Whaling Wars: Japan wrong on science and in breach of U.N. international convention

This week the Government of Japan began its trial of two Greenpeace activists who blew the whistle on an allegedly illegal trade in whale meat within that country.

The United Nations Human Rights Commission has informed the Japanese Government that it is in breach of The Universal Declaration of Human Rights in relation to detention of the Tokyo Two.




This is how Asahi Shimbun sees the trial and this below appears to be the newspaper's current position on whales:

A large whale apparently devours more than 5 tons of krill and small fish per day. One can only imagine the consequences of protecting such a big eater alone could have on the ecosystem......
Because we humans lord it over the land and because the oceans seem all too powerful, we have been too indifferent to their debilitation.
Unlawful actions against research whaling do nothing but distract people's attention from the true peril. It is time to repay the oceans with our wisdom.
--The Asahi Shimbun, Jan. 8

A position which is not supported by science according to Discovery News:

Meanwhile,a new study has cast doubt on one of the key arguments of those responsible for Japan's Antarctic whaling program: that the region's minke whales have increased greatly in number in response to greater availability of krill, following the reduction of populations of other whale species as blue, fin and humpback. According to this argument, hunting minke whales therefore not only does not pose a threat to the species, it actually helps those other species.
The new study, funded by the Lenfest Ocean Program and published in the journal Molecular Ecology, used analyses of genetic diversity to examine whether there was evidence that numbers of minke whales in the Antarctic have increased in recent decades. Its authors, led by Kristen Ruegg of Stanford University, extracted DNA from 52 whale meat samples purchased in Japan from minkes killed within four Antarctic management areas. As large populations tend to have more genetic variation than small ones, which have more inbreeding, the researchers were able to use the amount of genetic variation within the population to calculate its historical size. They concluded that the long-term population size of Antarctic minke whales is 670,000, which falls within the range of estimates derived from several ship-based surveys and is indeed in excess of a more recent unofficial estimate of 338,000.
Ruegg and colleagues speculate that one possible reason why minke whales might not have grown in number in response to the greater availability of krill is that minkes may have never experienced strong competition for food because krill may have been abundant enough for all predators, both prior to historic whaling and today. Alternatively, minke whales may not eat krill at the same time, in the same areas or at the same depths as larger whales.