Remember this summer when the spy plane landed at McMurdo to get surveillance shots on the Japanese “researchers” hunting whales? Now there is scandal because the crew may have stolen a ton of it and shipped it home to themselves, thus cutting into the profits of the researchers/whalers, who know the value of whale meat in Japan.

This whole article is fantastic. For start, it’s in the BBC News section of “Science/Nature” (rather than a “Politics/Business” section) and it just gets better, including that the whaling vessels are affiliated with the Japanese “whale research body the Institute of Cetacean Research (ICR)”, and that the crew was claiming whale meat as “cardboard” to get it through Japanese Customs.

From BBC:

 

Japan to probe whale meat ‘theft’

By Justine Parker BBC News, Tokyo

Greenpeace’s Junichi Sato presented the allegedly stolen meat to reporters

Officials in Tokyo are to investigate claims that shipping crews stole a tonne of meat from Japan’s whale hunt.

Documents seen by the BBC confirm that public prosecutors will examine corruption allegations lodged by the environmental group Greenpeace.

It says crew members posted boxes of stolen whale meat to their homes.

Whaling fleet operator Kyodo Senpaku says small amounts of whale meat are routinely given to the crew as a “souvenir” at the end of the hunt.

A Fisheries Agency official said it had ordered separate internal probes by Kyodo Senpaku and the government’s whale research body the Institute of Cetacean Research (ICR), which are due within a week.

ICR declined to comment on the prosecutor’s case, due to its own internal investigation.

Japan catches whales in the Southern Ocean around Antarctica under a clause in international whaling regulations permitting hunting for scientific purposes.

Link to whole article