Whales and Wiener Dogs

As you can tell from this picture, the wooden wiener dog key chain is not as long as a real wiener dog.

Female sperm whale with squid caught between her teeth (Tony Wu)

Photographer Tony Wu captured some extremely rare images off the Ogasawara Islands in Japan earlier this month. It’s believed the images chronicle adult female sperm whales teaching a baby how to dive for, and eat, giant squid.

The squid was caught far to deep for the photographer to snap pictures of the squid actually being caught, but Wu’s photos show the whales with squid still in their mouths at they return to the surface.

The squid was guessed to be up to 30 meters long.

These images were taken in the same area where Japanese scientists used baited hooks and cameras to capture live images of giant squid a few years back.

One scientist proposed this theory about the scene. “As echolocation is pivotal for sperm whales finding their prey, it is not out of the question that the females would release the dead squid at depth and let the calf echolocate and recognise it in the dark deep water, typically around 800 m deep.”

And no Japanese whale boats show up to kill anything.

More photos here.

I don’t really know if this is harassing the animal or not…I guess some would say yes.

A Bryde's Whale

Don’t you hate that they call themselves NatGeo now?

Anyways, whilst shooting some marlins recently off Baja, some Nat Geo photogs got some pics of some Bryde’s Whales feeding. Unlike many other baleen whales, they feed on sea creatures larger than plankton, sometimes as large as mackerel and sardines.

According to Nat Geo:

Surprisingly little is known for sure about this species. Lacking thick layers of valuable blubber, Bryde’s weren’t much targeted by whalers. They’ve had scant attention from scientists, in part because they can be tough to find. Bryde’s travel solo or in small pods and can dive to a thousand feet. Reported mostly in warm, equatorial waters, they probably breed year-round and may use low-frequency calls to find each other across great distances. But details of their movements, mating habits, and population status are sketchy, and sometimes inferred from better-known kin—making a wild encounter with Bryde’s in the vast, blue ocean even sweeter.

Mex!

Back in the day, reading Moby Dick was probably the last thing Keith Hernandez would have done with a woman, but according to this long-ish, sort of boring feature on Keith in Newsday, Keith Hernandez would now read Moby Dick with a woman. According to the story:

Hernandez removed the copy of Moby-Dick from his collection and announced one of his offseason plans: Joining Kai in reading the book.

Aloud.

A while back, when I saw “The Cove,” I wondered whether or not the filmmakers would be able to attain their stated goal - to end the annual dolphin slaughter in Taiji, Japan. Well, there have been a couple reasons over the last few days to think that maybe there is such thing as “The Cove” Effect - and keep in mind that the film hasn’t even been released in Japan yet.

First, Broome, Australia is suspending its sister city program with Taiji, Japan. Knowing how Australians feel about Japan and sea mammal conservation, I find it sort of hilarious that Taiji even had a sister city in Australia. I can just imagine the person who runs Broome’s sister city program - “They do fucking WHAT?!?”

Secondly, and more importantly, Ric O’Barry got to Taiji on September 1 - the first day of dolphin killing season - and found the killing cove empty of both dolphin killers and dolphins, but FULL or reporters.

In a post on his blog called “September 1, 2009: A Good Day for Dolphins,” O’Barry says:

Today is September 1st, the first day of the dolphin slaughter season in Japan. But when I arrived today by bus from Kansai Airport with media representatives from all over the world, the notorious Cove from the movie was empty. There were no dolphin killers in sight.

Good for him. We’ll have to see if “The Cove” Effect has real staying power, or if the Japanese will be up to their old tricks next year, or next month, or even next week when the big media retreats. Although, O’Barry does point out that these are Japanese media who have NEVER bothered to cover Taiji at all in the past.

I think we’ve featured Hazel doing something before, maybe eating broccoli.

Actor Conor Lovett and his director wife, Judy Hegerty Lovett, are bringing their one-man-play version of Moby Dick to Ventura’s Rubicon Theater next week. The Lovett pair are known for a producing a series of strong, minimalist one man shows in recent years, and Moby Dick is no exception. An rave-ish review in the Irish Times says of Conor Lovett, “He holds us spellbound as he catches the humour as well as the wisdom of Ishmael’s commentary, his pauses for thought, for memory, for finding the right word, reminding us that the story of this noble but melancholy ship, its crew, its quarry and its captain with the crucifixion in his face, is a story told by a man of honour and of mercy.”

Also, the Santa Barbara-based Environmental Defense Center has notified the National Marine Fisheries Service that it will sue the agency for failing to implement a plan approved 11 YEARS AGO that was designed to help blue whale populations recover.

Even though modern whaling was banned in 1966, and even though the blue whale was placed on the endangered species list in 1973, the largest creature ever to live on the planet earth still face many hazards; fishing gear, toxic waste and trash, and large ships. And while Santa Barbara channel is one of the best places in the world to see a blue whale, it’s also one of the busiest shipping lanes in the world, making it a likely place for blue whales to get hit by ships. The NMFS recovery plan would address many of these hazards.

THIS film (about a whale watch in which a massacre occurs) is what’s going to save Iceland’s economy.