Meshuga Beluga

November 7, 2019 1:45 PM

ATTENTION SEA CREATURE TWITTER: we have a whale playing catch! whale! playing! catch!!! Twitter | Threadreader
posted by Johnny Wallflower (19 comments total)

Look, Johnny, I don't wanna be That Guy Pointing Out The Difference Between Catch and Fetch but...
posted by bondcliff at 1:50 PM on November 7, 2019 [25 favorites]

!!!
posted by Quasirandom at 1:51 PM on November 7, 2019

"Look Steve, STOP THROWING SHIT IN THE OCEAN!"
posted by Pendragon at 1:54 PM on November 7, 2019 [19 favorites]

Yeah at the end he's a little like 'ok dude I brought the ball back twice, now you go hold on to it with your weird flippers, I'm a-leavin.'
posted by Namlit at 2:02 PM on November 7, 2019 [1 favorite]

Stop trying to make cetacean fetch happen.
posted by Atom Eyes at 2:58 PM on November 7, 2019 [17 favorites]

This appears to be a thing with Belugas.
posted by los pantalones del muerte at 3:52 PM on November 7, 2019 [6 favorites]

Underwater nerf football, surely.
posted by clavdivs at 4:10 PM on November 7, 2019

Those were all forward passes, so they don't count.
posted by Chuffy at 4:15 PM on November 7, 2019 [5 favorites]

ball retrieval with jaws
posted by clavdivs at 4:32 PM on November 7, 2019

Oh my God, that beluga giving back the girl's phone! We don't deserve how good cetaceans are.
posted by limeonaire at 5:04 PM on November 7, 2019 [7 favorites]

That's Hvaldimir, who even tried to give a seagull back the fish it dropped when he startled it trying to play. Unfortunately, people have not always been nice to him -- apparently teenagers in Alta hurt him repeatedly, you can see that he has injuries on his mouth that were not there when he first appeared in Norway.

It must confuse and frighten him terribly, poor thing, he grew up learning to do things for humans and being rewarded with food, and now sometimes they just randomly trick and hurt him.
posted by tavella at 5:17 PM on November 7, 2019 [8 favorites]

Hvaldimir.

O.O
posted by mwhybark at 6:16 PM on November 7, 2019 [3 favorites]

→ This appears to be a thing with Belugas.

[cetacean needed]
posted by scruss at 6:55 PM on November 7, 2019 [46 favorites]

[cetacean needed]

incredible
posted by So You're Saying These Are Pants? at 9:40 PM on November 7, 2019 [3 favorites]

🐋🐋🐋
posted by Homo neanderthalensis at 9:58 PM on November 7, 2019

The wiki on Hvaldimir is kind of heartbreaking. That poor whale. I hope he survives.
posted by I_Love_Bananas at 2:08 AM on November 8, 2019 [4 favorites]

Those were all forward passes, so they don't count.

Found the rugby purist.
posted by tommasz at 6:12 AM on November 8, 2019

Well, the good news on Hvaldimir is that he has apparently figured out to hunt for himself, after being supportively fed for a while, though they aren't yet sure if he is proficient enough to survive the winter. The ultimate hope is that he makes contact with a pod of belugas that is known to pass through nearby waters and is adopted, which doesn't seem impossible given belugas are known to have adopted strangers such as a lost narwhal. The bad news is that orcas also travel the same waters, and he likely won't know how dangerous they are.
posted by tavella at 7:58 AM on November 8, 2019

Oh, to clarify -- I should say that Hvaldimir is the one who gave back the dropped Iphone. Some people have suggested he is the one in the rugby video too, which would make sense. The news reports had it as a South African team in the Antarctic, but belugas only live in the Northern hemisphere as far as a quick google tells me.
posted by tavella at 11:51 AM on November 8, 2019