Subject: Blue Whale Somebody with knowledge of whale populations off India and Sri Lanka coastline - please post additional info. This is from ongoing IWC meeting in Monaco. ______________________________________________________________________ Blue whales, the largest mammals on earth, may be rallying from near-extinction but it will be years before anyone can be certain, scientists say. The International Whaling Commission (IWC), which is holding its annual meeting in Monaco, estimates around 460 blue whales live in the southern oceans, based on a study completed in 1991. A few hundred more may live in the northern hemisphere. ``There are probably fewer than 1,000 left,'' said Sidney Holt, a marine biologist at the International League for the Protection of Cetaceans. ``They're so rare, they're hardly ever seen.'' In a recent 10-year study of their population, only 30 blue whales were spotted even though they need to surface often, taking breaths every two minutes on average, he said. At the start of the century, there were probably 250,000 blue whales, which can measure more than 35 metres (100 feet). ``It's very difficult to find out if whale stocks are increasing or decreasing. It will probably be another 10-15 years before we know if blue whales are increasing or not,'' said Holt, a longtime adviser to the scientific committee. ``The rarer and more dispersed whales are, the less accurately they can be counted. The large whales have been protected from hunters for three decades. Pollution, depletion of the ozone layer and ultraviolet radiation pose the biggest threats today. The blue is a member of the balleen, or toothless, whale family. Of the balleen whales, which feed mainly on tiny shrimp, the only abundant species is the minke. The IWC estimates there are around 760,000 minke, which are hunted today despite a 1982 moratorium on commercial whaling pending a study of whale stocks. Over 1,000 minke were killed in the past 12 months. ``The only whales we know have been increasing are the grey whales and bowhead whales,'' Holt said. The other family of large whales are the toothed whales, the biggest of which is the sperm whale. Scientists say sperm whales are hard to track because they surface less often than balleen whales. They can dive miles below the ocean surface, staying down for up to one hour at a time. FWD from Reuters Web