411 



Before I give you some samples, one example will show you how 

 badly we need more research. As Dr. Norris said, the business of ac- 

 tually extinguishing a species has been done as far as we know of rec- 

 ord, only these two times in the case of the Steller's sea cow where 

 it was done up in the Arctic in a very few years. This was a very 

 limited population and the northern sealers just cleaned them out. 



When you get a population reduced too small you have i^roblems 

 like how does boy meet girl and actually this sort of thing, how do 

 things go on when they are scattered throughout the oceans? 



Some of our stocks of various species are reduced very much. 



The blue whale, which you hear so much about, these are figures 

 culled from presentations at our international conference last June, 

 one of the men reported on the South Atlantic population of blue 

 whales. This is all in high latitudes, south of 50°, probably. But he 

 thinks that perhaps there are 200 blue whales and another gives the 

 number of 130. 



In another authority reporting on the entire Antarctic, let's say 

 south of latitude 40°, thinks there are 4,000 blue whales. 



In the Xorthwest Atlantic our authority thinks there are a very 

 few hundred. This means off New England and off of Canada. People 

 see them all right, but one at a time, two at a time, not very many. 



Now, this is the sort of thing that you have. To give a background 

 we ought to know how many there were before the intensive whaling 

 began, and this we cannot answer because people did not start count- 

 ing them, of course, then. 



The British Discovei-y Committee which has worked on the Ant- 

 arctic population a great deal gave a figure about 6 years ago; per- 

 haps 400,000 whales in the Antarctic. This was blue, fin, humpback, 

 all mixed together. 



The current estimate for this population in the Antarctic is about 

 80,000. Eighty thousand out of say 300,000 to 400,000. This is an ap- 

 proximate measure of the depletion. 



The humpback whale, for example, is all over the world. It is now 

 protected by the International Whaling Commission and the local 

 populations' are measurable in 200, 500, 600, that kind of thing; a 

 population being the ones you find off western Australia or New Zea- 

 land. The North Atlantic they may be a little more abundant because 

 people have not been fishing. 



Mr. Downing. Do you have a count on porpoises? 



Mr. ScHE^^LL. Certainly not. Those numbers are infinitely greater, 

 of course, as you heard from Dr. Norris' testimony, several hundred 

 thousand just in this one patch of the eastern tropical Pacific. 



Dr. NoRRis. They are the ones that were killed, that is not the pop- 

 ulaton. 



]Mr. ScHEv^LL. Killed. But we really do not know what the popula- 

 tions are. We know sometimes at sea you will see porpoises in such 

 a dense crowd that vou cannot see to the far side of them. 



Mr. Downing. Well, you do not know whether the porpoise is be- 

 coming extinct ? 



lilr. ScHE\^LL. There are about 80-odd kinds of porpoises anyhow 

 and in tlie case of the tuna fishery we are speaking at most about three 

 species, I guess. 



