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Comment by badminton1 | Hacker News Reader

One of the few fish markets selling whale meat. But the tourist community keeps tolerating it.

update: And for some reason I get downvoted for denouncing something that is against our best interest... whales regulate the oceanic carbon cycle. You kill them and contribute to ocean acidification.

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Honestly the entire seafood industry is a disaster. Nearly 80% of the ocean biomass has been destroyed. It's the only part of the food system that still relies on hunting wild populations of animals and between the many countries involved, it's really hard to regulate how much is really being taken. It's very depressing how many species are on the brink because of this.

It's the food equivalent of oil drilling. Oddly enough, it seems many folks who are uncomfortable eating land animals for ethical reasons have no qualms about strip-mining the oceans.

I think those people have their hearts in the right places, but likely just haven't done their research [0] as less attention is paid towards it. Horrible farming conditions are something that happens right on American soil so it's easy to denounce and witness, not so much for the global seafood industry.

[0]: Another case is Quinoa which used to be a staple food for poor Bolivians who have now been outpriced by the demand (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/jan/16/vegans...)

A few hundred whales, particularly the non-endangered minke whales targeted by Japan, won't disrupt anything. The west's obsession with beef is a much larger environmental issue than eating whale ever will be.

On that note, much of the whale I've seen, bought, and eaten in Japan has come from Iceland. Norway also seems to kill more whales than Japan does, yet the whaling in Europe is completely ignored. Japan's "otherness" makes it easy to target them, and it's obvious since I see the whaling issue frequently come up even when it's not related to the topic at all aside from "Japan" or "fishing" being mentioned.

I'm not for or against, I just don't understand the market. I had whale prepared a few different ways in Japan and they only decent preparation was thinly sliced and raw. It just tasted like a tougher, slightly fishier, worse version of beef. I could understand it if it was significantly cheaper than beef, since domestic and even imported beef can be pricey. But it's often times more expensive than anything but the highest quality.

I expect the market will slowly collapse as the Japanese who grew up eating it in school slowly die out. Most people my age had never even eaten it.

Someone once told me that the actual delicacy is whale blubber. You have to figure out what to do with the rest of the whale.

Can't you just eat something else?

It's an old people thing. Once upon a time whale meat was served in Japanese schools. Those who grew up eating it want to eat it now. They are dying out and the younger generations (us) have no taste for the meat.

Try finding anyone in the UK under 60 willing to eat tripe or jellied eels.

Never thought of the nostalgia factor but that makes sense. Fwiw the school means served it because those regions (and the entire country) was too poor to afford any other kind of meat.

I believe some traditional crafts use some kind of whale whiskers, but I wouldn't imagine that is that big a factor.

I have seen it suggested that it comes down to bureaucratic territory marking.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-35397749

Reads like something from the darker portions of a Douglas Adams novel, but I find it entirely plausible.

Coupled with an element of irrational nationalism. "Everybody's telling us to stop doing something pointless/counter-productive, but it's a part of our culture!" (See also: gun ownership.)

"update: And for some reason I get downvoted for denouncing something that is against our best interest..."

I downvoted you for complaining about, or questioning, your downvotes.

Don't do that.

You sure put them in their place. +1 e-peen. That'll teach those damn karma whores. Keep fighting the good fight. Fugg the whales xD.

That is unfortunate. Whale hunting is illegal now in many countries, but the Japanese do like whale meat and continue to find ways to hunt them. I saw an interesting documentary maybe 4 years ago about how some hunting ships would find whales under the guise of science research, but really harvest them for food. Some countries stopped honoring the scientific licenses of the Japanese ships that allowed them to enter their waters. I'm not sure how much the affinity for whale meat has to do with tourism, though.

The research rhetoric itself is questionable. Research is expected to at least produce some report or publication, but many of them have produced neither for years.

The Japanese people largely don't like whale meat. Its sales have been declining and they're having a hard time convincing children to eat this weird fatty meat. Japanese whaling probably won't last another generation. But the Japanese do like tradition, so for now, whale hunting persists.

Alright, I'll bite, _how much_ do they regulate the carbon cycle?

I believe he is referencing the fact that "whale falls" (the ecosystem that subsists for decades on the corpse of a whale that died and sank in deep water) move the mass of the whale to the deep ocean, where it typically doesn't surface except on geologic time.

The obvious counter is that even at pre-human population levels the whales are an insignificant fraction of the shallow ocean biomass, and that artificial algea blooms over deep water could easily replace this carbon transfer in a sustainable way.

Perhaps more interesting is that the lack of whale falls has probably already driven to extinction many of the deep water species that prey on the drop sites. Those that are left are at risk. And at least until we can catalog the genetic diversity of these ecosystems, that could be a tremendous loss. There may be biological processes adapted there that are useful to us, in bio-engineering or medicine.

Also their poops keeps nutrients in the system, feeding algae that consume co2 and feeding stuff that eat algae*

*citation needed

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2928761/

> _how much_ do they regulate the carbon cycle?

"We estimate that rebuilding whale populations would remove 1.6×10^5 tons of carbon each year through sinking whale carcasses." [1]

"these changes are small relative to the total ocean carbon sink" [1]

The total ocean carbon sink is 10^9 tons of carbon each year [2]. So the changes in whale populations have had a 0.016% influence on the ocean carbon sink. So, not much.

But in the future when different geoengineering methods are suggested, maybe their impact in terms of tons of carbon per year could be compared to the size of this effect of stopping whaling altogether.

[1] http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_sink

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