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Kayakers and a surfer were enjoying a leisurely day off Santa Cruz, California when a humpback whale suddenly surfaced in pursuit of a school of anchovies. Barb Roettger caught this amazing scene on camera.
-via Boing Boing
Michael Fishbach and his friends were in the Sea of Cortez on Valentine’s Day this year when they found a humpback whale floating in the water. It appeared to be dead, having been trapped in a fishing net for a long time. Fishbach discovered that she was still alive — but only barely. They worked hard for an hour with only one knife to cut the net away and free her. They were ultimately successful. Skip ahead to 6:20 to see the whale’s joyful reaction.
-via Nag on the Lake
Whale researchers are tentatively suggesting that sperm whales might have names. Certain sounds emitted during their songs may be signatures:
Rendell and his collaborators, including biologists Hal Whitehead, Shane Gero and Tyler Schulz, have for years studied the click sequences, or codas, used by sperm whales to communicate across miles of deep ocean. In a study published last June in Marine Mammal Sciences, they described a sound-analysis technique that linked recorded codas to individual members of a whale family living in the Caribbean.
In that study, they focused on a coda made only by Caribbean sperm whales. It appears to signify group membership.[...]
That individual whales would have means of identifying themselves does, however, make sense. Dolphins have already been shown to have individual, identifying whistles. Like them, sperm whales are highly social animals who maintain complex relationships over long distances, coordinating hunts and cooperating to raise one another’s calves.
Link via reddit | Photo by Flickr user SidPix used under Creative Commons license
Hundred of millions of years ago, sea creatures crawled up on land and started to become mammals. Then much later, a few went back into the sea, but left few fossils to show us how they did it -or at least that’s what we used to think.
For more than a century, our knowledge of the whale fossil record was so sparse that no one could be certain what the ancestors of whales looked like. Now the tide has turned. In the space of just three decades, a flood of new fossils has filled in the gaps in our knowledge to turn the origin of whales into one of the best-documented examples of large-scale evolutionary change in the fossil record. These ancestral creatures were stranger than anyone ever expected. There was no straight-line march of terrestrial mammals leading up to fully aquatic whales, but an evolutionary riot of amphibious cetaceans that walked and swam along rivers, estuaries and the coasts of prehistoric Asia. As strange as modern whales are, their fossil predecessors were even stranger.
These fossils raise almost as many questions as they answer. Read more at Smithsonian magazine. Link
How do you design ocean turbine blades for optimal performance? Some scientists propose building them in imitation of whale flippers:
“We designed a novel blade modification for potential turbine performance improvement, which was inspired by humpback whale flippers, with the addition of tubercles, or bumps, to the leading edge of each blade,” explains Mark Murray, a Naval Academy engineering professor. Previous research demonstrated the addition of biomimetically derived protuberances (technology that mimics nature) improved stall characteristics and aerodynamic performance.”
A startup company called WhalePower is already at work trying to find commercial applications for these new designs.
Article Link and Company Link via Fast Company | Image: Whale Power
Previously: The 15 Coolest Cases of Biomimicry
Artist Matt Jones made “Bertrand” — a model of a whale created from garbage bags:
We breathed life into Bertrand, but sadly, he didn’t take flight. He tragically insisted upon beaching himself, and we ended up putting him out of his misery.
The idea was for him to be a solar hot air balloon, the air inside heating up and lifting him. I’m confident the main problem is too much mass of plastic in the pectoral fins, and tapered tail relative to how much volume of air those areas hold.
Link via Super Punch
Paleontologist Philip Gingerich looks for sea monsters in the Egyptian desert. He assembles fossils of ancient whales that died there when it was covered by an ocean. One such whale is the Basilosaurus, which had small hind legs.
“Complete specimens like that Basilosaurus are Rosetta stones,” Gingerich told me as we drove back to his field camp. “They tell us vastly more about how the animal lived than fragmentary remains.”
Wadi Hitan—literally “valley of whales”—has proved phenomenally rich in such Rosetta stones. Over the past 27 years Gingerich and his colleagues have located the remains of more than a thousand whales here, and countless more are left to be discovered.
Researchers hope that whale fossils can help them understand how a land mammal evolved into an aquatic form that became our modern whales. Link
(Image credit: Richard Barnes/National Geographic)
Here on land, we undertake great engineering projects to get rid of biological waste from cities and livestock farms. What about the sea, where huge animals produce a lot of it? It turns out that whales have the ability to offset greenhouse gasses with their poop!
Sperm whales in the Southern Ocean release 220,462 tons of carbon when they exhale carbon dioxide at the water’s surface, but their poo stimulates the drawdown of 440,925 tons of carbon, according to the research, published in the latest Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
These ocean giants and certain other marine mammals may therefore be among the most environmentally beneficial animals on the planet.
“If Southern Ocean sperm whales were at their historic levels, meaning their population size before whaling, we would have an extra 2 million tons (2,204,623 tons) of carbon being removed from our atmosphere each and every year,” lead author Trisha Lavery Told Discovery News.
Lavery, a marine biologist at Flinders University of South Australia, and her colleagues explained how the cleaning process works.
You can read all about it at Discovery News. Link -via Digg
(Image credit: Flickr user Erwin Winkelman)
How did whales manage to grow so big? And is there a limit to how big they can get? Scientists looked at the mechanics of how whales feed, especially those species that consume tiny krill. They call what they discovered “lunge-feeding”, which is detailed in an article at Discover Magazine.
In order to make lunge-feeding work, you have to have a really big mouth to capture enough water in one gulp. But in order to have a big mouth, you need a big body. And in order to keep that big body running, you need to get a lot of food. And in the very act of getting that food–diving deep, lunging open-mouthed, and then pushing a school-bus-sized volume of water forwards–requires a lot of energy on its own.
This type of feeding might explain the size of whales.
If the scientists are right, they may have discovered one of the big ironies in evolution. Lunge-feeding may have allowed whales to become the biggest animals ever to roam the planet. But this was not an open-ended invitation.r. Once whales got large enough, lunge feeding itself became so costly it prevented them from getting any bigger.
