>"You have the privilege of sharing the planet with the largest animal that ever lived on Earth."
We've returned the favor by killing 90% of them.
>The IUCN estimates that there are probably between 10,000 and 25,000 blue whales worldwide today. Before whaling, the largest population was in the Antarctic, numbering approximately 239,000 (range 202,000 to 311,000).
At first this was going to be one of those tedious meta-pedantry posts. But then I realized I was about to post one, and remembered meta-pedantry is a thing, so now it's going to be a meta-meta-pedantry post.
Basically, it's surprisingly common to point out, in a fun-loving-meant-to-be-helpful way, someone's minor error of style or grammar, and in the process make a different error of style or grammar yourself.
That, in turn, spawns a slew of "na, na, stones in glass houses, you're not perfect either" posts. Which are tedious, and often dramatically less principal-of-charity laden then the first instance of pedantry.
I'm not sure where this comes from, precisely, it may just be that people reading a pedantic post are less charitable in their reading than than they would be on an on-point substantial post.
Anyway. All that is just preamble to "perhaps you meant 'who'? 'Whom' is functioning as a subject, not direct object in your sentence (the reverse of what's grammatically required)"
> Pre-exploitation population estimate of 239,000 (95% interval 202,000–311,000).
> Estimated 1996 population size, 1,700 (860–2,900)
Don't use three significant figures when your confidence interval spans 50% of your estimate. "200,000 to 300,000" would more clearly express the data.
And be honest about accuracy: if modern satellite, aircraft, and naval technology can't pin the 1996 value down more tightly than "half this number to double it", you can hardly say with a straight face that your confidence interval on the 1800s data is "minus 15% to plus 25%".
We've returned the favor by killing 90% of them.
>The IUCN estimates that there are probably between 10,000 and 25,000 blue whales worldwide today. Before whaling, the largest population was in the Antarctic, numbering approximately 239,000 (range 202,000 to 311,000).