A whaling company has been accused of killing an endangered blue whale off the coast of Iceland.
Hvalur has a licence from the Icelandic government to catch fin whales, which are more abundant, but on Saturday landed an animal that it said was a hybrid of the two species. If confirmed to be a blue whale, it would be the first detected harpooning in about 50 years. Blue whales, the world’s largest species, have been protected since 1966. There are about 25,000 of them and 100,000 fin whales.
Phillip Clapham, head of cetacean assessment at the Marine Mammal Laboratory in Seattle, studied photographs of the whale caught by Hvalur and said it was likely to be a blue whale, not a hybrid. “Everything about this