We are saddened to note the passing of our colleague and friend Dmitry Tormosov, who died on October 15th in Kaliningrad, aged 87. Dmitry was a Russian biologist who worked on Soviet whaling factory ships in the Antarctic during much of the period when the USSR was conducting illegal whaling on a large scale: some 178,000 whales were killed and not reported to the International Whaling Commission (IWC), and the true catch data were classified as secret during this time. Despite orders to destroy the data, Dmitry preserved the entire catch record of one factory ship (the Yuri Dolgorukiy, involving some 72,000 records) by hiding the documents in his potato cellar until after the Cold War. Those data later proved instrumental in correcting the true catch record, which has been essential to the IWC’s assessments of Southern Hemisphere whale populations. Among other things, Dmitry was responsible for revealing that the USSR had killed more than 3,300 southern right whales (many of them off Patagonia), at a time when the general belief was that the population numbered only in the hundreds. Dmitry freely provided his dataset to whoever wanted it, and his data have since been used by other scientists in numerous research projects.
Dmitry was a delightful man with a great sense of humor who’ll be much missed for his courage, keen intellect, curiosity and kindness. A full obituary will shortly be submitted to Marine Mammal Science for inclusion in the In Memoriam series there. Fair winds and following seas, my friend. Phil Clapham Bob Brownell Vladimir Burkanov Yulia Ivashchenko -- Phillip J. Clapham, Ph.D. Seastar Scientific Inc. Vashon Island, WA
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