ArticleScientific reports2022
Current global population size, post-whaling trend and historical trajectory of sperm whales.
Article in Scientific reports, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 11 papers.
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Who cites it
11 citing papers in PubMed.
- How toothed whales divide up the world: phylogeny and ecology shape life-history strategies of odontocetes.BMC ecology and evolution · 2026Article
- Mitochondrial structure despite nuclear panmixia: sex-specific dispersal dictates population structure in sperm whales.Heredity · 2026Article
- Drivers of Viral Diversity and Sharing in Marine Mammals.Molecular ecology · 2026Article
- Estimating energy expenditure of sperm whales living in social units.Conservation physiology · 2026Article
- The global biomass of mammals since 1850.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Integrating cultural dimensions in sperm whale (Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
- Migration to breeding areas by male sperm whales Physeter macrocephalus from the Northeast Atlantic Arctic.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Assessing changing baleen whale distributions and reported incidents relative to vessel activity in the Northwest Atlantic.PloS one · 2025Article
- Female, juvenile, and calf sperm whaleEcology and evolution · 2024Article
- High Arctic "hotspots" for sperm whales (Physeter macrocephalus) off western and northern Svalbard, Norway, revealed by multi-year Passive Acoustic Monitoring (PAM).Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Sperm whale clans and human societies.Royal Society open science · 2024Review
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The sperm whale lives in most deep ice-free waters of the globe. It was targeted during two periods of whaling peaking in the 1840's and 1960's. Using a habitat suitability model, we extrapolated estimates of abundance from visual and acoustic surveys to give a global estimate of 736,053 sperm whales (CV = 0.218) in 1993. Estimates of trends in the post-whaling era suggest that: whaling, by affecting the sex ratio and/or the social cohesion of females, reduced recovery rates well after whaling ceased; preferentially-targeted adult males show the best evidence of recovery, presumably due to recruitment from breeding populations; several decades post-whaling, sperm whale populations not facing much human impact are recovering slowly, but populations may be declining in areas with substantial anthropogenic footprint. A theta-logistic population model enhanced to simulate spatial structure and the non-removal impacts of whaling indicated a pre-whaling population of 1,949,698 (CV = 0.178) in 1710 being reduced by whaling, and then then recovering a little to about 844,761 (CV = 0.209) in 2022. There is much uncertainty about these numbers and trends. A larger population estimate than produced by a similar analysis in 2002 is principally due to a better assessment of ascertainment bias.
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