Word: baleen
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...reason is that marine ecosystems and food webs are far more complicated than the one-to-one predator-and-prey relationship we might expect. Analyzing the waters off Western Africa and the Caribbean, where baleen whales breed, Gerber and her colleagues mined marine data to create ecosystem models that plotted the feeding interactions between whales and fish. (They chose these waters in part because Japan is using the fishery argument to persuade Caribbean and African nations to support the lifting of the whaling...
...environment and paid the price. Among many other blunders, they shortsightedly depleted the local forests (deforestation is a major theme in Collapse), which left them without the wood they needed to smelt iron. Icelanders were stunned when Greenlanders sailed into port in ships held together with wooden pegs and baleen instead of nails...
...catching whales in the Antarctic out of season. Moscow, of course, outrageously denied that it would be involved in any poaching. The Soviet Union, its officials quickly pointed out, had taken the whales under Article VIII of the International Agreement on Whaling. This clause enables a certain number of baleen whales to be caught for scientific purposes before or after the season starts. Rumors from sources close to the Presidium also note that whales are just little off-short islands anyway, and naturally belong...
Whale oil, unfortunately for whales, is especially valuable in war. It is a cheap source of fats for soap and margarine, and baleen whales yield glycerin for explosives. In World War I, up to 1917, Britain bought 660,000 bbl. of baleen oil for $185 a ton (normal: $120-125 a ton). At that time blockaded Germany was paying $1,500 a ton for such oil as she could get. This time, Britain contracted to take all the Norwegian oil for margarine. Next autumn, whether Norway is German-dominated or not, her great fleet of whaling ships will...
...Zoological Club. The Baleen Whales of Newfoundland; Mr. G. M. Allen. Short Papers. Room 1, fourth floor, Museum of Comparative Zoology...