New Japanese Whaling Mother Ship Can Travel To The Southern Ocean  

Japanese company Kyodo Senpaku Kaosha has revealed that they are building a whaling mother ship that can travel to Antarctica, making people jittery that the Southern Ocean will be plagued by commercial whaling. The proposed ship has a travelling capacity of 13000 km for 60 days.

Australia has already highlighted the global moratorium on commercial whaling in light of this new development. At the same time, Greenpeace maintains its a brutal practice and unnecessary for a threatened species like the whales.

In 1986 commercial whaling was banned by the International Whaling Commission. Still, as per the moratorium, Japan has been exempted from this as their whaling activity in the Southern Ocean has been dubbed scientific research. 

Japan had to end its whale hunting activity in 2019 after the 2014 directive from the International Court Of Justice. It was the same time Japan withdrew from the International Whaling Commission, committing that they would restrict the whaling activity in their territory. 

Whales in and around Antarctica and Australia are threatened by offshore oil and gas drilling and deep-sea mining, and they can’t afford to have such superships for commercial whaling in the region. 

In the mother ship method, people use other agile ships for whaling and then transfer the carcasses to the mother ship, where they are frozen and stored. The vessel is built to pass on the whaling culture to the next generation and be of use in the food security crisis in Japan. 

However, the Japanese government has articulated that they haven’t given any financial support to the ship, although they are aware of the developments.

Currently, the ship will be operational in Japan’s exclusive economic zone, which will likely stay the same for a while. 

The ship will be operational in Japan’s exclusive economic zone alone, which is unlikely to change in the near future. 

References: The Guardian, Asia News

New Japanese Whaling Mother Ship Can Travel To The Southern Ocean   appeared first on Marine Insight – The Maritime Industry Guide

Source: Maritime Shipping News