Word: whaled
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Despite anything you may have heard to the contrary, whale meat does not taste good. I know from experience: as a reporter in Tokyo I once attended a whale food festival - there were whale noodles, whale sashimi, fried whale, whale on crackers - put on by Japanese whaling industry lobbyists for the country's legislators. But for all its forbidden mystique, whale meat tastes spectacularly bland - the sort of food you might eat only if there were nothing else available. (See the top animal stories of the past year...
...that happens to be exactly why whale became a significant part of the Japanese diet, as a cheap source of protein in the impoverished days following World War II. As the country grew wealthier, however, whale meat grew less popular. Still, Japan (along with Norway and Iceland) continues to hunt and kill whales - more than 800 in the 2006 to 2007 season - and is pushing for an end to the 22-year-old worldwide ban on commercial whaling. While industry supporters contend that it's necessary for food security, today the average Japanese eats a little more than an ounce...
...recent years the whaling industry has been trying out a different defense - that whale populations need to be culled to reduce their threat to fast-disappearing fish stocks. Whales, after all, eat a lot of seafood, so it would make sense that controlling whale populations would be smart "ecosystem management," as whaling supporters put it. But a new article in the Feb. 13 issue of Science demonstrates that's hardly the case. "Essentially what we found was that...if you remove whales, it has a negligible impact on the biomass that is commercially available for fishing," says Leah Gerber...
...models allowed the scientists to test what would happen if whale populations declined. It turned out that whale numbers had little impact on commercial fish populations, in part because the kind of sea life whales like to eat - krill, plankton - is highly unlikely to end up on your dinner plate. "The seafood that people prefer is higher on the food web than [whales' diet]," says Gerber. There's also the undeniable fact that today's whale populations are still just a fraction of what they were in the days when Captain Ahab was (unsuccessfully) whaling, yet commercial fish populations...
...American ship was about a ton. Once that mass is broken up into smaller pieces, the atmosphere ought to do a pretty good job of incinerating it. Skylab did shower the Australian outback with wreckage during its reentry in the summer of 1979, but it weighed a whale-like 91 metric tons; Columbia weighed...