Modern whaling: description, history and safety

What is whaling? It is hunting for whales in order to obtain economic benefits, and not food. Obtain on an industrial scale and use whale meat as food only from the second half of the XX century.

Whaling Products

Today, any schoolboy knows that the whale fishery began with the extraction of blubber - whale fat, which was used primarily for lighting, in the manufacture of jute and as lubricants. In Japan, the blubber was used as an insecticide against locusts in rice fields.

Over time, the technology of fat heating changed, new materials came. Vortex is no longer used for lighting since kerosene appeared, but it receives the substance necessary for the production of soap. It is also used as an additive to vegetable fat in the preparation of margarine. Glycerin, oddly enough, is a by-product of the removal of fatty acid from blubber.

Whale oil is used in the manufacture of candles, cosmetic and medical products and preparations, color pencils, printing ink, linoleum, varnishes.

Whale meat is used to prepare a meat extract or, like bone powder, to feed animals. The main consumers of whale meat for food are the Japanese.

Bone powder is still used as a fertilizer in agriculture.

In food for the pet goes and so-called solution, broth after processing meat in autoclaves, rich in protein products.

Whale skin in Japan during the Second World War was used in the footwear industry for the manufacture of sweeps, however, it is not as strong as ordinary leather.

Blood powder was used earlier because of the large nitrogen content as a fertilizer, and due to the binding properties - as an adhesive in the woodworking industry.

From the body tissues of the whale get gelatin, from the liver - vitamin A, from the pituitary - adrenocorticotropic hormone, from the intestine - amber. For a long time in Japan, insulin was extracted from the pancreas.

Now almost no use of whalebone, which at one time was necessary for the manufacture of corsets, high wigs, crinolines, umbrellas, kitchen utensils, furniture and many other useful things. Until now, there are products of artistic craft from the teeth of sperm whale, grind and killer whale.

In short, today whales are completely disposed of.

History of Whaling

Homeland hunting for whales can be considered Norway. Already in the rock paintings of the settlements, whose age is four thousand years, there are scenes of hunting for whales. And from there come the first evidence of a regular whale fishery in Europe in the period 800-1000 years n. E.

In the XII century, whales were hunted by the Basques in the Bay of Biscay. From there, whaling moved north to Greenland. The Danes, and behind them the British hunted whales in the waters of the Arctic. On the east coast of North America, whalers came in the 17th century. At the beginning of the same century a similar fishery was born in Japan.

In those distant times the fleet was sailing. Whaling sailboats were small, with low payload and not very manoeuvrable. Therefore, they hunted harpoon and bowhead whales from rowboats with hand harpoons and cut them right into the sea, taking only the blubber and whalebone. In addition to the fact that these animals are small, they also do not sink, being killed, they can be tied to a boat and towed to the shore or a ship. Only the Japanese brought to the sea flotillas of small boats with nets.

In the 18th and 19th centuries the geography of the whaling industry expanded, captured the southern part of the Atlantic, the Pacific and Indian Oceans, South Africa and the Seychelles.
In the north, whalers began to hunt for bowhead whales and smooth whales, and later humpbacks in Greenland, Davis Strait and near Spitsbergen, in the Beaufort Seas, Bering and Chukchi Seas .

The time has come when a harpoon of a new design was invented, which still exists with minor modifications, and a harpoon cannon. At about the same time, sailing vessels were replaced by steam, with greater speed and maneuverability and considerably larger sizes. At the same time, whaling could not but change. The 19th century, with the development of technology, led to the almost complete extermination of populations of smooth and bowhead whales, so much so that at the beginning of the next century British whaling in the Arctic ceased to exist. The hunting center for marine mammals moved to the Pacific Ocean, to Newfoundland and the west coast of Africa.

In the twentieth century, whaling took to the islands of the Western Antarctic. Large floating factories in sheltered bays, later than the uterus, with the advent of which the whalers ceased to depend on the shore, led to the creation of flotillas working in the open sea. New methods of processing whale fat, which became a raw material in the production of nitroglycerin for dynamite, led to the fact that whales were, among other things, a strategic target of the fishery.

In 1946, the International Whaling Commission was established, which later became the working body of the International Convention for the Regulation of Whaling, which was joined by almost all countries that produce whales.

Since the beginning of the era of commercial whaling before the Second World War, the leaders in this area were Norway, Great Britain, Holland, USA. After the war, they were succeeded by Japan, followed by the Soviet Union.

Harpoons and harpoon cannons

From the middle of the 19th century to the present day whaling can not do without a harpoon cannon.

The Norwegian whaler Sven Foyne invented a new harpoon and a cannon to it. It was a heavy weapon weighing 50 kg and a length of two meters, a spear-grenade at the end of which are mounted paws that open already in the body of the whale and hold it like an anchor, not allowing to drown. There, a metal box with gunpowder and a glass vessel with sulfuric acid, which served as a detonator, were also attached, when it was broken by the base of the paws opened inside the shot animal. Later this vessel was replaced by a remote fuse.

As before, and now the harpoons are made from extremely elastic Swedish steel, they do not break even with the most powerful jerks of the whale. With a harpoon, a durable tench of several hundred meters is connected.

The range of the gun with a barrel about one meter in length and a channel diameter of 75-90 mm reached 25 meters. This distance was quite enough, after all, the vessel was approaching the whale almost closely. At first the cannon was charged from the barrel, but with the invention of smokeless gunpowder the design changed, and it began to be charged from the breech. By design, the harpoon gun does not differ from a conventional artillery gun with a simple aiming and starting mechanism, the quality and effectiveness of the shooting both before and now depend on the skill of the harpooner.

Whaler

Since the construction of the first steam and up to the current steam and diesel whalers, despite the development of technology, the basic principles have not changed. A common whaler has a blunt nose and a stern, widely dilated cheekbones, a steering wheel of a balancing type, which provide for an increased maneuverability of the vessel, very low sides and a high semi-tank, speeds up to 20 knots (37 km / hour). The capacity of the steam or diesel plant is about 5 thousand liters. from. The vessel is equipped with navigation and search devices.

Armament consists of a harpoon cannon, a winch for pulling the whale to the side, a compressor for inflating the air into the carcass and ensuring its buoyancy, coined by the Foyne of an amortization system with spiral springs and pulleys to prevent the line breaking during the jerks of a carnivorous animal.

The work of the whalers

The conditions of hunting for marine mammals have changed, and it would seem that the whaling safety technique is not needed. But this is not so.

Hunting for whales takes place in the northern seas hundreds of miles from the coast or the floating base, often during a storm.

Large powerful high-speed vessels hunt for large rorquals. Just bring to the blue whale a modern whaling ship - already a considerable art. And now, despite the search devices, he is sitting on the mast in the "crow's nest" sentinel, and the harpooner has to guess the direction of movement of the huge animal and adjust to its speed, standing at the helm. An experienced hunter can control a ship so that the head of the whale's air that has emerged is taken close to the ship's nose so close that you can look into the huge animal's breathing holes. At this moment, the harpooner passes the steering wheel to the helmsman and runs from the captain's bridge to the gun. Further, he not only monitors the movements of the animal, but also directs the steering wheel.

When the whale swallows the air, dips its head under the water, its back is shown above the surface, at this moment the harpooner shoots and carefully takes aim. Usually one hit is not enough, the whale is dug as a fish, the ship comes closer to it, and a new shot follows.

The carcass pulls the winch to the surface, puffs through the tube with air and sticks a pole with a pendant or buoy, into which a radio transmitter is mounted, cut off the ends of the tail fins, cut out the serial number and leave it to drift.

At the end of the hunt, all the drifting carcasses are picked up and towed to the mother ship or coast station.

Coastal stations

The coast station is formed around a large slip with powerful winches, on which the whale carcasses are raised for cutting, and with cutting knives. Boilers are located on both sides: on one side for blasting, on the other hand for processing meat and bones under pressure. In drying ovens, bones and meat after drying the fat are dried and crushed by loops of heavy chains that are suspended inside cylindrical furnaces, and then ground into powder at special mills and packed into sacks. The finished products are stored in warehouses and in tanks. On modern coastal stations, vertical autoclave and rotary kilns are installed.

The control of production processes and the analysis of blasting are carried out in a chemical laboratory.

Floating factories

In the heyday of floating factories, which are now dying off, they were first re-equipped large commercial or passenger ships.

The carcasses were cut in the water, only the fat layer was lifted on board, which was re-heated directly on board, and the carcasses were thrown out into the sea to be eaten by the fish. The coal reserves were limited, there was not enough space, so the equipment for the production of fertilizers on ships was not set. Carcases were used irrationally, but floating plants had several advantages. First, it was not necessary to rent land for a coast station. Secondly, the mobility of the factory made it possible to deliver the blubber to its destination on the same vessel, not pumping from shore tanks.

Already in the XX century began to build ocean whalers, which were equipped with the latest technology, they could store large reserves of fuel and drinking water. These were the vessels of the uterus, to which were attributed whole flotillas of small whalers.

The technological process of cutting and processing fat on such vessels, despite the difference in equipment, was about the same as at coastal stations.

In many factories, equipment has been added to freeze the loin of the whale, which is used for food.

Modern whaling expeditions

Modern whaling is limited to international agreements on the catch and duration of the hunting season, which, however, not all countries carry out.

The whaling expedition includes a ship-womb and other modern whalers, as well as veterans who are engaged in towing carcasses to floating factories and delivering food, water and fuel from bases to ships engaged in the search and shooting of whales.

Attempts were made to search for whales from the air. A successful solution was the use of helicopters, which sit on the deck of a large vessel, as was done in Japan.

In recent decades, whales have been at the center of public sympathy and close attention, and the number of most species due to overfishing continues to decline. And this despite the fact that almost any type of whaling products already have artificial substitutes.

In small quantities, the whale fishery in Norway continues, as part of the aboriginal catch - Greenland, Iceland, Canada, USA, Grenada, Dominica and St. Lucia, Indonesia.

Whaling in Japan

In Japan, unlike other countries that have ever been engaged in whaling, first of all prized whale meat, and only then a blubber.

The composition of modern Japanese whaling expeditions necessarily includes a separate refrigerator vessel, in which the meat mined or purchased from whalers from the European countries is frozen.

To use harpoons in whaling, the Japanese began by the end of the XIX century, increasing the volume of catch several times and extending the fishery not only to the Sea of Japan, but also to the northeast coast of the Pacific Ocean.

Modern whaling in Japan until recently was concentrated mainly in Antarctica.

The country's whaling flotillas are characterized by the largest amount of scientific equipment. Sonars show the distance to the whale and the direction of its movement. Electrical thermometers automatically detect changes in temperature in the surface layers of water. With the help of bathythermographs, the characteristics of the water masses and the vertical distribution of the water temperature are determined.

Such an amount of modern equipment makes it possible for the Japanese to justify the whale fishery by the value of scientific data and to mask the hunting of species forbidden by the International Whaling Commission to commercial catch.

Many public organizations around the world, especially the US and Australia, are opposed to Japan in defense of endangered species of whales.

Australia succeeded in obtaining the decision of the International Court of Justice, which forbids Japan to conduct whaling in the Antarctic.

It hunts whales in Japan and off its coasts, explaining this by the traditions of the population of coastal villages. But aboriginal fishing is allowed only for people for whom whale meat is one of the main types of food.

Whaling in Russia

Pre-revolutionary Russia was not among the leaders of whale hunting. Pomors, inhabitants of the Kola Peninsula and the indigenous population of Chukotka were engaged in the extraction of whales.

Whaling in the USSR for a long time, since 1932, has been concentrated in the Far East. The first whaling fleet, Aleut, consisted of a whale base and three whaling ships. After the war, 22 whalers and five cutting shore bases worked in the Pacific, and in the 1960s the whalers "Far East" and "Vladivostok".

In 1947, the whaling flotilla "Glory" came to the Antarctic coast, which was received from Germany on an indemnity basis. It included a processing vessel-base and 8 whalers.

In the middle of the 20th century, the whales of the flotilla Sovetskaya Ukraina and Sovetskaya Rossiya began to be mined in the region, and a bit later Yuri Dolgoruky with the world's largest floating bases, designed to process up to 75 whales a day.

The Soviet Union ceased the whale fishery in 1987. Even after the collapse of the Union, data were published on violations by the Soviet fleets of the quotas of the IWC.

Today, in the framework of aboriginal fishing in the Chukotka Autonomous Okrug, coastal whaling is produced by the quotas of the IWC and beluga whales by permits issued by Rosrybolovstvo.

Conclusion

When a ban on commercial fishing was introduced, the number of humpback whales and blue whales in certain areas of the World Ocean began to recover.
But the populations of smooth whales in the northern hemisphere are still under threat of complete extinction. The same concerns are caused by the Greenland whales of the Sea of Okhotsk and gray whales in the northwestern part of the Pacific Ocean. It was too late to stop the barbarous extermination of these marine mammals.