There Are Whales Alive Today Who Were Born Before Moby Dick Was Written
smithsonianmag.com
smithsonianmag.com
Among all free diving warm blooded animals they go the deepest. They dive to depths 25 times deeper than their other equally famous and endangered cousin the blue whales. The blue whale is the largest known animal to have ever inhabited the earth.
To give an idea of how deep they dive, here is a picture http://i.imgur.com/ESp2j.jpg It needs to be magnified for perspective and for the little surprise at the bottom.
It is interesting how they manage to hold their breath for so long and yet manage to survive the bends (decompression sickness).
The whales are seriously challenging our assumptions about animal intelligence, empathy, society, culture and language. For a long time we believed that the primates were at the top. Search Ted talks and youtube for dolphin intelligence, dont miss the Attenborough ones. For lack of a better word they are just amazing.
Dolphins are for example known to build difficult to make toys (air bubble vortex rings) just to entertain themselves.
They have to discover how to make it. Sometimes they can be quite possessive, they would break the toy if someone not so knowledgeable wants to play with it. Once a dolphin figures it out how to make one, his/her peers eventually figure it out too. So it kind of spreads within a group like fashion. This behavior has been observed both in captivity and in the wild.
Dolphins in captivity try to imitate us and seem to have no trouble mapping our body parts to theirs. A story goes that a scientist observing an young dolphin from an underwater portal had blown a cloud of cigarette smoke at it. The dolphin promptly went to the mother and did the same to the scientist with milk ! It is now strongly believed that they call each other by name. They try to imitate human speech which takes enormous effort on their part because unlike for example parrots their vocal tract is not conducive for this at all. People believe this to be an indication of their strong desire to communicate with us.
And they originated from ungulates: hoofed warm blooded animals. It came as a surprise to me that that there were hoofed carnivorous animals.
Russians are awesome :D
Large blood capacity for storing oxygen, I think. Whale beef is very red.
and yet manage to survive the bends (decompression sickness)
Well they don't breathe down there as human divers do. The excess nitrogen pressed into the blood is not more than what the lungs can take out again when rising.
I'm sure you meant "meat"
> is very red.
Indeed, it's almost black.
[0] and afaik culinary names come from the corresponding animal's name in french: beef comes from boeuf (~ox, a castrated bos taurus male), pork from porc, veal is veau, mutton is mouton and venison is venaison (replaced by "gibier" in modern french).
Yes. But I didn't. I called whale meat whale beef. That would be more like calling cow meat cow pork.
While on the topic- why does english have a term for most domestic meats except for 'lamb'. Lamb is lamb, while most other non-game meats have a culinary term.
Consider the dichotomy between sheep & mutton, or pig & pork. In all instances, the word referring to the animal has "old English", or Anglo Saxon roots. Likewise, the word referring to the meat is Latin via French.
This linguistic gap may have its roots in social divisions. In the years following the Norman invasion, the upper class spoke French. They also consumed most of the meat.
The conquered, who by and large did a lot of the agricultural work & raised the livestock, spoke Anglo Saxon ("old English").
Regardless of etymology, though, beef doesn't refer to generic 'meat'.
In French, however, boeuf can also refer to the animal.
"Beef" started switching meaning from the animal to the meat because the meat was something only upper-class, Norman-descended Englishmen could afford. They had less experience with cows in the field, and more experience with cows as slices of meat on a plate. So the snootier, upper-crust "beef" came to be used in the context of food, while the Old English, working-class "cow" was still used by the actual farmers in the fields, who were dealing primarily with the animals. Merchants and middlemen, who dealt primarily in the meat but also in the livestock, adopted the more aspirational "beef" to refer to both. This usage was common until as recently as about 100 years ago. There are probably few people around today who'd call a cow "a beef," though there are still people who'd refer to a herd of cows (or any quantity on a market) as a "beef herd," or a "herd of beef."
I'm not going to go out on a limb and claim that "beef" is common, modern usage when referring to the animal. (And "beeves" is now so uncommon as to sound funny to the modern ear.) But the usage is not entirely extinct, and in instances when differentiating beef from dairy, it's moderately useful.
* Beef from Boeuf
* Mutton from Mouton
* Pork from porc
* etc...That doesn't apply to doner kebabs.
[1] The athlete has to dive to the depth following (but not using) a guide line. The ‘Constant Weight’ refers to the fact that the athlete is not allowed to drop any diving weights during the dive.
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-diving#Depth_disciplines
Not much to say about this other than that's particularly elegant.
Arguably the heaviest, most likely not the largest.
What is/was, then?
Bruhathkayosaurus (/bruːˌhæθkeɪ.ɵˈsɔrəs/; meaning "huge bodied lizard") might have been the largest dinosaur that ever lived. The accuracy of this claim, however, has been mired in controversy and debate. All the estimates are based on Yadagiri and Ayyasami's 1989 paper, which announced the find.[1]
s3special (Giant Squid) is also an interestingly related topic. And so are pretty much all other episodes.)
> yet manage to survive the bends (decompression sickness).
But still get it, I remember a report of sperm whale bones being full of holes from nitrogen bubbles.
According to this article:
http://www.navytimes.com/article/20130404/NEWS/304040021/50-...
the Thresher likely imploded after sinking to 2400 feet, "the water-ram produced by the initial breaching of the Thresher's pressure hull at 2,400 feet entered the pressure hull with a velocity of about 2,600 mph"
129 crew died, it was the worst submarine disaster in history (also the first nuclear submarine to have sunk).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_cetaceans#Earliest...
I'd desperately try to reason with my captors too!
https://www.mfoundation.org/work#bowhead-whale
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Given the declining costs of DNA sequencing, all kinds of research that used to be prohibitively expensive even a few years ago is now becoming possible. For example, we recently awarded a $10,000 research grant to Dr. Joao Pedro de Magelhaes at the University of Liverpool to sequence the genome of the bowhead whale in order to study mechanisms for longevity in this warm-blooded mammal whose lifespan is estimated at over 200 years.
Not only are bowhead whales far longer-lived than humans, but their massive size means that they are likely to possess unique tumor suppression mechanisms. “These mechanisms for the longevity and resistance to aging-related diseases of bowhead whales are unknown,” says Dr. de Magelhaes, “but it is clear that in order to live so long, these animals must possess aging prevention mechanisms related to cancer, immunosenescence, neurodegenerative diseases, and cardiovascular and metabolic diseases."
The bowhead whale study will be conducted at the state-of-the-art Liverpool Centre for Genomic Research and results will be made available to the research community.
Whales, along with many other mammalian species (including humans) exhibit a perplexing divergence of somatic and reproductive senescence. Female whales hit menopause long before their lives are over, in some cases spending the majority of their lives in a non-reproductive state, which prima facie seems rather maladaptive.
A number of hypotheses have been proposed to explain what seems like widespread evolutionary selection for menopause, and none of them are completely satisfactory. The "grandmother hypothesis", for example, posits that experienced grandmothers assist in the care of their grandchildren, increasing their odds of survival.
Certain species of whales, including Orcinus orca, the killer whale, exhibit early-life menopause, and form stable matrilineal groups, making them ideal candidates for testing the grandmother hypothesis. Interestingly, studies on killer whales observe no significant correlation between living grandmothers and grandoffspring survival rates, though there are plenty of unaddressed confounding factors.
Humans are the only species where the grandmother hypothesis is supported by data, but the dearth of corresponding data in whales suggests the dramatic disparity in our somatic-reproductive senescence might be more strongly selected for by factors we are not yet aware of.
I thought average life expectancy of per-agrecultural, pre-technological humans was less than 40 years? It doesn't really seem like the grandmother hypothosis would enter into our evolutionary history then, as there would be very few post-menopause grandmothers around...
Age at death has a bimodal distribution: a huge portion of humans die at or near birth. If you survive that you're pretty likely to live quite a while, living well past the mean. That's 'cause all the deaths at infancy bring down the mean quite a bit.
Bill Gates fortune and mine average about 33 billion; averages aren't always useful information.
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It so chanced that almost upon first cutting into [a whale, not Moby Dick] with the spade, the entire length of a corroded harpoon was found imbedded in his flesh, on the lower part of the bunch before described. But as the stumps of harpoons are frequently found in the dead bodies of captured whales, with the flesh perfectly healed around them, and no prominence of any kind to denote their place; therefore, there must needs have been some other unknown reason in the present case fully to account for the ulceration alluded to. But still more curious was the fact of a lance-head of stone being found in him, not far from the buried iron, the flesh perfectly firm about it. Who had darted that stone lance? And when? It might have been darted by some Nor' West Indian long before America was discovered.
gutenberg.org full text:
Here's my favourite fact: the white whale Moby Dick is based on a real-life white whale named Mocha Dick
... Ishmael is a nut. :b
Both books are among my favorites, pretty much because of their dedication to the "medium."
There are trees alive today which sprouted ten thousand years ago. Hell, Pando (albeit a clonal colony) could be 1,000,000 years old. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pando_(tree)
Astounding depths of time for a single organism to persist over - but ultimately dependent on a very sedate pace of life.
Seriously though, I find it remarkable that bowhead populations have come back so fast considering how long they live. The oceans must have been absolutely teeming with them back in the day, if they reproduce that fast and live that long.
Nathaniel Philbrick's "Why Read Moby-Dick?" gave me the kick I needed to tackle the book and I am grateful to him that I did (and plan to do so again).
Ahab could give that whale insight into the often obsessive nature of humanity, its willingness to sacrifice riches and life on the altar of revenge. Plus Moby Dick really kicks ass in several scenes.
The implied statement is "Shoot that harpoon at us and see what happens".
So far, it's been a lot of posturing. Many hundreds of whales have been saved.
Culling a few more to make beaches safer for swimming is hardly an issue. This regularly happens in other parts of Australia and certainly other parts of the world.
However, suddenly it has become a cause celebre for fashionable activists the world over. oh, those poor sharks. They don't realise the underlying reason for the protests is to give the greens more visibility in the upcoming West Australian Senate election that has to be re-run.
Personally, I have zero issue with culling sharks near swimming beaches. There is 17,000 miles of Australian coastline after all, and 99% of it is not swimming beaches.
If people wish to protest about sharks, then protest about the killing of sharks for shark fin soup, where the rest of the body is then dumped instead of being used.
"Planet of The Cetaceans"
YOU MANIACS! YOU BLEW IT UP! OH, DANG YOU! GOLDANG YOU ALL TO HECK!
[TAYLOR buries his head in his hands, point of view switches to reveal half-buried in the sand and washed by the waves is MARINE WORLD]