Mostly orcas.
Archive for the 'Creatures' Category
The world’s last 350 North Atlantic right whales live along the East Coast. Collisions with ships are a deadly hazard, but new listening buoys are helping. Here’s how.
The green dots on this map show locations of buoys listening for endangered right whales. If you see a red whale icon instead, it means a buoy at that location has heard a right whale within the last 24 hours. This information is made available to ship captains, who can slow to 10 knots and post a lookout to avoid a collision.
http://listenforwhales.org/ via SA
Some good news for a change…
MELINKA, Chile (17 Mar 2008) — Three scientists stand on a hillside on the remote island of Melinka in Southern Chile. In the distance, across the shimmering waters of the Gulf of Corcovado, are the majestic snow-capped peaks of the Andes mountains.
All three are peering through high-powered binoculars, scanning the horizon methodically.
Suddenly, biologist Yacquiline Montecinos spots a spray of water piercing the horizon, six miles or so off shore.
“There … whale. Blue whale,” she says excitedly. Montecinos has seen hundreds of these spouts, but she still gets excited when she finds one.
And why not? She is part of a team researching a previously unknown population of blue whales, the biggest mammal on the planet, bigger than the biggest dinosaur. They can be up to 100 feet long and 100 tons.
ANCHORAGE, Alaska - The white killer whale spotted in Alaska’s Aleutian Islands sent researchers and the ship’s crew scrambling for their cameras.
The nearly mythic creature was real after all.
“I had heard about this whale, but we had never been able to find it,” said Holly Fearnbach, a research biologist with the National Marine Mammal Laboratory in Seattle who photographed the rarity. “It was quite neat to find it.”
Horsesurfing: The British-invented sport combines the technical skill of surfing with the raw power of horse riding
This daredevil duo were onto a shore winner yesterday when they hit the beach for the latest extreme sports craze - HORSESURFING. The British-invented sport combines the technical skill of surfing with the raw power of horse riding. A towing rope is attached to a special saddle so the surfer can be pulled through the water as the horse and its rider gallop alongside. As speed picks up the boarder hits waves and is thrown into the air - where they can pull flips and tricks before landing back down and racing on. Horsesurfing is the brainchild of stuntman Daniel Fowler-Prime who thought up the idea with friends when they grew bored of their existing hobbies.
Hey, I beat out Joe in posting this!
The surf kitty pics have been all over the Interweb, you can see the original story here. Our own cats, Avery and Capt. Blood, are not to be found doing watersports.
When you spend your life in the water, I guess you tend to develop a good intuition for its subtleties. Dolphins have been observed to create bubble rings by exhaling air carefully in the middle of the vortices caused by the motion of their fins through the water, among other techniques. Besides being nice to look at (and a neat demonstration of fluid mechanics), this phenomenon also might throw some light on dolphin cognition, since the skill to create the rings is a bit subtle and tends to be taught from one dolphin to the next via careful observation and practice. I’m also intrigued by the report that they seem to be using sonar to locate the vortex in the water, since that would be a fairly amazing bit of audio analysis.
See more here.
Tom Dexel of the Santa Cruz Rowing Club rows nearshore with a big blue buddy. Right now the grey whale migration is taking place down the California coast. We tried our luck, but had no joy trying to spot them from the cliffs of Davenport.
A new study shows that male dolphins carry pieces of plants and twigs to impress females, rather than simply playful behaviour as previously believed.
Object-carrying as part of sexual display is rare in the animal kingdom, with only humans and chimpanzees doing anything similar.
The fact that the habit has been observed in isolated populations of dolphins in river dolphins in Brazil, Venezuela and Bolivia suggests it has either been passed on through generations or evolved separately in different groups.
Link, via Spluch
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