Scientists use DNA to study whales

SYDNEY, Feb. 4 (UPI) -- Australian scientists, armed with DNA testing methods, are again ready to contest controversial claims whales must be killed to study them and learn about their diet.

Each year, Japan's whalers kill more than 500 minke whales. In 2000, they also began catching small numbers of Brydes and sperm whales. Japan has repeatedly argued it must kill whales to examine their stomach contents and thereby determine what they eat.

Their concern is that whales -- which one Japanese fisheries official famously referred to last year as "cockroaches of the sea" -- are growing in number and threatening vital fishing stocks. Japan hopes to use the data to convince the International Whaling Commission to repeal its moratorium on commercial whaling.

But the fact that after being examined, the whales used for meat and eaten in the best restaurants in the country, drives a suspicion the Japanese are using science as an excuse for commerce and culinary indulgence.

With the goal of finding out more about the diet of whales to manage local fish stocks in the Southern Ocean, scientists at Australia's Antarctic Division have developed a method to determine what whales eat by analyzing the DNA in their feces. The technique is not only quicker than killing whales, it is also much cheaper.

Using a very fine mesh net, researchers collect the feces, which whales eliminate near the surface of the water as a thin brown cloud. It is taken to the lab, where the DNA is separated and matched with that of known species.

"Up to now, there hasn't been any way to deal with these tiny little bits of DNA," Nick Gales, principal research scientist ay the Antarctic Division, told United Press International. "But now we've got some very sophisticated and sensitive tools, so we can get all of those tiny little bits together, we can grow them up, and separate (them), and go in and find out what animals were eaten."

Gales said the technique would help scientists set a sustainable fishing level for krill and fish.

"It's critical data that you need for the sustainable management of fisheries," he said. From the data, it also is possible to identify the whales' gender and individual identity.

Gales says the technique is equally applicable to other marine mammals, such as dolphins and the Steller Sea Lion, which lives off the west coast of North America and has been the subject of conflicts with local fisheries.

Gales said he will present his research during the April meeting of the IWC where it will receive greater scrutiny. Other researchers were quick to note the importance of the innovation.

"This is the first non-lethal method to study the diet of whales and other marine mammals," said Scott Baker, a conservation geneticist at the University of Auckland in New Zealand. "It allows us direct information on the whale diet, in an ethical way, which would otherwise be hard to get. What's more, it's a major improvement on cutting open a whale and looking inside its stomach because that method just tells us what the whale ate prior to being killed. This new method allows us to track a whale and see what it eats over time."

Baker said, however, the analysis will not stop whale killing for alleged research purposes.

"It's one less reason to kill whales, but it won't stop Japanese whaling," he said. "The Japanese are doing it to sustain a low-level commercial industry. Science is not their primary goal, and never has been."

Bill Sherwin, a geneticist at the University of New South Wales, also has confidence in the new technique, but is pleased he is not doing the research.

"You can amplify DNA out of feces, but it's horrid, slow, fastidious work," he said. "You're working with little scraps of DNA, in tatters and not very much of them. It's a bit like looking for the DNA in the bones of a 100,000-year-old extinct animal."

Japan's Fisheries Agency, in an August 2000 statement, defended its whaling activities. Masayuki Komatsu, counselor for fisheries policy, said Japan's whale research program is legal under the International Convention for the Regulation of Whaling and noted it was reviewed by the IWC's Scientific Committee.

He also said the convention requires the by-products of such research be processed.

"The fact that whale meat ends up on the market is a requirement of the convention to ensure that resources are not wasted," Komatsu said in the statement. "It is not a 'loophole' or 'illegal' or 'commercial whaling in disguise' as the anti-whaling rhetoric suggests."