Talk:Gray Whale

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Moved content from Whale to be merged

California Gray Whale: It belongs to the Order Baleen therefore it is a filter feeder. It can be 35 to 40 feet long, has a cigar-shaped body, and its color is dark with white patches. It has no dorsal fin but has a ridge on its back formed by a row of knuckles. Its flukes are braod and can be up to 10 feet across. The females give birth to babies up to 15 feet long. It typically migrates in the months of June and October to the north in the Berling and Chukchi Seas. It eats krill and Squid in the Northern seas. It migrates south in Autumn at a speed to 5 to 6 m.p.h for 6,000 miles to Baja, California. Thenit migrates back notth around April to the Artic region.

I think this is all covered now. Pete/Pcb21 (talk) 08:38, 19 May 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Gray Whales actually are hunted

Although many published accounts state that gray whales have not been hunted since the IWC banned commercial whaling, in fact hunting of gray whales has continued on a limited basis since the 1940s, under the Soviet Union's (later, Russia's) exception to the commercial hunting ban for "native/subsistence purposes." Specifically, the Chuckchee people of eastern Siberia have hunted the whales, ostensibly as part of their cultural tradition of hunting and eating whales. There has also been a (much smaller) hunt of gray whales conducted by native peoples on the west coast of North America in recent years.

Both hunts have been subject to periodic protests by those opposed to whaling. In the 1980s, the organization Greenpeace staged a "raid" on a Siberian settlement, announcing to reporters afterwards that they had obtained evidence that the facility was actually using the whale meat to feed fur animals being raised on a large-scale fur-farming operation. Reviewing the history of the annual Russian gray whale catch shows that the number of whales taken increased dramatically during the years when "collective farming" was introduced to the area by Stalin during the 1940s, and has remained high since then. Although Russian authorities denied in the 1980s that whale meat was being fed to fur animals, they reversed themselves in recent years and admitted that that was, in fact, happening (though continuing to claim that this should be allowed under the "aboriginal/subsistence whaling" exception to the IWC's commercial whaling ban).

I'll try to dig up some actual sources on this, and update the page, over the next few weeks.

-- John Callender 18:40, 30 May 2005 (UTC)

Thanks John. Data on this would be very interesting. It would also be relevant to Aboriginal whaling#Russian whaling - all we currently have there is Russians in the remote east Siberian province of Chukotka are permitted to take up to 140 Gray Whales from the North-East Pacific population each year. Pcb21| Pete 19:31, 30 May 2005 (UTC)

Thanks for the update. Pcb21| Pete 08:05, 31 May 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Required: Shell controversy

This article needs to talk about the Shell Kamchatka oil drilling controversy that has been in the news over the last few months. Pcb21| Pete 08:05, 31 May 2005 (UTC)