The fin whale was given full protection from commercial whaling by the IWC in the North Pacific in 1976, and in the North Atlantic in 1987, with small exceptions for aboriginal catches and catches for research purposes.
The Mediterranean Red List Assessment workshop in 2005 prompted subsequent quantitative analyses of catch landings, research trawl surveys, and sightings data.
Between 1978 and 1994, the relative abundance (number caught per research trip) of the five species fell by between 87 % and 98, the researchers report 5 January in Nature.
While the institute makes about $35 million a year from the sale of whale meat from its scientific catches, the research costs about $40 million a year.
Under IWC rules, whales can be caught for research purposes, but Japan has been accused of using science as a cover for hunting whales ultimately destined for Japanese plates.
Editors also say they are gatekeepers, not detectives, and that even though peer review is not intended to detect fraud, it catches flawed research and improves the quality of the thousands of published papers.
Volk went to Penn as an undergraduate intending to become a veterinarian; she caught the research bug working in a lab at the veterinary school.
Worst of all, I think Stockholm syndrome is setting in — just this morning I caught Jen researching tuition at St. Ann's, although the last thing we need is to embolden the tiny villain we've created.
The estimates are based on a mathematical model that uses data from a number of sources, including catch records and research trawlers that fish in the gulf several times a year.
The real catch of this research is that Westerners, and particularly Americans (who are the subjects of the vast majority of studies in the psychological literature), turn out to be outliers by almost any measure the team examined.
