INTRODUCTION 39 



SO long ago, reach 'a scientific basis for the attainment and maintenance of economic security'. 

 Commenting on the 'workable' International Whaling Convention of 1946, Haden-Guest (1955) 

 remarks, ' Biologists consider its provisions still very inadequate, both as regards the Antarctic and 

 elsewhere, but it has at least prevented rapid extermination, and there is still time to ensure the pre- 

 servation of nearly all whale species '.^ Indeed in his survey of the economic wealth of the Arctic, 

 Haden-Guest hopefully puts the whales, both northern and southern, among his ' renewable resources '. 

 It is for the whalers and whaling nations to show he is right. 



In compiling this report I have consulted the works of many authors, many of them not, or not 

 strictly, scientific. They include the writings of explorers and sailors, sealers and whalers, historians, 

 geographers and cartographers, ship's surgeons, contributors to official departmental publications and 

 compilers of books on whaling, sealing, polar and deep-sea exploration, meteorology, ornithology, 

 oceanography, marine biology and ecology, as well as sundry other references. I may sometimes have 

 been critical, but only because in seeking to unravel a problem of enormous complexity I have had 

 access to a body of data and material unparalleled in the annals of the investigation of any single 

 plankton animal, if not indeed of plankton animals as a whole, and, like Totton (1954) in his classic 

 account of our equally large collections of Discovery Siphonophores, have endeavoured 'to build 

 firmly on sure foundations '. 



As Deacon (1957) has written, 



the emphasis in marine biology is moving towards the studies of populations — towards learning more about the 

 distributions of the known species in relation to their physical and biological environments, and towards learning 

 more about the factors which make some parts of the oceans more productive than others. It is a long task, even for 

 the smaller, slow moving organisms which are easily caught. There are usually many stages between the eggs and 

 the adults and when these have been discovered a large number of net hauls made over a full range of seasons, places 

 and depths have to be sorted and the different stages counted and measured. Only then can provisional hypotheses 

 be sought to explain the distributions in relation to spawning and feeding habits, depth of water, temperature, water 

 movements and other relevant factors. The more active animals which escape large towed nets present greater 

 difficulties, and ideas as to their size and distribution seem to depend to a large extent on the type of gear used and 

 the speed at which it can be towed. 



It is with such questions that this report is largely concerned and it is along these broad lines that 

 the teeming multitudes of these southern shrimps have been studied. 



I would recall too the words of the late Dr Stanley Kemp uttered (Kemp, 1934) over a quarter of 

 a century ago. 



In the close interrelations which exist between animals and plants and the chemistry and movements of sea-water, 

 the whole system may be likened to an extremely complex machine : it is the way in which this machine works, and 

 the great seasonal changes in its operation, that we are seeking to understand. Knowledge of this kind, to be obtained 

 only by the slow accumulation of data and material and its subsequent treatment in the laboratory, is not merely of 

 scientific interest ; it is fundamental to the solution of almost all economic problems in marine biology, including 

 those of whales. 



At a recent symposium on marine and freshwater biology in CaHfornia Dr T. H. Bullock (1958) 

 called for a wider outlook on marine ecology, urging his audience that the presentation of balance 

 sheets and flow charts for whole ecological systems — of tide pools, estuaries, seas, and ultimately the 

 entire ocean — should be a matter for concerted effort and not left, as it is today, to the labours of a 

 few, working parochially in somewhat circumscribed fields. I am not an ecologist. I have presented 

 the ecological side of this problem in the simplest of terms. Nevertheless, I believe that when 

 the Antarctic balance sheet is presented, as in the long run it must one day be, the krill will emerge 



1 Laws (1960 a) has expressed the same view, noting that without the timely restraint imposed by this convention depletion 

 would have been 'much more rapid and catastrophic' than it has actually been. 



