When whales die: Yesterday,
a 20-30 foot whale washed up a shore in New Jersey. Officials are going to deal with it by cutting it up into small parts and burying it. In previous incidents, officials tried to explode it into bits that were meant to fall in the ocean and get eaten by seagulls, but that
didn't work out [YT] so well, especially for nearby spectators. Even if you want to let it decompose naturally, you have to be careful for
spontaneous explosions due to gassy buildup. Especially when transporting it in busy city streets. Oops. When whales die in the ocean, on the other hand, their bodies eventually fall to the sea floor and can start mini ecosystems, where female
pink glowstick-like sea worms that harbor the male pink glowstick sea worms inside their bodies live, eat whale bones, and propagate. (Previously on Metafilter:
Taiwan explosion)
posted by Salamandrous
on Jul 28, 2009 -
46 comments
"To pedal the 3700 kilometres of open water from Cape Verde off the west coast of Africa to Barbados in the Caribbean should take around 50 days..." Engineer and machinist Ted Ciamillo has built a human powered
mini-submarine, designed around a larger version of his Lunocet carbon-fibre "tail" for
divers, for an
Atlantic Ocean crossing.... The "
SubHuman project".
posted by Kronos_to_Earth
on Jan 29, 2009 -
23 comments
Dolphin intelligence is under fire, but are these arguments over brain size relevant in the face of
overwhelming behavioral evidence? Dolphins have been known to display almost all of the qualities which we would consider uniquely human, qualities that we would consider a mark of ‘higher’ intelligence. They are
tool users, they are
highly creative (perhaps even
artistic), they enjoy recreational and
social activities, from surfing (either
on waves or around the
prow of boats) to
sex, and they have proven
time and
time again that they are
self-aware. They’ve also formed symbiotic
relationships with fisherman, and recent reports suggest that dolphins even have
names for each other. But perhaps Douglas Adams said it best in the
Hitchhiker’s Guide: “Man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much... the wheel, New York, wars, and so on, whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely the dolphins believed themselves to be more intelligent than man for precisely the same reasons.”
posted by heylight
on Sep 4, 2006 -
44 comments
The Starving Ocean : A large collection of articles by Debbie MacKenzie on the death of the ocean. The idea is that removing most of the fish from the sea might be sort of bad for the marine ecosystem as a whole. Her writing style is a bit kooky, but she has been right on some points (ie. the Grey Seal thing). Oh, and fishing is also responsible for the rise of atmospheric
carbon dioxide.
posted by sfenders
on Sep 14, 2004 -
10 comments
Bizarre new species of deep sea squid - Yes, you may have read about it earlier, but this link is a photo of one of the
strangest new species to be discovered in a long time. Seventeen feet of weirdness 10,000 feet below the surface. It's cool that we can still find new alien life forms without yet venturing into space.
posted by kokogiak
on Dec 20, 2001 -
34 comments
