INSTRUCTION – Read the following text carefully and then choose the correct alternative that answer the question.

SOUTHERN HUMPBACK WHALE

INTRODUCTION

During the Australian winter, these ocean leviathans journey 3,100 miles north from their Antarctic feeding grounds to the warm tropical waters near Australia´s Whitsunday Islands. At the southern edge of the Great Barrier Reef, the 40-ton female humpbacks give birth to calves measuring 14 feet long and weighing over one ton. The Whitsundays´ sheltered bays keep the calves warm and safe from predators. During the next few months, the whales rest, sing, play and mate. The calves nurse, but the one thing the adult whales don´t do while in the tropical seas is eat. By winter´s end, adults are famished, and they head south. This life cycle is repeated throughout the Southern Hemisphere: one group migrates along the western coast of Australia, others to southern Africa and South America.

SIGHT UNSEEN

STATUS/CONSERVATION

Commercial hunting in the 19th and 20th centuries decimated most whale species. Because they migrate close to shore and swim slowly, humpbacks became a popular whalers´ target, and were hunted down to a few hundred animals in the Southern Hemisphere. The International Whaling Commission (IWC) implemented a moratorium on harvesting all species starting in 1986, and in 1994, declared Antarctica´s Southern Ocean a whale sanctuary. Now numbering over 10,000 in the Southern Hemisphere, humpbacks have shown incredible resilience, but their numbers still remain a fraction of their historic abundance. Recovery of regional populations varies, and the World Conservation Union (IUCN) lists the humpback as vulnerable.

Humpbacks also have two Northern Hemisphere populations that number around 11,500 in the North Atlantic and 6,000 in the North Pacific. Northern humpbacks are genetically differentiated from the Southern Hemisphere population, and have dark bellies, while the southern humpbacks have all-white bellies. They don´t interbreed, because while the southern populations are mating and calving in the warm tropical seas, northern populations are near the polar Arctic.

OUTLOOK

The International Whaling Commission (IWC) allows hunting by indigenous cultures but bans hunting of humpback whales. Japan has long engaged in IWCsanctioned “scientific whaling” of minke and other whales, and plans to start hunting humpbacks in 2007. “We are all concerned about Japan´s plans to add this species to the scientific whaling quota”, says Dr. Scott Baker, a renowned cetacean conservation biologist. Iceland also just started commercial whaling in 2006.