008 How to Count Whales

A frequent question from the interested laymen is: “how many whales are there?”. The answer is not trivial and it is of utmost importance, not only for purely academic reasons, but also for the management and conservation of the different species. For example, it is essential to know the abundance of a species at different point in time to be able to determine if there is a decline or an increase that would indicate a potential large variation in ecosystem characteristics. From the mark-recapture technique to line-transect sampling we try to summarize and describe the most important techniques for determine the numbers of cetaceans.