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Some Northern Hemisphere stocks look better. Antarctic blues remain far below pre-whaling. EN is still the honest card.

The IWC protected blue whales after the factory-ship years had already taken the Antarctic majority. Protection was a lock on an empty room in the south.

It is a commercial-whaling pause for many species. Blues were already protected; the moratorium is the political weather that kept factory ships from a sequel.

A blue whale eats tonnes of krill and returns nutrients in faecal plumes; a fall feeds the benthos. In this atlas that pump outranks most terrestrial carnivores except elephants and wolves.

Payne whale-song fame is mostly humpback. Blue-whale acoustics (low-frequency pulses) are a later Navy-and-NOAA file.

A southern subspecies/form -- smaller, still EN, often confused in catch histories.