Good news everyone! Populations of the
slot second-biggest whale on Earth are rebounding in the icy south.During the heights of industrial whaling in the early 20th century, fin whales seemed doomed. The statistics are grim: More than 700,000 fin whales were killed
between 1904 and 1976, the year a catch quota of "zero" was instated. Even though the killing slowed (whaling nations such as Japan still caught fins for "research purposes"), surveys taken after 1978 showed the slaughter had driven the whales from their feeding grounds in the Antarctic -- essentially, the fin whale disappeared.
That, of course, was bad news. But the good news is a new round of survey data, collected during two expeditions in 2018 and 2019, shows populations are recovering, returning to their ancestral feeding grounds. The new research, published in the journal Scientific Reports on Thursday, also recorded aggregations of up to 150 individual whales feeding just off the coast of Antarctica -- a phenomenon not captured on video before.
