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The Yushin Maru - Source: Reuters -
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New Zealand and Australian scientists will set sail for Antarctica on Friday to show you don't have to kill whales to study them.
They are collaborating on a six-week field trip, the first instalment in the Australian federal government's $14 million whale research program.
Commercial whaling is banned but Japan hunts whales in the name of scientific research, measuring the carcasses and assessing the stomach contents and dead foetuses.
Australian Environment Minister Peter Garrett, who will farewell the researchers in the New Zealand capital of Wellington on Friday, says the harpoons were not necessary.
"We do not need to kill whales to study them," he says.
The research program has the motto of "respect for the oceans and the creatures that make their home in the vast waters of our planet".
The research ship, the Tangaroa, will head to Antarctica's Ross Sea, which is located south of - and claimed by - New Zealand.
Japanese whalers are hunting whales this summer but not in the Ross Sea.
The researchers will investigate the feeding behaviour of whales and their interaction with pack ice, along with the population structure of whale populations.
Nick Gales, the expedition's chief scientist and leader of the Australian Antarctic Division's Australian Marine Mammal Centre, was confident the trip would show whales did not have to be dead to be studied.
"You can always come up with some question that will require an animal to be killed for something or other," Gales says.
"But the question is whether that is a critical issue for the management and conservation of whales."
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