Mercury levels in the kidneys and livers of the Faroese are roughly ten times that of the Norwegians living in Bergen. This startling revelation was made in a recent World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) Marine Update (No. 20, May 1995) which links the elevated levels with the consumption of whalemeat by the islanders.
The Faroese regularly eat the meat of the long-finned pilot whale, which they catch by driving the whales ashore. The whalemeat forms an important part of the islander's diet, with consumption between 1970 and 1984 ranging from 82 to 555 g week ^-1. The problem is that pilot whales are carnviorous, feeding on squid, pelagic fish and crustaceans. Being at the top of the marine food web, they are liable to accumulate both toxic metals and organic chemicals. According to the WWF report, researchers have found that pilot whales from the North Atlantic have up to seven times the amount of PCBs and other chemicals that the World Health Organization (WHO) and the US Food and Drug Administration (USFDA) consider safe.
Mercury exposure is not the only danger coming from the consumption of whale meat. Whilst mercury exposure from eating pilot whale exceeds WHO levels by a factor of four, cadmimum levels are also exceeded by a factor of two. Elevated levels of the pesticides lindane and dieldrin and DDE as well as PCBs have all been found in the Faroese.
The predicament of the Faroese serves to draw attention to problems from pollution facing whale populations as a whole. The WWF report suggests that even if all the world's whaling fleets wre mothballed tomorrow, the future of many whale species would still remain in doubt as a result of toxic pollution and other environmental threats such as global warming, drift nets, toxic algal blooms etc.