Blue whale in 2018: NOAA acoustic maps

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. Is the 1982 moratorium a blue-whale law?

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. In some coastal stocks (Sri Lanka, California) yes -- a recovery problem that 1966 did not imagine.