Whales will be counted this summer

Whales will be counted in the North Atlantic next summer, for the first time in eight years. The plan is to assess the stock size of whales and if the whales are increasing.

The nations carrying out the search include, in addition to Iceland, the Faroe Islands, Norway and Greenland, but it is organized by the North Atlantic Marine Mammal Commission, NAMMCO. The Icelandic Marine Research Institute got a special government appropriation for this project to the amount of 150 million kronas. The counting will take place in June/July and the research vessel Bjarni Sæmundsson will be used for the counting along with a tramp vessel.

Jóhann Sigurjónsson, CEO of the Icelandic Marine Research Institute, says that it is important that the counting will be done on a regular basis.

"We put a great emphasis on that the counting would take place this year, but if more time passes then the hunting consultancy will be more cautious. But these are slowly growing creatures that become old, so there will not be any dramatic changes from one year to another. So it's O.K. to do this every five to seven years," he says.

Multinational whale counting started in the High North in the year of 1986. Since then, there have been four countings: in the year of 1989, 1995, 2001 and 2007, but in the year of 2009 a counting of mink-whales was carried out from a plane. The counting carried out in the year of 2007 was the most comprehensive one.