To wit: because little whaling occurred north of 40_S, there was no wintertime pelagic whaling fleet to ‘‘discover’’ whales in the open ocean; there were fewpelagic shipping routes in the Southern Ocean; and because blue whales were believed to be widely dispersed in tropical and subtropical latitudes, the effort required to find and delineate wintering grounds was nearly insurmountable. Arguably, with regards to sighting data, little has changed since then (Clapham et al., 1999).