Whalers Sound the Alarm: ‘Never seen so many skinny whales’
The Greatest Grift of All (11): don't be fooled by the headline, whales are lean because their numbers are rising fast--predictably, experts™ cry Climate Change™ while their models are far, far off
Today I have a particular gem for you, dear readers: Norwegian whalers sound the alarm as the majestic mammals they catch are…very lean.
Please follow me down a particularly stupid rabbit-hole of Marine Science™ ‘splainin’ that this is natural, with grifters from the same research institution yelling Climate Change™ while the main issue—that previous estimates were effectively off by ‘at least an order of magnitude’—is buried.
Hence, a new instalment of ‘The Greatest Grift of All’ is here for you. Enjoy.
Translation of non-English text, emphases, and [snark] mine.
Whalers Sound the Alarm: ‘Never seen so many skinny whales’
Almost all the minke whales skipper Bjørn Andersen of ‘Reinebuen’ [Rainbow: what an irony, eh?] has caught this year have been unusually lean. Both whalers and marine scientists are concerned about the trend [what’s in a word: a ‘trend’—Wikipedia ‘redirected’ me from my original search—to this: ‘A fad, trend, or craze is any form of collective behavior that develops within a culture, a generation, or social group in which a group of people enthusiastically follow an impulse for a short time period.’ LOL]
By Ine-Sofie Bruhaug and Susanne Skjåstad Lysvold, NRK, 12 Juni 2025 [source; archived]
Skinny whale: this picture was taken by the crew aboard the whaler ‘Reinebuen’ [Rainbow]. Skipper Bjørn Andersen says one notes that the whales are very lean.
‘It’s been a bad start for whalers since the whaling season began in April.’
As of the beginning of June, a total of 126 minke whales had been caught, compared with 293 minke whales in the same period last year.
Kyst og Fjord covered the story first.
But it’s not the low catch figures that are worrying the whalers:
We’ve never seen so many lean whales as this year. Only in exceptional cases have we caught an animal that is really round and good this season.
So says Bjørn Andersen. He has been the skipper of whaling ships for many years and believes that the skinny whales are cause for concern:
It’s not good. It’s clear that the whales are not getting enough food.
Becoming Unbalanced
There may be several reasons for this, according to the whaler Andersen:
It’s hard to say for sure, but there are starting to be good [high] numbers of both humpback and fin whales. And actually blue whales, too. There are such large numbers here in the north that it’s frightening [huhum, so, the minke whales are skinny because there are so many bigger whales].
Norway is one of very few countries in the world that hunts minke whales. Nevertheless, their population has increased significantly in our waters in recent years [huhum, what’s in the term ‘significantly’?].
Scientists used to believe there were around 100,000 minke whales in Norwegian waters. Now scientists believe there are 150,000 minke whales in Norwegian waters [what’s being off by 50% among scientists, by the way? Also, that link will take you to yet another NRK piece, but here’s the underlying report from 2021 (in Norwegian, data from 2014-19), which further reveals that, e.g., whale numbers around Jan Mayen may be ‘three times higher than before’].
‘When there are a lot of whales, there is a battle for food. When the population comes back, it comes back so quickly that there is an imbalance elsewhere’, says Andersen [well, that’s kinda the same issue with deer hunting, isn’t it? Take out the wolves, remove the natural enemy—and soon deer become the next problem™].
He is not alone in making this observation.
Capelin Stock Fished Down
Dag Myklebust is the skipper and gunner on the whaling ship ‘Kato’, and has been whaling for more than 50 years. He is now whaling north of Bjørnøya.
He says that the crew on board have also observed lean whales:
You can see it in the blubber layer, which is much thinner than normal.
He is in no doubt as to why this is happening:
There are far too many whales competing for the same food bowl. And that food bowl is empty. Minke whales follow the capelin stocks, but they have been fished down. The capelin is important for all life in the sea, but it’s almost gone.
He adds:
It’s absolutely terrifying. The entire food chain has been destroyed [by whom?]. It affects the entire fishing industry. Cod also feed on capelin.
No Fishing This Year
The condition of the capelin stock in the Barents Sea was so poor last year that a fishing ban was recommended this year to give the stock a better chance of recovering as quickly as possible.
This is according to Georg Skaret [profile], marine scientist and capelin stock manager at the Institute of Marine Research [orig. Havforskningsinstituttet].
Over the past 10 years, the capelin stock has shown fluctuations over shorter periods of time than previously. This year’s stock is the third time in the last 10 years that the stock is below harvestable levels. Skaret adds:
We have no reason to believe that this is anything other than natural fluctuations. There have been large quantities of young herring in the Barents Sea in recent years, which normally has a negative impact on capelin stocks. At the same time, we have seen that there has been less inflow of plankton, which has meant that there has been relatively less food for the capelin [and thus we come up with the explanation: ‘no reason to believe that this is anything other than natural fluctuations’, sayeth the Science™: why the desire, by legacy media, to spin this as a major thing?].
Researchers Saw the Ribs of Minke Whales
Senior scientist Martin Biuw [profile] at the Institute of Marine Research says that researchers have also observed lean whales in the Barents Sea [alright; you know what else the Institute of Marine Research says? ‘Humpback whales make strong “comeback” in the Antarctic’ (2021) whose numbers (43K) now far exceed the number of hunted animals 1900-50 (27K); same with ‘Fin whales making strong comeback’ (2024].
On research expeditions aimed at satellite tagging minke whales, they observed individual whales whose ribs were clearly visible [below, I’ll tell you how whales are counted by the Science™].
‘These whales were not tagged’, says Biuw.
Every year, researchers receive large quantities of samples from the whalers, such as the blubber layer. It was documented that the blubber layer was thinner than before.
‘We will keep a close eye on the results of this year’s whaling’, adds Biuw.
He believes that there are several reasons why the whales shot by whalers are leaner than before [drum roll for the Greatest Grift of All]:
Climate Change has contributed to the entire ecosystem in the Barents Sea changing, which is worrying. A lot of things are happening at the same time. It causes shifts and changes in the entire food web, which makes this kind of thing happen [ahem, we note that Biuw’s colleague, Georg Skaret, is quoted literally a handful of paragraphs before stating that, ‘we have no reason to believe that this is anything other than natural fluctuations’—which one is it? Note that Biuw’s expertise is in ‘marine mammels’ while Skaret’s is ‘pelagic fish’—and now the former is apparently an expert™ in Climate Change™…]
The changes are happening so fast that it is difficult for scientists to predict what it will look like in 2-3 years [thus more by Biuw—the correct way of reading that kind of statement is: ‘plausible deniability’]
If the weight loss becomes a permanent trend [and here we see that my opening remark about this being a ‘fad’, as opposed to something like a statistical trend…and if you add what Biuw noted in the preceding paragraph, you can, likely, observe the Greatest Grift of All in action], it could have consequences, especially for the females.
Food shortages can affect milk production, which in turn can affect reproduction.
‘This could have serious consequences for the population in the long term’, says Biuw [yawn, for this has been observed time and again, be it deer on a Canadian island or yeast in a petri dish: the main problem, I’d surmise, is the Science™ learning something new and breathlessly advocating more research funds to be allocated to them to study™ these new™ things].
Bottom Lines
There are two main aspects to consider here: one methodological and the other being the over-arching depravity of the Science™.
As per the above-linked piece about ‘fin whales making [a] strong comeback’, which the Institute of Marine Research published on 30 April 2024, here is how the whale counting works™:
This is how we count whales
In order to arrive at the whale numbers, researchers have obviously not counted all 50,000 whales. They use a method called line transect distance sampling.
‘When on a survey, we follow pre-planned lines. Along these so-called transects, we observe whales, note down the species and distance to the vessel, as well as the angle between the whale and the course line [this is the empirical first part of the survey] We often see a group of whales, and then we also record the number of whales in the group’, explains marine scientist Ulf Lindstrøm, who also took part in the 2019 survey.
Together with other factors, such as weather conditions, wind, and visibility, [in a second step] these numbers are entered into a statistical model [is that model accurate?] that results in a density estimate. That is, how many of the whales there are likely to be within a given area, such as one square kilometre. The result [of the ‘density estimate’] is then extrapolated [so the statistical model output gets ‘extrapolated’] to abundance for the entire area being surveyed [this all means—there’s some counting, some modelling, followed by extrapolation].
‘There is of course some uncertainty in these calculations, so we also include an uncertainty margin around our estimates. But even if we take this uncertainty into account, the population size for fin whales is many times higher than previously thought’, concludes Biuw.
That would be the same expert™ who now blames Climate Change™ for something that a) is beset with uncertainties, b) had produced an estimate that was way off before, and c) peddles the Climate Change™ nonsense despite there being objections from his very own colleague Skaret.
You literally cannot make this up, even though the piece above has all the ingredients of agit-prop (albeit rather piss-poorly done so):
drastic pictures of dead whales from fishermen to agitate whoever is reading the piece
an expert™ ‘splainin’ that this isn’t man-made, who is immediately contradicted by another expert™ ‘splainin’ that this is due to Climate Change™ (which functions as a call for funding)
and the ‘plausible deniability’ racket—‘changes are happening so fast that it is difficult for scientists to predict what it will look like in 2-3 years’, according to Biuw—that permits experts™ to make wildly misleading claims to get more funding that will, very likely, not result in anything that helps us to understand the issue at-hand (other than, say, the bottom line of these ‘principal investigators’ who lead the research™ projects)
I haven’t read this article by, but perhaps I will at some point: Biuw, M., Lindstrøm, U., Jackson, J.A. et al., ‘Estimated summer abundance and krill consumption of fin whales throughout the Scotia Sea during the 2018/2019 summer season’, Sci Rep 14, 7493 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-024-57378-3.
Here’s but a choice sampling from its abstract to highlight the methodological problems noted above:
Circumpolar estimates in the 1990s suggest an abundance of about 5500 animals south of 60° S, while the IDCR/SOWER-2000 survey for the Scotia Sea and Antarctic Peninsula areas estimated 4670 fin whales within this region in the year 2000 [so there were about 5K fin whales south of 60° S as recently as 25 years ago]. More recent studies in smaller regions indicate higher densities, suggesting that previous estimates are overly conservative and/or that fin whales are undergoing a substantial increase. Here we report findings from a recent multi-vessel single-platform sightings survey carried out as part of the 2019 Area 48 Survey for Antarctic krill [basically, the fin whale data wasn’t what they looked at]. While fin whales were encountered throughout the entire survey area, which covered the majority of CCAMLR Management Area 48, they were particularly abundant around the South Orkney Islands and the eastern Bransfield Strait. Large feeding aggregations were also encountered within the central Scotia Sea between South Orkney Islands and South Georgia…[line break added]
Design-based distance sampling analyses resulted in an estimated total fin whale abundance of 53,873 (CV = 0.15, 95% CI 40,233–72,138), while a density surface model resulted in a slightly lower estimate of 50,837 (CV: 0.136, 95% CI 38,966–66,324). These estimates are at least an order of magnitude greater than the previous estimate from the same region based on the IDCR/SOWER-2000 data.
Please re-read that last sentence: current (2019) estimates ‘are at least an order of magnitude greater than the previous estimate’.
Trust the Science™ with more funding, esp. once we throw Climate Change™ into the game, too.
Look, I’m an academic myself, and I understand that most research projects obviously fail, but that’s the way the scientific method works: you have an idea (hypothesis) and are going to test it to see if it’s true or false (empirical observation), followed by a discussion of the results (that should involve honesty about the underlying hypothesis).
Here’s what Dr. Biuw is proposing: Climate Change™ (hypothesis gimme funding); he was off by ‘more than an order of magnitude’ before (empirical™ observations in the above-related ‘how we count [sic] whales’ way); end of discussion.
Rinse and repeat.
How far off were the Antarctic ice models, by the way, while we’re at this:
Oh, lest I forget:
Isn’t it amazing how lightning-fast politicos™, experts™, and journos™ shut their mouths about Climate Change™ destroying that glacier that swallowed a village in Switzerland last month?
Needless to say, my above grift model (muahahahaha) ‘splains’ that, too:
Have a good day, dear readers.
Novo Nordisk ozempic whales - obviously.
The Science gets funding, and science does not - a huge built-in bias. There is plundering to be done, hopefully combined with population reductions. The Science will distract us from seeing easily observable reality. We can just look at criss-crossed skies above us and reason, but we don’t because The Science tells us there is nothing to see. It all reminds me of an abused wife who catches her husband in bed with another woman. The husband denies the obvious by, “whom are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?”