Whale of an error

-- (Credit: Rustam Vania)A GIANT question mark casts a shadow
over Norway's whale census, Recent
revelations in a confidential document
from the Norwegian Computing Centre
and the University of Oslo disclose
errors in the software used to estimate
the North Atlantic minke whale population. Norway is in favour of a resumption of whale killing. The erroneous figures were used in 1993 to
justify the country's defiance of an
international ban on whale culling
imposed by the International Whaling
Commission (IWC).

Similar inaccuracies have also been
detected in Norway's mathematical
calculations which form the basis of
the software program. A damning
indictment comes from Justin Cook, a
member of the iwc's scientific committee, who says that when he tried to
reproduce Norway's minke whale population estimates, he got a lower figure 6f
53,000 whales compared with the
official figure of 86,700. "The effect of
reduced, population estimates would
be to reduce the possible catching
levels," he says.