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Whether or not this whale is enjoying the show is up for debate, but one thing is certain-his eyes are locked on the mariachis as they play. Maybe it’s their shiny suits or instruments that have caught the whales attention, or maybe he’s just wishing he could grab all three men and drown them in his tank! -via BoingBoing
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One night, Robert Majkut had a dream. That dream was to recreate the piano in a grander form. So Robert took this whale of an idea and created this: an electric keyboard called the Whaletone:
It seemed to me a little imprecise, fuzzy. Shapes were looming, fading away, then replacing one another. Maybe it was the whales I saw during the day, maybe the smooth motion of waves, or maybe just many things have overlapped and blended into one animated sequence of pictures. What I saw was a grand piano – yet totally different from all I have seen before. As though it was challenging the classic notion of a piano. Soft, flowing, frozen movement of a gigantic animal.
Although I was moved by the dream, I did not appreciate its meaning at first. I realized how little had changed in this instrument over so many years. Intrigued with this discovery, I began to chase the dim picture trapped in my memory. At first, my mind lead me astray, struggling with habits, experience, intuition and beliefs. It took me a long time to sketch the form, which came across as something vaguely imitating the vision concealed in my mind. And then, one day, while working on this concept already a bit obsessively, my mind unlocked and my hand drew the piano from my dream. I immediately recognized it. I instantly knew I got it.
Monumental – like a whale emerging from the water, slow – like the movement of a giant. Charming, majestic, delicate and melodious, like romantic calls of coquetting whales…I knew it called for being made.
From that moment on, I have known that in the depths of our minds there are ready-made, complete, good ideas. Concepts, forms, choices that are beyond our comprehension until we release them. This is one of them – Whaletone – my version of a singing whale.
Link - via Doobybrain
Dr. Nigella Hillgarth, director of the Birch Aquarium at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, took this picture during an outing last month off the coast of Baja California.
The Young Gray Whale came up to our Boat and put its head up – a life changing experience
Definitely worth sharing! Link -Thanks, Dr. Hillgarth!
Just like humans, whales also have "pop songs," complete with music mania that sweeps across the ocean:
The findings are based on 11 years of recordings from underwater microphones slung over the sides of boats, which were collected by marine biologist Ellen Garland of the University of Queensland in Australia and colleagues. Picking out the patterns took a while; the team had to listen to 745 songs in total from six whale populations across the South Pacific over the 11-year period. The researchers identified 11 distinctly different styles (audio). Sometimes the "hit song" contained snippets from previous seasons, sometimes it was entirely revolutionary. But at any given time and place, there was only one song. What’s more, the popular song switched incredibly rapidly; it took only 2 to 3 months for whales in a given region to entirely change their tune, the team reports online today in Current Biology.
For male whales, singing is known to be a mating behavior, and Garland calls the results a "weird interaction of constrained novelty" where each whale wants to one-up the whale next to it but still feels pressure to conform enough that it doesn’t stand out as an oddball. But whether a whale primarily intends its song to impress females or to intimidate other males with its swanky style remains unclear.
Humpback Idol, anyone? Link
In 1966, a beluga whale swam the wrong way up the Rhine -and wound up paving the way for environmental reform in Germany.
When World War II finally came to an end, Germany was in shambles. Its cities had been transformed into forests of twisted steel and broken concrete, and the German people were suffering from food shortages and rampant unemployment. Within a few years, however, things were looking up. Production of steel and coal were fueling remarkable growth in West Germany, and the country was positioning itself as the industrial powerhouse of Europe.
But this “economic miracle” was wreaking havoc on the environment. Careless mining and manufacturing turned the Rhine into what amounted to an open sewer, and soon, the international waterway contained millions of gallons of toxic waste. By the 1960s, the river was striped with red and green steaks of sludge. The water’s oxygen level had plummeted, and fish were dying en masse. Germany tolerated the pollution because food, jobs, and a sense of progress came along with it, but everyone knew that something had to change.
The catalyst for that change appeared unexpectedly on the morning of May 18, 1966, when a fisherman on the Rhine spotted a large, white creature swimming alongside his boat. Dr. Wolfgang Gewalt, director of the nearby Duisburg Zoo, was called in to identify the animal, which he recognized as a beluga whale. Intrigued, Dr. Gewalt quickly put together a team of whale hunters to trap the animal and bring it to his aquarium.
That was easier said than done. For all his expertise, Gewalt had little idea how to capture a whale without harming it. He tried trapping the animal using tennis nets, but the whale swam right through them. Several more failed attempts followed, and the whale began to garner more and more attention. Before long, the newspapers had nicknamed him Moby Dick. But as the German people continued to watch Dr. Gewalt’s attempts to capture the whale, it became impossible to ignore the unfortunate side effects of post-war progress. As Moby Dick proceeded to swim up the Rhine, journalists noticed that the whale’s skin went from soft and white to bumpy and splotchy. Concerned citizens began to fear that the river’s water would harm the animal, if not kill it outright.
After a couple of weeks, Moby Dick finally left the Duisburg area and traveled downriver. It was only a few yards from the North Sea when a strange thing happened. The whale suddenly stopped, turned around, and went back upriver. A few days later, Moby Dick appeared outside the German parliament building in Bonn -150 miles south.
This caused quite a scene. Hundreds of onlookers gathered at the river, and a group of nearby politicians even suspended their NATO news conference so they could get a glimpse of the whale. Meanwhile, the press went wild, with newspapers suggesting that Moby Dick’s plan all along had been to raise awareness of the environmental plight of the Rhine.
Although the whale eventually escaped to open water, its presence remained. For four weeks in 1966, Moby Dick captured the nation’s attention and highlighted the country’s ecological desperation. Not coincidentally, environmental politics soon became a pressing national issue. The German people began forming grass roots organizations, and in 1972, the influential Federal Association of Citizen’s Initiatives for Environmental Protection was formed. That same year, the German parliament passed the first two laws that effectively regulated waste disposal and emissions in rivers. And in 1979, 
Germans formed the first successful political party to focus on ecological concerns, Die Grünen Partei, literally “the Green Party.” It’s from their name that we get the term “green politics.”
Today, the Rhine is the cleanest it’s been in decades. Germany is still an industrial powerhouse, but it’s also one of the most eco-friendly countries in the world. Yet the river might still be a sewer today if it hadn’t been for one lost whale that tested the waters.
__________________________
The above article by Michael Ward is reprinted with permission from the November-December 2010 issue of mental_floss magazine.
Be sure to visit mental_floss‘ entertaining website and blog for more fun stuff!
Belgian scientist Olivier Lambert has discovered a new species of whale, a prehistoric sperm whale that was a real killer. Leviathan melvillei was the size of modern sperm whales, with a very big difference:
Today’s sperm whale has no functional teeth in its upper jaw and only small ones in its lower jaw (which are mostly used in fights). It feeds through suction, relying on a rush of water to carry its prey into its open mouth. But Leviathan’s mouth was full of huge teeth, the largest of which were a foot long and around 4 inches wide. This was no suction feeder! Leviathan clearly grabbed its prey with a powerful bite, inflicting deep wounds and tearing off flesh as killer whales do, but with a skull three times bigger.
Leviathan was at the very top of the food chain and it must have needed a lot of food. While modern sperm whales mainly eat squid, Lambert thinks that Leviathan used its fearsome teeth to kill its own kind – the giant baleen whales. At the same point in prehistory, baleen whales started becoming much bigger and they were certainly the most common large animals in the area that Leviathan lived in. Lambert thinks that the giant predator evolved to take advantage of this rich source of energy. He says, “We think that medium-size baleen whales, rich in fat, would have been very convenient prey for Leviathan.”
This whale swam off the coast of Peru 12 million years ago. There’s lots more about Leviathan melvillei at Not Exactly Rocket Science. Link
Last week, a sperm whale was spotted in the Mediterranean Sea, a mile and a half off Herzliya Marina, just north of Tel Aviv. After a couple hours of observation by researchers from the Israel Marine Mammal Research and Assistance Center, they came to the conclusion that this was not a sperm whale, it was a gray whale, a species that doesn’t exist in the Mediterranean! There have been no gray whales observed in the Atlantic Ocean since the 18th century. All gray whales live in the Pacific. Except this one. Some scientists think the retreat of ice in the Arctic led the confused whale into the Atlantic.
In other words, a summering gray whale north of Alaska, swimming eastward along the Alaska coast, may have been able to take advantage of ice-free conditions to continue swimming eastward, all the way through the Canadian Archipelago and west of Greenland, (or, perhaps more likely, westward, above Russia and Europe, via the Northeast Passage) until instinct instructed it to turn south and ultimately hang a left.
(image credit: Dr. Aviad Scheinin)
Xiao Qiang is a Beluga whale living at Qingdao Polar Ocean World in China. This whale has learned to paint pictures, and his paintings sell for big bucks!
“He showed a lot of interest in painting right from the start so now all we have to do is give him the brushes and hold the paper while he paints with his mouth,” said trainer Zhang Yong.
“His favourite colour seems to be blue and he’s best of all at seascapes. His people always look like seals.”
Link -via Fortean Times
Paddle surfer Jodie Nelson set out to standup-paddle 40 miles to raise awareness for breast cancer … and made an unusual "friend" doing it: a 30-foot minke whale she named "Larry" swam alongside her and kept her company!
Minke whales are not commonly seen off Southern California, and those spotted by boaters are often elusive. So when a mammal Nelson named Larry joined her endeavor to become the first woman to make this long paddle, she took it as a sign.
"To me it was a total God thing," the San Clemente resident said. "We prayed at 4 that morning that God would reveal his beauty and creation and nature, and allow me to endure this long trek, so for me it’s not such a huge surprise that this happened."
Link | Jodie’s official blog – Thanks Howard!
Marine biologist and blogger WhySharksMatter presents the latest in his award-winning "ethical debate" series, showcasing a "hot topic" from the environmental movement, presenting both sides, and asking readers to argue it out in the comments. Since his readership includes scientists, politicians, and leaders from the environmental movement, these discussions are always interesting, and this one is sure to generate some strong opinions.
WhySharksMatter is claiming in this ethical debate that North Atlantic Right Whales, one of the most endangered animals on Earth, are going to go extinct whether or not we help them, and therefore we should stop wasting so much of the environmental movement’s limited resources on protecting them.
“For the sake of this debate, I will concede the following points (i.e. there is no need to debate them any further).
* Right whales are a unique and interesting animal. They, like us, are mammals.
* Without our protection, they will certainly go extinct
* It is undeniably, 100% our fault that they are so endangered in the first place”
From the Upcoming 
ueue, submitted by whysharksmatter.
Meet the Ophryotrocha craigsmithi, a newly discovered species of bristleworm that eats only dead whale bones. But there’s a plus side to eating a carcass of an animal that large: a single whale can provide food for 20 years, to be eaten by generations of worms!
Once flesh-eaters like hagfish and sharks have picked clean a whale’s skeleton, the 0.8-inch-long (2-centimeter-long) worms go to work, said zoologist Helena Wiklund, a member of the University of Gothenburg team behind the study.
Generations of worms "could be there for maybe 20 years depending on how big the whale was," Wiklund added. "Bones from a big whale last really long on the seafloor."
But when the whale is finally disposed of, the bacteria-munching worms must find another whale carcass, and that could be many miles away.
How the tiny creatures hop from dead whale to dead whale remains a mystery. Some bristle worm species, though, have microscopic larvae that ride ocean currents, Wiklund said.
Mother Nature wastes nothing at all, doesn’t she? Link (Photo: Helena Wiklund, University of Gothenburg)
The New York Times looks at the history of human-whale interaction, from whale hunting to the modern effects of sonar on the cetaceans. A very different type of interaction takes place in the lagoons of Baja California, Mexico, where gray whales give birth. The mother whales seek out human contact, as if wanting to make friends.
Some marine biologists have dismissed the phenomenon as little more than a reflexive behavior, suggesting that the whales are merely attracted to the sound of the boats’ motors or that they are looking to scratch their lice-ridden and barnacled backs against the boats’ hulls. Still, a combination of anecdotal evidence and recent scientific research into whale biology and behavior suggests that there may something far more compelling going on in the lagoons of Baja each winter and spring. Something, let’s say, along the lines of that time-worn plot conceit behind many a film, in which the peaceable greetings of alien visitors are tragically rebuffed by human fear and ignorance. Except that in this particular rendition, the aliens keep coming back, trying, perhaps, to give us another chance. To let us, of all species, off the hook.
New whale research shows that the animals are smarter than previously thought. Could they be trying to tell us something? Link -via Metafilter
(image credit: Ivan Chermayeff)
Why do whales beach themselves? A new study may have answered the question that baffled scientists for decades: it’s the bends …
A new study offers evidence to support the theory that beaked whales get the bends when they surface rapidly, possibly after being startled by naval sonar.
The report could help scientists understand why beaked whales appear to be more vulnerable to the potentially harmful effects of sonar than other marine mammals.
Together with other studies, the results may also help scientists and regulators think of how navies could adjust their sonar use during training to prevent beaked whale strandings and deaths.
"It provides more evidence that beaked whales that are being found dead in association with naval sonar activities are likely to be getting decompression sickness," said Robin Baird, a marine biologist at Cascadia Research Collective and one of the report’s authors.
A 40-foot finback whale that washed up on Herring Cove Beach in Provincetown, Massachusetts, has a very unusual anatomy: a gigantic swollen tongue!
What really stands out is the whale’s swollen tongue, which looks like a giant balloon sticking out of its mouth.
C.T. Harry of the International Fund for Animal Welfare told the Cape Cod Times the tongue was swollen by gas created in the decomposition process.
Marine biologists may do a necropsy, but not so soon:
"You don’t want an open carcass on the beach on a busy weekend," Harry told the paper.
(Photo: David G. Curran/SatelliteNewsService)
While cutting through some Egyptian limestone recently, stone masons in Italy made an interesting discovery. A whale fossil! They called in experts who confirmed this was a 40 million year old whale. Then the fun really began. Well, fun for the archeologists paleontologists that is.
They went to the place where the stone was extracted and found prehistoric bone fragments and more. A bigger dig is currently underway. We hope this didn’t put the masons out of business.
National Geographic has a video report, with an unedited transcript:
“BEING MASONS WE WERE IGNORANT OF THE IMPORTANCE OF THE DISCOVERY WE HAD MADE” SAYS SUPERVISOR RICARDO FRANCIONI.
BUT THEY KNEW ENOUGH TO CALL IN SOME ITALIAN EXPERTS WHO DETERMINED THEY HAD INADVERTENTLY CREATED AN ALMOST PERFECT CROSS SECTION OF AN ANCIENT WHALE.
IT LIVED IN EGYPT 40 MILLION YEARS AGO.
FINDING ANCIENT WHALES FROM EGYPT, A COUNTRY THATS 95 PERCENT DESERT, MIGHT SEEM UNUSUAL — BUT IT ISNT.
Link – via yesbutnobutyes
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by Baierman.
47 million years ago, whales that looked like this gave birth on land, according to a study published this week that analyzes the fossil of a pregnant whale found in the Pakistani desert. This type of ancient proto-whale was amphibious.
When the fossil was discovered, the scientists were perplexed by the jumble of adult and fetal-size bones. First they found small teeth, then ribs going the wrong way. The head-first postion of the fetus gave them the clue: land mamals are generally born head first, and marine mammals are born tail first.
Illustration courtesy John Klausmeyer and Bonnie Miljour/University of Michigan Museums of Natural History.
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by Marilyn Terrell.
