Fróðskaparrit - 01.01.1991, Page 33

STUDIES ON THE LONG-FINNED PILOT WHALE
37
pilot whale from this study can be said to be
11.5 years old and 405 cm long, has a value
of 6 skinn, weighs about 800 kg, 430 kg of
which is made up of meat and blubber for
human consumption.
Introduction
In Faroese pilot whaling, entire schools of
the long-finned pilot whale, Globicephala
melas (Traill), are caught in a drive fishery.
When the schools contain both sexes and all
states of reproduction, this provides an ex-
cellent opportunity to examine the internal
school structure as well as a wide range of bi-
ological parameters.
Through the centuries, long-finned pilot
whales caught in the Faroes have been
described several times, but a thorough,
comprehensive investigation of their biology
had, until recently, never been carried out.
From 1976, pilot whales began to be exa-
mined for the purpose of biological study. In
1978, 3 pods were examined by Moore, Hut-
ton and Cole (1978, 1979), and from 1978 to
1986, 10 schools were examined as well as oc-
casional individual animals (Table 1), Three
of the pods from 1984 were incorporated
into the investigations of G. Desportes
(1985).
Additional information came from J. S.
Joensen, Director of the Fisheries Laborato-
ry in Tórshavn, and is incorporated into this
material; namely the catches in Hvalba on
August 28, 1978 and September 7, 1983 (Ta-
ble 1), and data on 34 foetuses from
1958-1964 (Table 3).
Schools are usually monospecific, but
several times a year mixed schools occur. The
other species sometimes found with pilot
whales through the plady period were the
bottlenose dolphin (Tursiops truncatus), and
the Atlantic white-sided dolphin (Lagenor-
hynchus acutus), (Bloch, Desportes, Mourit-
sen, Skaaning and Stefansson, in print, a).
Mixed schools are not an uncommon pheno-
menon, and other species, such as the killer
whale (Orcinus orca), have also been ob-
served together with pilot whales (Bloch and
Lockyer, 1988).
From July 1986 to July 1988 all schools
caught were examined comprehensively by
an international team (Desportes, 1990). It
was therefore important to assess the materi-
al already sampled, partly as background for
the new investigations, and partly to find out
which new items it was necessary to include
in the 1986-1988 investigations in order to
gain a complete picture of the biology pat-
tern of the pilot whale in the Faroes.
Material and methods
The grind message. When a decision was
made to drive a school of pilot whales, the
local sheriff telephoned the message to the
museum. In most cases the killing was
finished by the time of arrival at the loca-
tion, and the whales had been moved to a
quay for assessment and partition. A
thorough description of the various stages of
the Faroese pilot whale drive is treated by
Bloch, Desportes, Hoydal and Jean (1990a).
Sampling time. The team was made up of
only a few people (usually from one to four),
so this limited the amount of possible sam-
ples which could be taken on any one occa-
sion.
Depending on the size of the school, there
were usually between 2 and 8 hours available
for biological sampling, and this had to stop
when the partition began. Whales are taken
for food, so to avoid spoiling the meat, the