An Old Surpise

In a paper published Tuesday in the journal "Current Biology" researchers from New Zealand and the united states speak of their discovery; "For the first time we have a description of the world's rarest and perhaps most enigmatic* marine mammal."NYDailyNews 

 
        The main reason the picture to my right is a drawing and not a realistic picture is because this whale blog will be a special breakthrough whale who hasn't ever been photographed alive. I didn't want to post a picture of another dead whale when I love them so much. The species is so rare that it is categorized as "Data Deficient" by IUCN* and not listed by CMS*. Although not until December 2012 was this animal ever actually seen since the 1950's. Scientists still know quite a bit about the animal however, from bone and skeletons collected and analyzed from over the years. These whales were said to have the ability to  dive down to 800m. Thats insanely deep, even for whales. Also these dives could last up to 87 minutes at those depths. 
     In November 2012 when two Spade tooth beaked whales were beached on Opape shore in New Zealand, measurements were taken and a mother, about 17 feet lie beside her son, who was about 11.5 feet in length. Thats about double and triple my height.  I am Imagining something so big just lying lifeless upon the beautiful shore, it makes me think how those whales got there, what happened? and what can we do to prevent it? Although it also makes me think just how crazy that this animal we have hardly ever seen just appears and all the sudden we have specimens to study. Hopefully there will be more where they came from in a more live manner.  By learning about species from our pasts we can hopefully predict how to preserve the ones we have today and new ones of tomorrow at the best of our ability. 
      If you don't believe me when I say that these creatures are some of the most graceful surprising in our world, go find out for yourselves, Whale watching is available pretty much anywhere there is a coast. Enjoy!     
                                                                      

*Enigmatic-Adj. Difficult to interpret or understand; mysterious. 

*IUCN- International Union for Conservation of Nature
*CMS- Content management system 

Japanese Whaling.

Japan’s Whaling.

My third blog is coming to the subject of the opposers to the Sea Shepards, the Japanese and their Government’s view on Whaling. They say that Whaling is a tradition among the Japanese and it is loved country-wide. Although according to data from the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries, the industry only shipped 5k tons in 2011, where as 233k tons in 1962, when whaling was as it’s maximum in the Japanese people’s support. I don’t see much support and tradition in those numbers but they are consistent in funding the ‘Research’ program on whales. The IWC says itself, “Japan exploits a loophole in IWC legislation, and has never stopped killing whales despite the Moratorium. They simply assign themselves a permit to undertake ‘scientific whaling’ (ie. killing whales for the purpose of scientific research) and continue hunting whales as before.” It hurts me that the Whaling Commission in itself is not able to and/or willing to, I do not know the situation completely, stop the Japanese from killing such innocent and beautiful creatures that already have such falling numbers as these Whales. I mean if you actually look a where this whale meat is going it is to the market and in these Japanese peoples diets, They make a profit and that is why they keep it going. The IWC also says, “Japanese claim to be undertaking research by killing whales. However, most of the data collected by the Japanese ‘Scientific whaling’ programme is not required for management or conservation of whale stocks and is never published in reputable scientific journals.” Like what? How is this still going on? 

Whales are a huge part in our oceans food chain. “A blue whale for example can consume as much as 40 million krill per day so you can imagine the impact this would have on stabilizing the aquatic eco system if the blue whale species were to become extinct.” Says WhaleFacts.org.  For every whale that is killed that is literally 40 million times that number of krill extra a day, these aquatic animals are born in mass by minutes and would  result in a krill-tastrophe. So as you can see this Japanese Research is complete bologna, and should be stopped so our oceans don’t fill with krill and disappear of that Carbon rich whale poop.