330 FOLLOW THE WHALE 



years on end. The last of the pack to succumb, "Old Tom" was 

 washed ashore in 1928 and his skeleton is now in the Eden Museum 

 at Two-fold Bay in southern New South Wales. 



Whales, with the possible exception of the rights, maintain, in 

 fact, a steady and very strong reproductive pressure against all vicis- 

 situdes, and thus against attack by humans, which is at this time by 

 far the most powerful force operating against their general welfare 

 and natural increase. Thus, even a brief respite from depredations 

 by men gives them a chance to rebound in an astonishing manner. 

 But herein lies a very great danger. It takes at least four whales to 

 make an additional whale each year. We don't know the total stock 

 we now have available. If we did, any mathematician could tell us 

 immediately how many we could safely kill per year in order either 

 to keep the supply stable or to permit it to increase. The Inter- 

 national Commission has settled on the purely arbitrary figure of 

 sixteen thousand blue-whale units per annum,^ and so far things have 

 gone along all right, but we have no way of knowing what is going 

 to happen when the time factor begins to take effect. 



To my mind, there are two danger signals already flying, and the 

 more significant of these is the strange irregularity in the apparent 

 numbers of available whales. These variations are of exceedingly 

 short term and cannot therefore be due to any normal rhythmical 

 fluctuations in population, nor can they be explained by sudden 

 spurts in reproduction. They come too suddenly and too often for 

 even the fast-growing whale to bring about. This means there must 

 be some place to which the animals retire either to breed or simply 

 to avoid persecution, and from which they sometimes suddenly 

 emerge in great numbers. The reason for their emergence is prob- 

 ably a temporary food shortage in these retreats. This, however, 

 poses two further questions. First, do they all emerge at these times, 

 or is a basic stock left there, as with lemmings, all the emergents of 

 which die oflf but which leave a sufficient breeding stock behind to 

 maintain the species? Second, did Captain Larsen find their only re- 

 maining retreat within the antarctic ice, or do the animals have other 

 even less accessible strongholds to which they can retire? If the an- 

 swer to both these questions is in the affirmative — namely, that all 

 the remaining whales come out in times of food shortage and that 

 1 Reduced in 1955 to 14,500 units. 



