Scientists will discuss remarkable advances in whale research at the annual meeti...( le populations have responded to climat...)

The IWC also urged researchers to reconcile the dramatic differences between population estimates based on genetics versus whaling records. ''What we've tried to do ever since the furor over the Science paper started is to engage historians by saying, let's try to figure out if there is an answer that is supported by both of our techniques and come to some agreement,'' Palumbi says. ''Most historians seem to agree that the previously accepted numbers were too low, but not as high as we've said,'' noting that researchers at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts are reexamining old whaling logs in light of the recent genetic findings.

Other speakers at the AAAS symposium are Christopher Clark of Cornell University, who will discuss advances in whale bioacoustics; Roger Payne of Ocean Alliance, who will describe how toxicological studies of sperm whales are improving our understanding of ocean pollution; and Craig Smith of the University of Hawaii, who will describe new studies showing how dead whales support invertebrate life on the seafloor.

''If filmmaker Jacques Cousteau could climb out of his grave and go to a seminar, it would be this one, because when he made his last whale movie, he knew about whales only what he and others could see,'' Palumbi concludes. ''Now we know a huge amount that he never knew, because of all this new technology. As a result, we can not only manage them better, but, as Roger Payne is trying to do, we can use them as a gauge of how the oceans are doing. And that, fundamentally, is going to affect us all.''

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Contact: Mark Shwartz
mshwartz@stanford.edu
650-723-9296
Stanford University
19-Feb-2005