1 Are whales eating too many fish, revisited.

Has “scientific research has shown that whales consume huge quantities of fish making the issue a matter of food security for coastal nations”, as stated in the St Kitts & Nevis Declaration of the International Whaling Commission? Building on other recent reviews, this paper assesses recent work presented by scientists in support of this view. Significant flaws are found in Murase et al’s (2007) recent publication on prey preference in two Balaenoptera species in the waters off Japan. The results of the research program on the influence of marine mammals on fisheries in the Barents Sea are compared with other Norwegian research on the same system. A model that includes fish and fisheries provides a good representation of what has happened in the system, and does so without including any information from marine mammal predation. Models based on the assumption that marine mammal predation is important in the system fail. This suggests that the influence of marine mammals on the fish-fisheries system in the Barents Sea is trivial. Where good data are available, there is no evidence to support the contention that marine mammal predation presents an ecological issue for fisheries. Suggestions that fisheries problems can be attributed to whales consuming huge quantities of fish distract attention from the root causes of these problems: fisheries mismanagement