Modelling the past and future of whales and whaling

Abstract

Historical reconstruction of the population dynamics of whales before, during and after exploitation is crucial to marine ecological restoration and for the consideration of future commercial whaling. Population dynamic models used by the International Whaling Commission require historical catch records, estimates of intrinsic rates of increase and current abundance, all of which are subject to considerable uncertainty. Population genetic parameters can be used for independent estimates of historical demography, but also have large uncertainty, particularly for rates of mutational substitution and gene flow. At present, demographic and genetic estimates of pre-exploitation abundance differ by an order of magnitude and, consequently, suggest vastly different baselines for judging recovery. Here, we review these two approaches and suggest the need for a synthetic analytical framework to evaluate uncertainty in key parameters. Such a framework could have broad application to modelling both historical and contemporary population dynamics in other exploited species.