Fróðskaparrit - 01.01.1992, Page 29

A NOTE ABOUT ...
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While the Tórshavn school was landed,
another school was also being driven
towards Vestmanna on the southwestem
side of the same island (Fig. 1). Eighty one
whales from this school were landed while
around 30 whales of various sizes could not
be beached and were released. They were
later reported leaving Vestmannasund at
night, swimming in a northerly direction. It
was decided that this second school should
also be sampled systematically in an
attempt to determine whether the male-
only school could have been a part of this
bigger school.
The Vestmanna school had a more usual
composition, including 23 immature or
mature males (length range 185-580 cm)
and 57 immature, pregnant, lactating, or
resting females ranging in length from 180
to 472 cm. The animals were measured and
examined for reproductive condition, all
the foetuses, some gonads, the stomachs
from 5 mature males were collected. The
same tissue samples as mentioned above
were also collected from 61 males and
females.
The day before, November 17, 1989, a
school was landed at the southem side of
Hvannasund (Fig. 1). No escapers were
reported from the drive. This school con-
tained 131 males and females of various
sizes and had not been examined by scien-
tists. The meat and blubber were shared
among the participants of the drive follow-
ing the normal procedure (Sanderson,
1991) and subsequently taken care of in the
traditional way, i.e., salted, air-dried or
frozen.
The male-only pod landed in Tórshavn
could have been part of the Hvannasund
school.This hypothesis was checked by
collecting muscle samples from as many
Hvannasund animals as possible to com-
pare with the Tórshavn samples. The fol-
lowing days effort was made to contact the
persons having received a share and they
were asked to send a piece of meat to the
Museum of Natural History. In this way,
meat samples were obtained from around
40 animals.
Further details and results from the
examination of the male-only schooi in
Tórshavn
The age determination (Table 1) was per-
formed by counting growth layer groups
(yr) in both dentine and cementum on thin
sections of decalcified teeth prepared as
described by Bloch et al. (in press, b).
Sexual maturity (Table 1) was deter-
mined by histological examination of tes-
ticular tissue as described by Desportes et
al. (in press), according to the proportion of
seminiferous tubules being mature (0%
mature tubules, immature; mature and
immature tubules coexist, maturing; 100%
mature tubules, mature).
The eight stomachs (Table 1) contained
only hard remains of prey. They were most-
ly beaks from the cephalopode, Todarodes
sagittatus. The stomach of two animals
also contained a few remains of blue whit-
ing, Micromesistius poutassou.
All eight whale stomachs were infested
by the nematode Anisakis simplex, at dif-
ferent stage of maturity, and by cysts of the