Breaching Humpbacks, Biggs Orca, Dolphins and Porpoise

Society News & Events

DONATE
to the non profit wild ocean whale society

Jump to:   MAP | SIGHTINGS | MAGAZINE

Jump to:   MAP | SIGHTINGS | MAGAZINE

REGIONAL

Ships passing through a sensitive area off British Columbia’s coast have agreed to slow down in an effort to protect the critically endangered southern resident killer whales.
Researchers believe just 78 Salish Sea orcas remain and warn the species is on the verge of extinction.
One of the major threats to their survival is the amount of noise pollution from marine activity, which makes it difficult for the orcas to communicate and hunt for food.
The Vancouver Fraser Port Authority announced Thursday it will launch a pilot project in the Haro Strait – a critical feeding ground for the whales off the east coast of Vancouver Island to San Juan Island – asking vessels to reduce their speed to 11 knots to study whether that measure effectively reduces the amount of underwater noise.
A typical deep sea container ship would normally travel at 18 knots…..

WEST COAST

One man in San Francisco got the show of a lifetime when he passed by the famous Golden Gate Bridge and caught sight of several humpback whales swimming under the great structure.

Mauricio Santana posted four videos to Twitter that showed the huge mammals splashing around the the Golden Gate strait under the bridge on Sunday (16 July).

Armed with knives on long poles and high-tech equipment, expert marine rescuers and volunteers painstakingly cut a 35-foot long humpback whale free from a shrimp trap Tuesday afternoon after the large mammal had been trapped for five days off the Crescent City coast.

After the whale, which had been tangled up since Thursday, was set back into the Pacific Ocean about 4:30 p.m., it circled the rescue boat a few times.
One fisherman took the gesture as the mammal’s way to say thank you, said Michael Milstein, spokesman for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Fisheries West Coast Region, one of the lead agencies helping with this Herculean effort.

Volunteers and others, led by a team of marine biologists in Fort Bragg’s Old Rec Gym on Monday, were helping the Noyo Center put together the largest Orca skeleton in the U.S., according to experts there. Michi Main, one expert from Canada who came to head up the project, said the skeleton, at 26 feet long, may be the largest of its kind in the world, as well.

The Orca, an adult male from Alaska, died on the Mendocino Coast in 2015 after tangling himself up in crab pot line. The Noyo Center, with help from the California Academy of Sciences, collected and prepared his bones after his body decayed, perfectly preserving every part….

NATIONAL & INTERNATIONAL

PARIS-A sperm whale appears to have beached on an embankment in the shadow of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris.

Or maybe not.

A Belgian artists’ collective installed a very real-looking, life-size whale sculpture Friday alongside the Seine River, eliciting surprise and concern from tourists and Parisians alike.

Bart Van Peel, a member of the collective, said the installation is about raising environmental awareness and awakening "the child in everyone who still is puzzled about what is real and what is not."…

In a first, marine biologists have discovered that some of the Gulf’s common bottlenose dolphins have a knack for decapitating native marine catfish.

Though dolphins usually eat their prey whole, they sometimes get fancy in their meal preparation. Rough-toothed dolphins in the eastern Pacific "filet" mahi-mahi. Dolphins employ division of labor to corral and eat mullet. One 2009 study shows that Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphins follow "recipes" for preparing cuttlefish meals.

Published on Jul 18, 2017
Stan Cook Sea Kayak Adventures with a humpback whale swimming under and alongside kayaks on tour.

A potentially life-saving method to help raise blood pressure in trauma victims experiencing blood loss gets its inspiration from dolphins and seals.

The pre-hospital intervention is simple-place a bag of ice on the victim’s forehead, eyes, and cheeks. In a small study, the method increased and maintained blood pressure in a simulation of trauma victims experiencing blood loss.

"There is a slight reduction in blood pressure during the simulation and we wanted to see if face cooling would reverse that," says Zachary Schlader, assistant professor of exercise and nutrition sciences at the University at Buffalo. "It turns out, it does. It raises blood pressure during a simulated hemorrhage situation."

Mammals like seals and dolphins-and, to a much lesser extent, humans-have what’s called the "mammalian diving reflex." It’s a physiological function that the animals employ for submersion in water….

It’s hard to muster sympathy for lice. Most of the parasites seem to be doing fine-living, feeding and multiplying on their hapless hosts. But lice that live on dolphins have it tough. Their hosts are slippery and fast-moving; the lice spend their lonely lives clinging tight and hoping to meet just one other louse they can mate with. And while these parasites can teach scientists about the evolution and behavior of ocean mammals, it’s not clear how the lice themselves survive at all.

Syncyamus aequus is a whale louse, but it doesn’t live on whales and it’s not really a louse. The 30 or so species called whale lice are crustaceans, like crabs-not insects, like the lice that live on humans. Each species infects certain kinds of cetaceans (the group that includes whales, dolphins and porpoises); S. aequus only lives on dolphins. Whale lice do have some similarities to human lice: They can only live on a host’s body, and they spread when two animals rub against each other. But whale lice feed on skin, not blood. And their hosts live in the ocean….

New research published in the journal Current Biology finds that elephant seals identify one another by the rhythm in their calls, much the way humans can discern accents and vocal tone.

Previously there was no recorded example of a non-human mammal that could remember and recognize a wide range of rhythms.

“This is the first natural example where, on a daily basis, an animal uses the memory and the perception of rhythm to recognize other members of the population,” lead author Nicolas Mathevon of the Université de Lyon/Saint-Etienne in France said in a written statement.

“There have been experiments with other mammals showing that they can detect rhythm, but only with conditioning.”…

Magazine Submissions
the magazine accepts submissions of links to published articles and media of interest to our readers. we welcome original articles, letters, notices, photography, video and audio

SUBMIT
to the magazine

original material guidelines
notices: 100 words max.; letters & articles: 500 words max.
you or your organization must be authors of the work and are solely responsible for its content. the magazine gives no assurance material submitted will be published. media submission guidelines

DONATE
to the non profit wild ocean whale society

VOLUNTEER
review our volunteer opportunities

Jump to:   MAP | SIGHTINGS | MAGAZINE

SUBSCRIBE
receive sightings update eMail notices

CONTACT
the wild ocean whale society