Whale marking techniques

Abstract

The world-wide development of modern whaling in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, using an explosive harpoon fired from a cannon mounted on a steam-powered catching boat, led to an increasing need for information on the distribution of whale stocks and the relation of the catches to the size of the stocks. Some method of marking living whales so that the marks might be recovered from them after capture could clearly provide an important source of such information. Several people apparently had the idea of marking whales at about the same time (Brown, 1977) but the first actual experiment in marking whales at sea appears to be that of Captain Amano, a Japanese whaling captain, who fired a `marking rod' into a Blue whale Balaenoptera musculus off the Japanese coast in February 1910, and captured the same whale. two years later in June 1912 (Omura and Ohsumi, 1964).