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Try this one then 8-p
Tim, dude - have a read
FROM: Alan Macnow Consultant, Japan Whaling Association
JUNK SCIENCE TARGETS WHALING
A campaign to make it appear that whales are being caught illegally and smuggled into Japan was waged on the eve of the opening of this year's meeting of the International Whaling Commission by the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW). The group, whose practices got it barred from membership in the prestigious World Conservation Union, employed a team of anti-whaling scientists, ecologists, and activists from New Zealand, the US and Japan to 'prove' that illegal whale meat is being marketed in Japan.
Their results ran contrary to DNA testing of 228 samples of whale meat in Japanese outlets conducted recently by TRAFFIC Japan, affiliated with the World Wildlife Fund for Nature (WWF) and the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), and the government of Japan. Those studies revealed no traces of the blue, sei, or humpback whale meat which the IFAW team claims it found in the Japanese market.
'Scientists' in the IFAW team have been cited before for publicizing questionable results unsupported by adequate data. Their current studies suffer from the same fault. They have not been peer reviewed and no supporting data have been made available. Although since 1995 their papers assert that 'DNA sequences of these test samples and those published from previous surveys . . . are available from the authors' Internet home page at:
http://www.sbs.auckland.ac.nz/staff/bakerscott.html', there has not been anything at that site except for a description of one 'scientist's' research interests and a notation: 'Last updated: 28 Sept 95'.
The Scientific Committee of the International Whaling Commission has rejected their papers in the past.
In past papers, members of the IFAW team (then working for the advocacy group 'EarthTrust'
erroneously identified a single piece of meat as both a minke whale and a humpback whale, another as a cross between a sperm whale and a harbor porpoise, and another as a type of dolphin that is found only in waters around southern Africa. They also could not identify a high percentage of the samples taken from Japanese markets.
Some of the defects of the IFAW team's current papers are:
* No supporting data are presented. The results cannot be verified. There is no evidence that all the samples were collected in Japan; some could in reality have come from Iceland, Mexico or New Zealand. There is no way of knowing as long as the researchers refuse to disclose the underlying data;
* The papers contain mistakes and omissions. In one paper, a table of haplotypes contains strings of unidentified nucleotide base pairs; no conscientious researcher would include these in his results. In another, (SC48/038) an entry for a sample referred to in the text is missing from the table.
* There is no detailed description of the precautions taken to avoid contamination of the samples and no control tests. The PCR procedure used to amplify the mtDNA control region selected is notoriously susceptible to contamination from bacteria, dandruff, mishandling of samples, even an unguarded sneeze. As the PCR amplifications were carried out in hotel rooms not in sanitary laboratories, contamination is a real concern.
* The papers often seem more concerned about the propaganda value of the 'results' than with objective science. For example, a whale meat sample which the authors admit may be from a hybrid of a fin whale with a blue whale (taken off Iceland during the period when trade in whale meat between Iceland and Japan was legal) later appears throughout the documents unequivocally termed a 'blue whale'. IFAW compounded this fiction in press releases trumpeting that its researchers had found evidence that the highly endangered blue whale was being sold in Japanese markets.
* Other mistakes include:
An assessment that fin whale meat found in Japanese markets must have come from a 'Minimum of 18 different individual whales.' If this were true, and if the Japanese were responsible for the catch as implied by the authors, there would be almost as much fin whale meat found in the markets as southern minke whale meat, instead of just a handful of samples. A single fin whale yields 50 mt tons of edible products compared to 3 mt tons for a minke. 18 fin whales would yield 900 mt, an amount equal to the catch of 300 minke whales.
A 'finding' that some of the north Pacific minke whale products found in Japanese markets are identical to whale products found in Korean markets is unproven and the conclusion that the Japanese products must have been smuggled in from Korea is unfounded. The researchers were unable to locate that area in the control region that is used to identify stocks so they based their conclusions on haplotype similarities. However same species haplotypes for whales are very similar and, by themselves, without the presence of stock identifiers, cannot be used to identify with any assurance whether one sample of a species is from the same location as another. They also cannot claim that one sample is identical to another unless there is a perfect match of nucleotide sequences. They did not show this except for a single case in which a minke whale sample from Japan in 1996 matched a minke whale sample found in Korea a year later. If that case were correct, it would appear that the whale meat was smuggled to Korea, not the other way around.
The Japanese do not dispute that there is a wide variety of whale meat products on the market in Japan but not as a result of widespread smuggling or illegal catches. There is still fin and Bryde's whale meat from stockpiles frozen before 1986 when the commercial whaling moratorium was imposed. This would account for the fact that the products of as many as 18 fin whales may be found in the markets without finding a great amount of fin whale meat there, too.
Other sources of whale meat are strandings and the accidental death of whales caught in coastal fishing nets. The meat from southern hemisphere and north Pacific minke whales surplus to research needs is marketed as required by Article VIII of the International Convention for the Regulation of Whaling. Baird's beaked whale and small cetaceans do not come under the moratorium provisions of the IWC and can still be harvested under Japanese government regulations.
Ok Tim, now you can harp on about it being from the JWA.. then I can harp on about it being from IFAW lackeys etc etc etc...boring boring boring ...
Reference any independant studies and folk can discuss matters - I for one consider Traffic to be independant enough ( assuming they follow proper procedures etc )
On another note..
Like Havid did, I´m going to take aaw out of my ng list for a while .. this is getting pointless .. at first, I believed that discussions could ( despite the polarised standpoints ) be fruitful .. but these days I see more and more that it just degenerates into flaming and personal attacks ( and I´m just as guilty as the next ).. enough´s enough...so, bye for now ...have fun
John
PS .. George - your email account is bouncing mails back - see you in the pub friday ß)
in area from 0° longitude to 70° east longitude, from the equator to the Antarctic Continent) and fin whale B. physalus and for one species of tooth whale, sperm whale Physeter catodon. 
