Whaling as Science.

In an open letter published in 2002 in the "New York Times", 21 distinguished scientists criticized Japan's program of scientific research whaling, noting its poor design and unjustified reliance upon lethal sampling. In a Forum article in "BioScience," Aron, Burke, and Freeman castigate the letter's signers and accuse them of meddling in political issues without sufficient knowledge of the science involved in those issues. As members of the Scientific Committee (SC) of the International Whaling Commission (IWC), we can attest that the signers of the open letter correctly summarized criticisms made by researchers very familiar with Japanese scientific whaling. One such critique was presented and discussed last year at a meeting of the SC. It was authored by SC members representing a broad range of countries, yet mention of this paper and others like it was absent from Aron and his colleagues' commentary, betraying a selectiveness that pervades their article. The authors quote lines from SC reports to support their contention that the IWC regards scientific whaling as valuable, but they fail to acknowledge many other sections that are highly critical of the Japanese program. Japan's scientific whaling program in the North Pacific (JARPN) was originally described as a feasibility study, but it included no performance measures by which to judge its success or failure. Fundamental problems of the JARPN II study include a lack of testable hypotheses or performance measures; inappropriate use of ecosystem models and failure to include sensitivity analyses and key data on other ecosystem components; selective or inappropriate use of data or methods in estimating whale abundance; unnecessary reliance on lethal sampling; inappropriate geographic sampling for population structure analysis; and unrealistic assessments of the effect of the proposed catches on the populations concerned.