...and there was just rope everywhere--it went around the whales mouth, around the whale's head, across her eye, over her back wrapped around the pectoral fins, all the way down to its tail. I thought there was no hope, there was no chance, we're looking at a dead whale, the whale just doesn't know it yet--but I knew that I had to try. ...It was a very surreal moment looking down and seeing the 20 crab traps and buoys just disappear into the abyss... And just like that, the whale was gone. ...I'm spinning around, where'd she go, where'd she go ? ...Now here's where the story takes a pretty startling turn. ...Next thing I know there's this fifty ton whale coming right at me...
From about 4:00 to 14:30 in nearly 23 minutes of the segment,
Animal Blessings--in
mp3 here, all 20 megs of it. Or you can try the podcast at
RadioLab: Animal Minds. Either way, you are in for a most truly awesome anecdote. And listen to the whole program to have some back and forth science dropped on you in regards to what we think we know about what and how animals think.
[more inside]
posted by y2karl
on May 26, 2010 -
69 comments
For the past 21 years, across the limitless expanse of the North Pacific, a
lonely whale has been singing, calling for a response. There has been none, and there never will.
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posted by Cobalt
on Feb 6, 2010 -
88 comments
"Why the fuss? Well, Colin's a baby whale..." Oh no. They named the doomed little thing ('little' meaning about the size of a large car). Mal Holland's report from the Daily Telegraph gives a very illuminating rundown of the nervous breakdown that "Sydney's booming whale watching industry" is experiencing right now...
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posted by ZachsMind
on Aug 20, 2008 -
78 comments
Rethink.
The.
Shark.
[YouTube] The
Save Our Seas Foundation [small Flash], a Swiss-based non-profit, joins the growing ranks of a world-wide movement to undo the damage caused by
popular reports and
gross misrepresentation by Hollywood of sharks as human-savoring sea monsters/killing machines. The fact of the matter is that the opposite is true: Current estimates give between 65 million to 165 million sharks being killed worldwide annually via unregulated catch - including
38 million to
70 million [PDF] for their fin alone, with untold numbers of butchered and bleeding-to-death sharks being cast back into the oceans to die slow and gruesome deaths.
[more inside]
posted by humannaire
on Jul 31, 2007 -
38 comments
Whale puke may not sound like the sort of thing that could make you money, but a 15kg lump of it found on a beach has made Australian Leon Wright and his wife more than a quarter of a million dollars overnight. Perviously discussed
here, ambergris is essentially the vomit of a sperm whale. It has a scent like nothing else on earth and is used in
perfume or as an aphrodisiac.
posted by The Ultimate Olympian
on Jan 24, 2006 -
54 comments
