that were killed throughout the world. These floating factories saw their first use at the beginning of the twentieth century and were still used by some countries, such as Japan, that continued to engage in whaling in 2024.

Uses of Whale Products

Whales have been hunted by humans for many purposes, and in the past, most portions of the whale carcass were used. For centuries baleen, the thin strips of material in the mouths of toothless whales used to strain zooplankton, was the primary commercial product. Baleen strips were used to stiffen articles of women’s clothing; crinolines, taffeta, corsets, and hoop skirts all owed their rigid shapes to baleen. The strong substance was also used for umbrella ribs, fishing rods, carriage springs, and buggy whips.

For many whalers the prime objective was obtaining oil from blubber. This was abundant in both the baleen and the toothed species of whales. The oil was used in lamps, as a lubricant for precision machine parts, and in the manufacture of soap and explosives. Amounts of oil from each whale could be substantial. One adult right whale, for example, might yield from eighty to one hundred barrels of oil. During the nineteenth century, prices in the United States were approximately thirty dollars per for oil and ten dollars per kilogram for baleen. The combined products from the average adult bowhead might bring more than ten thousand dollars to the whaler.

Spermaceti, a waxy substance from the heads of sperm whales, was especially prized because it was used to make smokeless, odorless candles that were much in demand in the 1800s. The spermaceti organ in an adult sperm whale could yield up to 1,900 liters of oil. The sperm whale’s teeth were also valued for the artwork of scrimshaw. Ambergris, a waxy material formed in the sperm whale’s intestines, was used as a fixative and as a base for perfumes. With the abundance of valuable products that could be obtained from sperm whales, it is little wonder that this species was one of the first to be seriously depleted by the mid-1800s.

Bones of whales were ground up and used to make fertilizer, glue, and gelatin. Whale meat was (and still was in the twenty-first century) eaten by people and dogs, and when ground up, served as cattle feed.

In modern society, some species of whales, such as killer and pilot whales, are used in the entertainment industry, and whale watching tours of a number of species are popular. In defiance of the IWC’s 1986 moratorium, Japan, Iceland, and Norway continued to engage in commercial whaling in 2023.

Bibliography

“Bowhead Whale.” NOAA Fisheries, 22 Nov. 2024, www.fisheries.noaa.gov/species/bowhead-whale. Accessed 22 Jan. 2025.

Dolin, Eric Jay. Leviathan: The History of Whaling in America. W. W. Norton, 2007.

Fu, Helen. "When Whaling is Your Tradition." Rom, 27 Feb. 2018, www.rom.on.ca/en/blog/when-whaling-is-your-tradition. Accessed 22 Jan. 2025.

Haiken, Melanie. "An Extremely Rare Gray Whale Was Spotted in the Atlantic. Scientists Say It’s Only the Beginning." National Geographic, 12 Mar. 2024, www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/gray-whale-spotted-new-england-extinct-whaling. Accessed 22 Jan. 2025.

"History and Purpose." International Whaling Commission, 2025, iwc.int/commission/history-and-purpose. Accessed 22 Jan. 2025.

Hoyt, Erich. Marine Protected Areas for Whales, Dolphins, and Porpoises: A World Handbook for Cetacean Habitat Conservation. Earthscan, 2005.

"Japan Resumes Commercial Whaling after 30 Years." BBC News, 1 July 2019, www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-48821797. Accessed 22 Jan. 2025.

McCurry, Justin. "Japan to Resume Commercial Whaling One Day after Leaving the IWC." The Guardian, 24 Jan. 2019, www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jan/25/japan-to-resume-commercial-whaling-one-day-after-leaving-the-iwc. Accessed 22 Jan. 2025.

National Marine Fisheries Service