Current global population size, post-whaling trend and historical trajectory of sperm whales.

The sperm whale lives in most deep ice-free waters of the globe. It was targeted during two periods of whaling peaking in the 1840's and 1960's. Using a habitat suitability model, we extrapolated estimates of abundance from visual and acoustic surveys to give a global estimate of 736,053 sperm whales (CV = 0.