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In an era when we can track the lineage of humanity using DNA and monitor deforestation from space, you might think scientists would have come up with a more sophisticated way of counting whales than standing on the bridge of a ship with a pair of binoculars.

If so, you would be wrong - mostly.

Many decades after they were first used, sighting surveys are still the standard way of estimimating how many whales there are in the oceans.

"There are many variables that can affect your ability to see whales - that can include obvious things like weather, ice conditions, depending on where you are," says Greg Donovan, the genial Irishman who heads up the scientific programme of the International Whaling Commission (IWC), the global body charged with regulating whale hunting and conserving the giant cetaceans.

Counting whales should matter, wherever you stand on the rights and wrongs of hunting.

Good estimates would be needed for setting quotas if commercial whaling should ever be revived - as appears to some degree possible, now that the IWC has decided at this year's annual meeting to embark on a process of reform, perhaps leading to compromise.

They are needed to set quotas for the subsistence hunts performed by indigenous peoples in Greenland, Russia, the US and the Caribbean; and they are definitely needed for conservation.

So if this is the case - and the IWC is just one body putting resources into gathering numbers - why is it that estimates for some populations are so imprecise? ...