14 DAY TRIAL // Stopping whale meat consume is a bitter fight led against the Japanese mentality. But in some cases, unwittingly whales have a method of their own.
10 % of the gray whales hunted by Russian aboriginals from Chukotka are inedible due to the rancid stench of their meat and this is increasing. Still, researchers cannot say if it is due to chemical contamination or disease.
International Whaling Commission (IWC) signaled the same problem with the meat of ringed and bearded seals, walruses, and cod.
Chukotka aboriginals first signaled the problem in the 1990s, but older hunters reveal the problem could date from late '60s.
The consume of this meat induces temporary problems like numbness in the mouth, skin rashes and stomach aches.
"Even dogs will not eat the meat," said Gennady Inankeuyas, a whaling captain and chairman of the Association of Traditional Marine Mammal Hunters of Chukotka, that defends the interests of whale hunters and their families.
Some experienced hunters can tell the stinky whales just from the mammals' breath. U.S. and Russian toxicologists tested the meat probes in 2003 for heavy metals and other industrial toxins, like organochlorines and polyaromatic hydrocarbons.
"The samples show a slew of more than a hundred volatile compounds, including hydrocarbons, sulfur and nitrogen compounds, and various odorants. Yet the results are still unclear and do not appear to implicate human activity," said Wendy Elliott, a program officer at the nonprofit WWF-International.
But hunters noticed an oddity: stinky whales had their stomachs filled with seaweed.
"We are not fully sure, but it is possible that a change in prey abundance due to climate change is forcing the whales to change their diet and this is causing certain biochemical reactions within them." said Elliott.
The IWC report agrees that gray whales could have reached carrying capacity: there are either too many Eastern North Pacific gray whales feeding on the same food supply, or the food supply is quickly going out. There is also the theory of an unidentified biotoxin, like aldehydes and ketones, or a metabolic disorder linked to local habitats.
"The stink could not be due to the whales approaching carrying capacity, because in that scenario a large number of whales would be affected. Instead, there could one agent that might be causing the stink, and another agent causing the numbness in people who eat the meat," said Lorenzo Rojas Bracho, coordinator of the National Marine Mammal Program at Mexico's National Institute of Ecology.
"It is probably a regional, ecosystem issue. The stinky smell has also been reported in other mammals and birds of the region. Maybe certain bacteria, fungi, and biotoxins are the cause of the stinky whale. This could explain the numbing, and is a more plausible explanation," he said.
"Scientists from U.S and Mexico are working on a project to check the chemical composition of the blowhole breath of free-swimming whales in the breeding lagoons of Mexico."
Gray whales breed in Mexico in winter and move north for feeding in summer. The issue could cause a revised aboriginal whaling management procedure, to be applied by 2009.
At the recent IWC meeting in Anchorage, Alaska, the Russian government announced that it did not take in consideration the stinky whales against the quota, pointing that the whales do not fulfill the aboriginal subsistence needs. At the same time, the government recognized it could not make that determination unilaterally. The IWC allows a shared catch threshold of 280 bowhead whales until 2012 for U.S. and Russia indigenous peoples and renewed the quotas for gray whales.
"We did not gain anything, since our cultural and nutritional needs for whales exists with or without the quotas. The international community recognized our right to hunt, use, and eat whales. We feel very fortunate," said Inankeuyas.