The Bowhead Whale

Fearing total extinction of the bowhead whale, the International Whaling Commission has now limited Alaskan Eskimos to a total of 12 killed or 18 struck whales per year, much to the consternation of the villagers on Alaska's northwest coast.

Decline of the bowhead whale (the Greenland or Arctic right whale) began about 300 years ago. By then, European whalers had essentially wiped out the North Atlantic right whale which they hunted for baleen and whale oil. During the hundred years ending in 1775 nearly 60,000 right whales were taken. By 1840 commercial hunting of the Arctic right whale in the eastern North Atlantic was not feasible for lack of whales.

Yankee whalers breached the last Arctic stronghold of the right whale north of Bering Strait in 1843. Nine years later 278 ships reddened Alaskan waters with their kills of the bowhead, probably taking more than a thousand whales. So efficient were these whalers that they depleted the fishing by 1908. Now the Whaling Commission believes only about 1300 bowheads are left.

The bowhead grows to a length of 60 feet and weighs about a ton per foot. Each side of the huge upper jaw holds 300 or more plates of black baleen up to 10 or 11 feet long. Hairlike extensions of the plates strain out the tiny crustaceans upon which the bowhead survives. A large bowhead may yield as much as 275 barrels of oil, one-tenth of which may come from its tongue.

Though the bowhead is no longer commercially valuable, other whales are being hunted in Antarctic waters. Whale oil is used as a lubricant, for cold-rolling and quenching of steel and for manufacturing soaps, cosmetics and detergents. Whale meat is used as human and animal food. The baleen is still used for corsets and bristles. Whale byproducts are used for fertilizer and for cattle and poultry feed.

But even the Antarctic whales are disappearing. Each year it has been necessary to reduce the legal catch in international waters. In 1971 the U.S. ended licensed commercial hunting of whales.