Episode Details

In 1994 the Soviet Union handed its official whaling records to the international community, reporting 2,710 humpback whales killed over several decades. Secret state shadow ledgers told the truth: more than 48,000. This episode traces how whaling grew from subsistence hunts dating to at least 3000 BC, with 5,000 year old baleen whale harpoons found in coastal Brazil and Korean petroglyphs that may reach back to 6000 BC, into the fuel of the Industrial Revolution. The Basques commercialized the hunt around 1026 AD and dominated it for five centuries, and sperm whale oil later lit city street lamps and lubricated textile mill machinery because it kept its viscosity in extreme temperatures. By the late 1930s, steam ships with explosive harpoons and factory ships with stern slipways were killing more than 50,000 whales a year.

The International Whaling Commission formed in 1946 to manage whale stocks for the industry, voted a moratorium in 1982 that took effect in 1986, and extended it indefinitely. The loopholes remain: lethal scientific whaling, Japan leaving the IWC in 2018, Norway's formal objection, Iceland's private fleet, and a South Korean bycatch rule under which one drowned minke whale can sell for up to $150,000. The episode ends with whale biology: methylmercury in whale meat, nutrient pumping that feeds phytoplankton, whale falls on the deep sea floor, and an estimated 9.1 million tons of carbon no longer stored in marine mammal bodies because of historical whaling.

• Inuit hunters tied inflated seal bladders to harpoons so a diving whale would drag a buoy and exhaust its oxygen.
• Soviet factory ship crews could earn bonuses of 25 to 60 percent of base pay and returned to brass bands and parades.
• The UN once gave the Indonesian village of Lamalera a motorized whaling ship, and villagers went back to rowboats after catching five sperm whales they could not preserve.
• Health authorities in the Faroe Islands, Japan, and St. Vincent have advised eating whale meat no more than once every three weeks.
• Osedax, the zombie worm, secretes acid to dissolve whale bones and reach the lipids inside.