"In a bid to boost the whale watching economy, a new law bars Greenlanders from taking humpback whales near the capital."
"Like his father before him, Anton Egede hunts whales and fish for a living. As the captain of the Sori, a 17-meter boat named after his wife, he sails out from Greenland’s capital, Nuuk, searching for the riches of the Greenland Sea. While his father was primarily a whale hunter turned cod fisherman, Egede is a fisherman who, when given a chance to supplement his income, will harpoon a minke or humpback whale. In 2019 and 2020, Egede killed three humpbacks in the fjord outside Nuuk, selling each for up to US $16,000. But a new law, passed in April, means that harvest will no longer be possible.
A fully grown humpback whale is around 15 meters long and can weigh up to 30 tonnes. Humpbacks are photogenic animals, jumping out of the water and hitting the surface with their bluish-gray tails. Watching humpbacks is great for sightseeing tourists. And that’s why Sermersooq, the largest municipality in Greenland, has banned killing humpback whales in Nuuk Fjord. The decision was welcomed by the nascent tourism industry, but angered the small number of remaining whale hunters in the city, like Egede.
For about 4,000 years, the Inuit in Greenland sustainably hunted humpback whales. Then, mainland Europeans, in their pursuit of whale oil, pushed the whale’s population to the edge of extinction. Killing humpback whales was banned in Greenland in 1986, but in 2010 Greenlanders regained the right to hunt humpbacks with a quota of nine whales per year."
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