Scientists will discuss remarkable advances in whale research at the annual meeti...( gulates the whaling industry worldwide....)

gulates the whaling industry worldwide. In 1986, the IWC declared a moratorium on commercial whaling-a position respected by all member-nations except Japan and Norway. The IWC can allow commercial hunting to resume in areas where a population has reached 54 percent of its original carrying capacity. But if Palumbi and Roman's estimate is correct, the number of humpbacks would have to increase dramatically before whaling could resume.

Frightening yet productive

Soon after the Science study appeared, Palumbi was invited to speak before the IWC's scientific committee at the commission's 2004 meeting in Sorrento, Italy. ''That was the most significant and frightening event I attended last year, but it turned out to be very productive,'' he recalls. ''When you surprise a regulatory agency with a new point of view, it shouldn't come as a shock that they are cautious. The IWC wasn't ready to take the genetic results and turn them into policy, but a roadmap was laid out.''

Committee members raised numerous questions about the Science study and criticized Palumbi's decision to rely on genetic variation in just one gene, D loop, which has a complicated mutational history that can be difficult to interpret. In response, Palumbi and his Stanford colleagues have launched the first multi-gene whale population study that will allow researchers to compare DNA variation in 11 different genes.

Palumbi also is re-visiting the portion of the 2003 Science study that focused on Antarctic minke whales. It turns out that New Zealand geneticist Scott Baker conducted an independent analysis of minke whale DNA using both the D loop gene and another mitochondrial gene called cytochrome b.

''We wanted to see if cytochrome b-a different gene with much nicer mutational characteristics than D loop-was going to give us the same answer,'' Palumbi says. ''Amazingly, we got the same estimate no matter which gene we used: The historic population of the An
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Contact: Mark Shwartz
mshwartz@stanford.edu
650-723-9296
Stanford University
19-Feb-2005

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