You got me curious and I wasn’t satisfied with any of the existing responses to this. I agree that public sightings would certainly be correlated with whale population, but it would have plenty of other compounding factors, so it’s a pretty poor way to estimate population.
The Internation Whaling Commission will do sighting surveys do get an actual population estimate. This is with groups of specific people going out in boats and/or planes to spot them and using those numbers to extrapolate population number with certain confidence intervals. I’m not sure how they do the extrapolation, but I can’t be bothered looking into it further.
I did also find this plot using population estimates, including a projection to 2030 (made in 2019)
I’m guessing we would have the capability to gather more accurate measurements, but there’s probably just no funding for that and the current sighting surveys are good enough for what we need…
You got me curious and I wasn’t satisfied with any of the existing responses to this. I agree that public sightings would certainly be correlated with whale population, but it would have plenty of other compounding factors, so it’s a pretty poor way to estimate population.
The Internation Whaling Commission will do sighting surveys do get an actual population estimate. This is with groups of specific people going out in boats and/or planes to spot them and using those numbers to extrapolate population number with certain confidence intervals. I’m not sure how they do the extrapolation, but I can’t be bothered looking into it further.
I did also find this plot using population estimates, including a projection to 2030 (made in 2019)
I’m guessing we would have the capability to gather more accurate measurements, but there’s probably just no funding for that and the current sighting surveys are good enough for what we need…