American Inuit natives are allowed to hunt close to 60 a year. Grey whales, hunted by the Siberian Inuit under an exemption for aboriginal subsistence whaling, number around 21,000. Under a joint U.S.-Russian quota, the Makah tribe of Washington state will be allowed to hunt four grey whales a year. The other family of large whales are the toothed whales, the biggest of which is the sperm whale. Estimates of its numbers are wildly disparate, ranging from 20,000 to 600,000 just in the North Atlantic, Cooke said.
Scientists say sperm whales are hard to track because they surface less often than balleen whales.
They can dive miles below the ocean surface, staying down for up to one hour at a time.