By John DeFore

Certain species of large whales, particularly humpbacks, are less threatened now than they were when whaling bans took effect in the ’80s, according to a new report from the International Union for Conservation of Nature.

The Geneva-based IUCN, which describes itself as “the world’s oldest and largest global environmental network” and counts nearly eleven thousand scientists around the world as volunteers, is the author of a Red List which for four decades has kept tabs on the status of plant and animal species worldwide, focusing on conveying “the urgency and scale of conservation problems to the public and policy makers, and to motivate the global community to try to reduce species extinctions.”

In the 2008 Red List, the humpback’s situation is described as one of “Least Concern,” meaning its odds of extinction are low, although two subpopulations are still considered “Endangered.” (This page provides an exhaustive explanation of the organization’s approach to categorizing risk.) The group attributes the whales’ resurgence to legal protections against commercial hunting, though it says whales do face the threat of accidental entanglement in fishing gear, strandings caused by military sonar, and the various effects of climate change.

The news, unsurprisingly, is not all good. The latest Red List finds that “Most small coastal and freshwater cetaceans,” — a category that includes dolphins and porpoise — “are moving closer to extinction.” The IUCN also notes that the overall picture could be worse than reported, since they don’t have enough data to make accurate assessments of nearly half of cetacean species.

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