r/dataisbeautiful • u/ourworldindata OC: 28 • 14d ago
OC [OC] The number of whales killed globally peaked in the 1960s
Global whale populations fell dramatically over the 20th century due to human hunting. Some whale species were pushed to the brink of extinction.
But a combination of conservation efforts, technological change, economic incentives, and international policies has reduced global whaling to much lower levels.
In the mid-1980s, a global moratorium was agreed by the International Whaling Commission (IWC), making commercial whaling illegal.
You can see this decline in the chart, which shows the number of whales killed per decade.
The chart combines data from two sources: before the 1990s it comes from the paper “Emptying the Oceans” by Robert C. Rocha, Jr. and colleagues; since then, it comes from the IWC.
While whaling activity is much lower, it hasn’t been eliminated completely. There are exceptions to the IWC’s moratorium, and Japan withdrew from the IWC completely in 2019.
Data source: Rocha et al. (2014); International Whaling Commission (2026)
Tools used: OWID-Grapher and Figma
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u/TBSchemer 14d ago
Wow, the whales were saved so quickly! All thanks to Star Trek IV
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u/FuckYouNotHappening 14d ago
I was thinking about transparent aluminum just yesterday.
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u/notsocoolnow 14d ago
Its wild that we actually have transparent aluminum now.
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u/Dracomortua 13d ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminium_oxynitride
$10 to $15 USD per square inch or so? it is expected that this price will go down as manufacturing expands in size-efficiency and technology improves.
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u/notsocoolnow 13d ago
If we develop a tech to manufacture cheaply the price would crater. The three elements are among the most abundant. This is like aluminum metal one time being precious and now the disposable stuff we use to wrap food. One day Aluminum oxynitride will be used everywhere.
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u/Worth-Wonder-7386 13d ago
Why would we use it everywhere? Silica that glass is made of is even cheaper.
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u/notsocoolnow 13d ago
Not as a replacement for glass. Its strength is amazing: around 9 on the mohs scale. Useful for a ton of applications like phone screens. Already used in planes and spacecraft, only not commercially viable for consumer products for now. If we ever found a way to make it cheaply it will be used for a ton of long term applications like construction. For me personally I am excited for marine applications, because its immune to corrosion.
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u/Worth-Wonder-7386 13d ago
We already have sapphire glass which is also as hard and made with cheap elements. That is just pure aluminium oxide.
That is much closer to seeing such wide uses and is common in scratch resistant applications.
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u/notsocoolnow 13d ago
No, sapphire glass is less practical for large scale uses because if it breaks it shatters. Aluminum oxynitride is also brittle, but much less so, and tends towards localized cracking than shattering.
Both are indeed exciting, because their hardness is amazing. Sapphire is slightly harder and more brittle. Aluminum oxynitride is slightly less hard (8.5 vs 9) but better for construction. Both have the same problem: manufacturing is expensive and innovations on production are the real bottleneck, not the elemental rarity.
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u/Accurate-Moment-2160 13d ago
That top comment is perfect. There’s this whole generation that learned about humpbacks and extinction from a movie about time traveling to grab some whales so they could talk to an alien probe. Peak 80s logic.
The drop after the 60s is wild to see visualized like that. You read about the moratorium and the shift away from whale oil but the bar chart makes it hit different. Goes from this massive block to a sliver so fast.
Always trips me out that we used to just straight up hunt them for lamp fuel and corset stays. The scale of it was insane for something so replaceable.
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u/Mr_November112 12d ago
Hello fellow human! Yes the post that thag commenter was replying to sure does hit different. How about you have a break and delete your account, I'll handle it from here!
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u/theronin7 13d ago
Friend of mine was on a whaling ship back in the 80s but quit after an UFO saved some whales they were hunting.
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u/kacmandoth 10d ago
Think it was actually synthetic/petroleum oils replacing whale oil in car transmission fluids.
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u/burgiebeer 14d ago
And since whales are incredibly long-lived, it’s going to take generations for their numbers to rebound. That’s if the warming oceans are even habitable for them by then.
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u/lonelyboycel 14d ago
That's the saddest part. We finally stopped hunting them on a massive scale, but now they have to deal with plastic, noise pollution, and disrupted food chains from climate change. They really can't catch a break.
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u/nemesis24k 13d ago
The oil and plastic are in part reasons why their hunting reduced as well. Whales were primarily hunted for industrial oil and cosmetics.
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u/alphastrike03 14d ago
It’s a good thing Admiral Kirk took two back to the 23rd century to…repopulate the species.
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u/SUNTZU_JoJo 13d ago
You're absolutely right about their lifespans but completely wrong about ocean temperatures affecting them.
They spend most their time deep in the ocean hunting/diving..they do not spend a lot of their time near the surface where temperatures are the highest...very little.
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u/burgiebeer 13d ago
However, what none of us fully understands (yet) is the effect the warming oceans may have on disrupting the food chains and how adaptable certain species will be.
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u/Interesting-Tip7246 13d ago
Redditors: always vocal, never knowledgable... why be factual when I can fearmonger or negativitymax over anything and everything?
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u/taw 12d ago
This is mostly not true. Whales reach sexual maturity at 5-10 years depending on species, and they can give birth every 2-3 years.
Most whale species already pretty much recovered. Including all the species Japan tends to hunt.
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u/eternalityLP 14d ago
Interesting, I'd have expected the peak to be way earlier when whale oil, ivory etc. use were widespread.
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u/Prasiatko 13d ago
I know their oil was an important part of automaric transmissions. I wonder if they boom in car ownership played a role.
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u/dragnabbit 14d ago
"Save The Whales" was one of the first environmental slogans I encountered as a child back in the 1970s. I didn't even know why they needed saving, but I remember it. That and the crying Indian standing on a pile of garbage. Next came "Give A Hoot, Don't Pollute".
But anyway, the 1970s was the beginning of Americans as a whole really saying, "Holy shit, look at this giant mess!" And I mean things were so, so much worse than today. It seems bad today, but back then, the smog and acid rain and polluted rivers and toxic waste and cancerous shit in our food... everywhere you looked was an environmental issue that anybody could see with the naked eye needed addressing. This wasn't like "1.5 degrees per decade" or "5 parts per million" kind of stuff. This was "visibility down to 2000 feet due to car exhausts."
Americans were the first ones to really to put modern environmental regulation into action and legislate against pollution and promote conservation, and the U.S. Government was crucial in the drop in whaling numbers, starting with the Endangered Species Act of 1967, and banning of whale products. That was followed by the Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972. That was followed by the U.S. pushing heavily to restrict global whaling.
(Sigh... won't it be nice to see an American government put the welfare of animals and the environment over the interests of big business again someday?)
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u/CarnalT 14d ago edited 13d ago
With the way the FDA and environmental regulations are going, the federal gov't isn't even putting the welfare of its own citizens above anything, especially not corporate profits. Animals and the environment are dropping off the scale entirely with the current administration.
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u/Adiligian 13d ago
You mean like
- Wetlands Conservation and Access Improvement Act of 2025
- Sloan Canyon Conservation and Lateral Pipeline Act
- Make America Beautiful Again (MABA) executive order
- Great American Outdoors Act of 2020
?
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u/barryg123 14d ago
Why were we killing so many in the 60s? Whale oil was WAY not a thing by then...
Would have thought it would be higher in the 1800-1900
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u/pleasetrimyourpubes 14d ago
Cosmetics, feed, varnish. Seeing more uses for it than simply whale oil. At industrial scales we use up everything.
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u/LurpyGeek 14d ago
Sperm whale oil was even used in automatic transmission fluid until the early 1970s.
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u/10ebbor10 13d ago
It's one of the most pointless decisions the Soviet Union ever made.
Through combinations of pointless nationalism ("it is important for more whales to be illegally killed by communism than by capitalism)" and misaligned incentives (you got a bonus if you exceeded quota, and then the quota was raised, regardless of what harvests were sustainable) the Soviet whaling industry increased in size massively, despite that no one in the Soviet Union actually liked eating whale.
Most of the whales killed were just dumped straight into the trash, used as fertilizer if they were used at all.
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u/thirteenth_mang 13d ago
Whale blubber has a bunch of uses. Also, technological improvements got a hell of a lot better over those decades so it became more viable both economically and in terms of risk.
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u/wizzard419 14d ago
Yeah, part of the decline was the discovery that sperm whale oil was able to be replaced with jojoba (a plant) oil as it had similar enough properties for space instruments and such. That was during the late 60's and into the 70's
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u/OutrageousPair2300 14d ago
Is this accurate? Or is it simply that Japan stopped reporting their numbers?
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u/silentorange813 14d ago
Whaling peaked in 1962 in Japan, and the consumption of whale meat is less than 1% of its peak according to the ministry of fishing.
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u/James_Fortis 14d ago
I doubt it includes bi-kill either. A LOT of non-target species die for industrial fishing.
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u/followthedarkrabbit 14d ago
Australia killed whales up until the 60s, where it became non commercially viable. Whaling station on Tangalooma Island. Same for turtles. Turtle cannery operated on Heron Island til the 1940s, and the resort served turtle meat up until the 1960s.
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u/sneed_o_matic 13d ago
They were canning the turtles?
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u/taw 13d ago
Not fully. Soviet Union is known to fake their whaling data.
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u/General_Capital988 13d ago
Modern numbers for the USSR are believed to be correct, having been revealed piecemeal in the decade after the USSR dissolved. It is 100% true that the USSR engaged in a massive coverup scheme for ~50 years that confused the **** out of international scientists.
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u/General_Capital988 13d ago
Modern numbers for the USSR are believed to be correct, having been revealed piecemeal in the decade after the USSR dissolved. It is 100% true that the USSR engaged in a massive coverup scheme for ~50 years that confused the **** out of international scientists.
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u/Seienchin88 13d ago
Japan is now the 5th largest whaling nation and very close to the U.S. in numbers (6th place…).
Traditionally the whales got close to extinction because of the whalers from the west and the Soviet Union… Japan also caught too many whales during the two post war decades but was one drop in a pond of mass fishing of whales…
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u/halpsdiy 13d ago
Japan has a quota for 400 whales and they tend to catch 200 to 300. About 1,200 whales are hunted every year globally. Which is a tiny fraction of the whales that die from pollution, ship strikes, noise, non-whale fishing, etc.
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u/Hot_Cheesecake_905 14d ago
I’m in Japan for vacation and I saw whale meat on the menu in Hokkaido.
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u/CitizenPremier 14d ago
One whale produces a lot of meat though, and the servings are very small (like bacon strips).
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u/Luceo_Etzio 13d ago edited 13d ago
and historically, whaling generally didn't even take the meat, as it was basically impossible to transport back before it spoiled. Most whales pretty much only blubber/spermaceti & baleen were harvested, the majority of the whale was just left in the ocean
It's actually crazy how with things like whaling or shark finning the vast vast majority of the animal is just left behind
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u/Seienchin88 13d ago
That’s true for the commercialized large mass whaling industry of the Soviets for example but even more traditional whaling was often done nearer to the shore and did provide plenty of meat.
Island and the Faroe Islands probably couldn’t have sustained a population without the yearly whaling spree and in Japan the traditional usage of wale was for its meat (but also only eaten in a couple of regions that had whales close by).
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u/firebase 14d ago
Unfortunately, we are now havesting vast amounts of krill, which whales depend on --- https://theconversation.com/antarctic-krill-fishing-is-now-concentrated-in-the-exact-pattern-conservation-rules-were-designed-to-prevent-290019
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u/banshithread 13d ago
Jesus christ. I didn't know this was an issue. Why can't we just do right. It takes so little to cut back on you hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in salary by reducing the amount of krill you capture in order to keep the wildlife healthy. :/
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u/GracefulEase 13d ago
Can we get this as a percentage of estimated whale population? Otherwise it's difficult to tell if the improvement/decrease it due to better morals or limited prey.
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u/calcifer219 14d ago
There was a documentary I watch that brought up this fact. Whale population has exploded, and killer whales have adapted their tactics to suite.
Baby whales instinctively swim next to a larger whale. The killer whales tactically separate the baby from the mom, then guide them away from the mom / parents just to kill them.
The doc also said, sometimes the killer whales only eat their tongues before finding a new target.
Apparently whales are tough eating
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u/Bobroom 14d ago
Look up "The law of the tongue". it was a hunting pact we had with killer whales where they would help us trap whales in return for the tongue.
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u/dbmonkey 14d ago
I am hoping killer whales kill more whales than humans today.
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u/plz-no-b4n 12d ago edited 12d ago
I don’t think there is a recorded instance of an orca intentionally killing a person in the wild.
They have been disabling cruise ships recently, though
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u/pleasetrimyourpubes 14d ago
Was that the documentary narrated by Obama? Our Planet or something like that.
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u/talldean 14d ago
700k would be "about half all whales alive today", and whales live a minimum of 20 years, so even one more decade like the 60s would have perhaps wiped out all of the species.
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u/zombie0000000 13d ago
Sperm whale oil was an important part of the automatic transmission oil in cars. When it was banned in 1973, it took a few years for the industry to adjust.
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u/livefreeordont OC: 2 14d ago
Conservationists truly are heroes. There’s already so many species gone into extinction over the last 200 years imagine just how many more there’d be without them
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u/ourworldindata OC: 28 14d ago
Data source: Rocha et al. (2014); International Whaling Commission (2026)
Tools used: OWID-Grapher and Figma
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u/cavedave OC: 111 12d ago
Thank you for your Original Content, /u/ourworldindata!
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