Bryde's Whale

A long-standing prohibition on the operation of factory ships north of 40°S except in the North Pacific north of 20°N meant that Bryde’s Whale populations largely escaped the consequences of whaling suffered by baleen whale species that feed in higher latitudes (Tønnessen and Johnson 1982), although this regulation was not respected by Soviet whaling fleets in the 1960s, nor by the pirate whaling ship Sierra in the 1970s. However, some subpopulations such as the East China Sea and South African inshore stocks may have been reduced by whaling (Omura 1977, IWC 1980).

Pelagic whaling for Bryde’s Whales was suspended in the North Pacific from 1980 following a ban by the IWC on most factory ship whaling, but catches continued from the coast of Japan and the Ogaswara (Bonin) Islands until 1987. Pelagic whaling resumed in the western North Pacific in 2000 under special permits and continued until 2016 but catches were limited to 50 per year (25 per year from 2014) (Allison 2017). Like most cetaceans, Bryde’s Whales are occasionally by-caught in fishing gear. Records of vessel strikes are generally rare. However, bycatch and vessel strikes are poorly reported throughout much of the range of these whales. Vessel strikes were frequently reported in the Hauraki Gulf region (0.9 whales/year) during 1994-2014 and were of concern for this small local subpopulation (Constantine et al. 2015). No collisions were reported there in 2016-17, which may reflect the success of new voluntary measures to avoid collisions.

There have been artisanal fisheries in the Philippines (until 1997) and Indonesia (Barnes 1991) taking small “Bryde’s Whales” (Dolar et al. 1994), but the catches consisted at least partly of Omura's Whales (LeDuc and Dizon 2002).

The very small, apparently isolated, subpopulation of Bryde’s Whales in the northeastern Gulf of Mexico may be threatened by vessel traffic, commercial fishing, and oil and gas activities (Soldevilla et al. 2017, Corkeron et al. 2017). The taxonomic status and geographical range of possible local subpopulations of small-type Bryde’s Whales in the tropics have not yet been determined, and therefore it is difficult to assess potential threats to them.