The shrinking size of whales over the 20th Century could help scientists detect when wildlife populations are in trouble, a study suggests.
The analysis shows that the average body size of four whale species declined rapidly during the second half of the 20th Century in response to hunting.
But warning signals were visible up to 40 years before whale stocks collapsed.
The work appears in Nature Ecology and Evolution journal.
Christopher Clements, from the University of Zurich in Switzerland, and his colleagues looked at records on the abundance and body size of whales caught by commercial whaling vessels between 1900 and 1985, after which a global whaling -read more
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