Talk:Gray Whale

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Gray Whale was a good article nominee, but did not meet the good article criteria at the time. There are suggestions below for improving the article. Once these are addressed, the article can be renominated. Editors may also seek a reassessment of the decision if they believe there was a mistake. Reviewed version: February 7, 2007

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Moved content from Whale to be merged

California Gray Whale: It belongs to the Order Baleen therefore it is a filter feeder. It can be 35 to 40 feet long, has a cigar-shaped body, and its color is dark with white patches. It has no dorsal fin but has a ridge on its back formed by a row of knuckles. Its flukes are braod and can be up to 10 feet across. The females give birth to babies up to 15 feet long. It typically migrates in the months of June and October to the north in the Berling and Chukchi Seas. It eats krill and Squid in the Northern seas. It migrates south in Autumn at a speed to 5 to 6 m.p.h for 6,000 miles to Baja, California. Thenit migrates back notth around April to the Artic region.

I think this is all covered now. Pete/Pcb21 (talk) 08:38, 19 May 2004 (UTC)

Contents 1 Gray Whales actually are hunted 2 Required: Shell controversy 3 Conservation status 4 Failing Good Article 5 Oligocene?!?!?!

[edit] Gray Whales actually are hunted

Although many published accounts state that gray whales have not been hunted since the IWC banned commercial whaling, in fact hunting of gray whales has continued on a limited basis since the 1940s, under the Soviet Union's (later, Russia's) exception to the commercial hunting ban for "native/subsistence purposes." Specifically, the Chuckchee people of eastern Siberia have hunted the whales, ostensibly as part of their cultural tradition of hunting and eating whales. There has also been a (much smaller) hunt of gray whales conducted by native peoples on the west coast of North America in recent years.

Both hunts have been subject to periodic protests by those opposed to whaling. In the 1980s, the organization Greenpeace staged a "raid" on a Siberian settlement, announcing to reporters afterwards that they had obtained evidence that the facility was actually using the whale meat to feed fur animals being raised on a large-scale fur-farming operation. Reviewing the history of the annual Russian gray whale catch shows that the number of whales taken increased dramatically during the years when "collective farming" was introduced to the area by Stalin during the 1940s, and has remained high since then. Although Russian authorities denied in the 1980s that whale meat was being fed to fur animals, they reversed themselves in recent years and admitted that that was, in fact, happening (though continuing to claim that this should be allowed under the "aboriginal/subsistence whaling" exception to the IWC's commercial whaling ban).

I'll try to dig up some actual sources on this, and update the page, over the next few weeks.

-- John Callender 18:40, 30 May 2005 (UTC)

Thanks John. Data on this would be very interesting. It would also be relevant to Aboriginal whaling#Russian whaling - all we currently have there is Russians in the remote east Siberian province of Chukotka are permitted to take up to 140 Gray Whales from the North-East Pacific population each year. Pcb21| Pete 19:31, 30 May 2005 (UTC)

Thanks for the update. Pcb21| Pete 08:05, 31 May 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Required: Shell controversy

This article needs to talk about the Shell Kamchatka oil drilling controversy that has been in the news over the last few months. Pcb21| Pete 08:05, 31 May 2005 (UTC)No never

[edit] Conservation status

What is the grey whale's conservation status? It says low risk here, but the highest risk over at whaling

[edit] Failing Good Article

I've assessed the article against the Good Article criteria and regrettably had to fail it. The principal reasons are as follows:

• The 'physical description' is markedly incomplete. I'm sure more could be added to other sections (see Blue Whale for a very complete whale species article), but this is the main area where the article falls short in terms of content.
• The article is insufficiently referenced. A good number of references, and preferably inline citations, must be added for this article to become a Good Article. As it stands, virtually none of the main points of the article are verifiable.

Regards, The Land 19:05, 7 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Oligocene?!?!?!

hi people!!!!! —Preceding unsigned comment added by 205.148.53.200 (talk)
Well, I don't know who wrote it, but it contradicts every source I have here: According to the Encyclopedia of mammals, the gray whales exist only from the middle of the Miocene. According to "Cladistic analysis and a revised classification of fossil and recent mysticetes", METTE ELSTRUP STEEMAN, 2005, the gray whales speciated after the Balaenidae. Oldest? Oligocene? It certainly needs sourcing. Yaron from the hebrew wikipedia, 11:24, 31 October 2007 (UTC) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 88.155.181.22 (talk)

Yeah - 30 million years old for this particular species seems way out of the range of possibility. The oldest of the Mysticetes seem to date back to 34 million years ago, http://www.kanazawa-med.ac.jp/~hum-sci/Fordyce.htm, and I don't see any evidence that suggests they should be considered the same species as Gray Whales. I'm going to delete that portion of the article - if someone would like to put it back up, please provide a citation. Wevets (talk) 20:40, 6 May 2008 (UTC)