Anti-Whaling Group Using Drones To Find Whalers

FatLittleMonkey writes "Anti-whaling group Sea Shepherd is using aerial drones to find and track factory ships used by Japanese whalers. The group claims the tactic shortened the Japanese whaling season last year by a month, saving 200 whales, and this year they've spotted the factory ship even earlier."

In other news salmon and tuna are running out

[tp1024]

As well as lots of other species. No fuss about those.

Why is it that those guys still act like it's 1968? We have different problems these days!

What do you spend your time doing?

[thegoldenear]

There's a lot of people on the planet, and so a lot of time being spent by them, why does the small amount of time these people spend grate on you that much? What do you spend your time doing?

Re:In other news salmon and tuna are running out

[puppybeard]

There is fuss about both of those, perhaps you aren't aware of it.
http://www.nasco.int/ [nasco.int] for Salmon

http://www.tunaresearch.org/ [tunaresearch.org] for Tuna

And you forgot cod: http://www.greenpeace.org.uk/media/press-releases/greenpeace-ship-sails-to-save-north-sea-cod [greenpeace.org.uk]

And to be fair to them, while I don't see myself joining their fight, at least they have the balls to stand up for something, sure there are problems in the world, but most people don't bother addressing those problems either. Apathy, not whale conservationists, is our biggest enemy.

Re:In other news salmon and tuna are running out

[axx]

In other news, Sea Shepherd are a conservation group, they defend all marine species, including Tuna (for which they have been doing a major Mediterranean campaign). You should check the width of their action before pointing out “boo, there are other fish species endangered, so you get no points for protecting one and not all of them!”.

Interesting that while TFA is about clever use of technology in a space where it's not obvious, most slashdotters seem more interested in bashing the group of people using this technology for not following their (very traditional and anthropocentric) view of life. Nice.

Re:So people really have this much time and money?

[luther349]

we have the biggest hydro dam in the word able to run most of the usa on its own. its just they never expanded it on that scale but it does run a large chunk of it. and that's just 1. i got 2 250 watt panels and a couple dc battery's plus a 600 watt turbine mounted on a fucking camper and it pulls plenty of power. enough to run pretty much everything. the problem is not with alt energy being pratcal because it is very much so its removing the power hungry devices from your life. that 3 video card computer drawing 1500 watts just isn't needed. even the most powerful laptops draw under 150 watts. and netbooks 35. with 450 amp hrs on my 2 batters i can run even the gaming laptop all night long and still have power. and if theirs wind not even drain the battery's. and most cases if theirs no sun there is wind. its just a matter of using low power devices. led lighting etc.

Re:So people really have this much time and money?

[Discopete]

Paul Watson was asked to leave Greenpeace because when GP was attempting to get charitable status with the US IRS, the IRS told them "No property damage". Later that week, Watson disarmed a harp seal hunter who was clubbing a seal to death and tossed the club into the ocean. That is considered property damage and the board asked him to resign.

A few years later, one of the other founders of GP decided that they had become too soft, left and joined Sea Shepherd.

I believe everyone on board SS's ships are vegetarian, if not Vegan.

Re:So people really have this much time and money?

[SuricouRaven]

There are plenty of nuclear waste disposal options that are cheap, reliable and safe. They are just politically problematic.

The easiest would be to just put it in boxes and throw it down the Mariana Trench. There is no possibility of anyone getting it back, and if it ever comes back up naturally it'll be long after safe decay. The problem is political: Throwing nuclear waste in the ocean violates international law, and for some reason no politician wants to start the process of changing that.

Re:So people really have this much time and money?

[Runaway1956]

There's a narrow line between "endangered" and "not endangered". The seas have grown barren, compared to 300 years ago. With five years of sea duty behind me, I can state that whale sightings are rare, dolphins are only somewhat less rare.

It's a bit tough to find tales of life at sea 300 or more years ago, that don't include a lot of superstitious nonsense, but it seems to have been common for ships to be constantly trailed by dolphins, and whales were common sights. With each passing decade, there are fewer and fewer.

The only two explanations for that, that make any sense, are over hunting, and pollution.

We really need to allow the ocean, and the populations found in the ocean to recover. Why wait until any given species is actually "endangered" before trying to conserve resources?

Re:Looks like drones aren't just for governments.

[YrWrstNtmr]

Think my numbers are off by a lot? I'll be happy to read any citations you might find on the subject. But, no matter what numbers we might find, we'll just come back to the fact that in olden days, iron men in wooden ships went out to take a modest number of whales from the sea. Today, men go out in huge iron factory ships to process entire pods of whales.

By 1500 most of the desirable whales in the Bay of Biscay were gone. [marinebio.net] The large sailing ships ventured further and further away – as far as Newfoundland.
However, by the early 1600 and 1700s [ehow.com] commercial merchant ship owners realized the profits of the whaling trade and a shift began toward large scale whaling by companies.
1500-1800, Europeans (Dutch, English, Basques, etc) were actively fishing the Atlantic, and not just single ships, but fleets of a couple dozen or more [wikipedia.org].

We have been doing this for a long, long time.