Disentangling Whales

I love the Internet. I love awesome websites. What I love most is when people on the Internet send me awesome websites. So, when Jives over at The New Blue sent me the link to the New England Aquarium Research Team site, I was pretty darn excited! Here's a group of people, so driven to help protect Right Whales, that they get out on the water and disentangle fishing gear from the whales. Let me say that again, they disentangle fishing gear from whales. Wow! How do I get a job like that?

With so many human-created dangers out there, it's a wonder the worldwide whale populations are not even worse off. With abandoned fishing gear littering the ocean and starving Southern Resident Orcas, there is so much set against the mystical megafauna. I'm thankful that there are people making an effort to even out the playing field. One whale at a time is much, much better than nothing.

A Pet Peeve

Every now and then I like to mix my interests of crafting and marine biology and check out what creative marine biology-related crafts people are coming up with. I'm also a fan of Etsy, and their searchable site makes it easy to find what I'm looking for. Most of the crafts that feature whales are of the cutesy, cartoonified variety. You know the one I mean, right? It's the whale with an open mouth -- no teeth or baleen -- and no pectoral fins. Kind of like this one...


Well, I've learned to get over the misleading imagery of this whale design, but -- and here's where the pet peeve comes in -- I can't get over it when people make these designs even more scientifically inaccurate. For example, I was just browsing for some whale crafts, and found one that had a whale, like the one above, eating krill. I mean, come on! The whale looks most like a sperm whale, yet has no teeth, and would not intentionally be eating krill! (Sure, a sperm whale might ingest some krill while getting other food, but that's not the point.) It doesn't make sense, but I'm not going to message the person to tell them that this cute thing they've designed and put so much work into is wrong. I'm just not that kind of person. This type of inaccuracy seems to be contagious in the world of crafts, which is why scientifically correct crafts make me so happy when I see them.

Here are some of my favorite artist-designed, marine biology-related items:

Angler Fish shirt at Squidfire.com

Whale Huggers poster by Don McMichael at The Whale Museum

The "I Feel Pretty" Giant Isopod totebag at Questionable Content

Nudibranch Soft Sculpture by Weirdbuglady on Etsy

Arctic Print by SepiaLepus on Etsy

Whale Tails Shadow Puppet Set by Orangemoontoys on Etsy

Do you have any favorites?

10,000 Kitty Cats!?

The new Sant Ocean Hall at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History is an intense visual experience. They've done a lot to immerse visitors into the realm of oceanic wonder. The hall itself is rectangular with the entrance off the first floor rotunda. My first instinct was to look up; the ceiling spans two floors and there are many things to see above the floor exhibits.

The most eye-catching exhibit is Phoenix, a model of a resilient Northern Right Whale. At one point in her life, she was entangled by a mess of fishing line, but she made it out fine -- save for some scarring on her fluke and bottom lip. All these scars were visible on the model as well.

All through the hall, a graphic of Phoenix accompanied a word bubble with text pointing out a key fact about that exhibit. Often there would be a follow-up question to the visitor, or a humorous anecdote. For example, one of Phoenix's bubbles stated that an adult Northern Right Whale weights 140,000 pounds, which is equal to twelve African Elephants or 10,000 kitty cats!

Along with general species information, the biological exhibits had three main questions emblazoned on the cases:

1) Where does it live?
2) Is it big (or small)?
3) What is it related to?

It was easy to see the main education objectives of the exhibit developers.

One of my favorite exhibits was on vertebrates, and compared the largest -- Blue Whale -- with the smallest -- the Goby. To reach the weight of a Blue, one would need 155,000,000,000 gobies. That's a lot of gobies!

Tere tohora, tere tangata

Translated from Maori as, "Where whales journey, people follow."

This was the subtitle for the whale exhibition at the National Geographic Museum in Washington D.C. It was so artfully, skillfully, factually put together -- like walking into the pages of National Geographic, but much more interactive. The exhibition's acceptance of cultural traditions were wonderful and something that National Geographic has come to be known for.

The central exhibit was two sperm whale skeletons; one, a large male and the other a mature female with weakened bones. It was fascinating comparing the two to one another, side by side. Directly underneath the skeletons were some sort of black plexiglass and small lights. This created two wonderful effects that added a reflection of the skeletons from underneath, as well as producing dramatic shadows upon the ceiling.

In one corner of the room stood a small cave-like room. Once inside, I realized that the cave was shaped like the interior of a sperm whale's head. Towards the front was a screen that played a simulation video of a sperm whale diving for a squid, called "Search and Destroy." Like the rest of the exhibition, this film was exceptionally well done. It made no use of vocal narration and allowed visitors to focus on the whale's task.

A series of short films on "Whale People" were scattered around the perimeters of the room, spotlighting a few different people who study whales in New Zealand. Some were locals, others were foreign researchers who have come to love the country as well as the whales. Each video was a glimpse of the life of someone who lives in New Zealand and studies whales.

It's too bad I don't live nearer to D.C.; I would have enjoyed another visitor or two (or three!) to the Tohora exhibition. One day I'd like to go one better than an exhibit; one day I'd like to go to New Zealand and see for myself!

Whales on Hydrophones

So, where are the whale exhibit reviews? They're a-comin', I promise! In fact, some of them have been written up in my paper journal and are just waiting to be typed up here. Until then, my friends, check out Orcasound.net, the hydrophone network of the Salish Sea. For most of this morning I was listening to distant calls of orcas on the Lime Kiln hydrophone. That's got to be some of the best background music to listen to while writing curriculum about orca communication -- which, incidentally, is what I've been doing all morning. Take care, and let me know if you hear anything on those hydrophones!

Whales on the East Coast

In less than 24 hours I'll be boarding a plane back to Seattle after spending a wonderful few days on the east coast, mostly in New York City and Washington DC.

After visiting a few museums -- American Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, and the National Geographic Museum -- I'm reminded of how important museological collections are to society. Seeing the Blue Whale in AMNH, the Northern Right Whale in the Smithsonian, and the Tohora exhibit at the NatGeo were all enlightening experiences. Not just for what I learned from the exhibitions themselves, but also from observing the interactions of fellow visitors, especially with regards to kids. Hearing parents interpret text panels, kids ooh and aah over the size of Big Blue, and seeing kids climb inside a model heart of a blue whale -- all of these interactions confirmed the important roles of collections and interpretation of collections to me. Even in the current Internet/TV age that we live in, it is becoming increasingly important to experience as much as we can in the flesh, instead of on the screen.

I'll be posting on each museum experience over the next few days. Keep your eyes peeled. =)

Belated Exploding Whale Day

There are three types of exploding whale. One is an explosion triggered by the natural buildup of internal gasses, while another is by using dynamite. The last is the kind where children sit around eating sandwiches and watching it explode. Okay, so that last one doesn't really happen all that often, but my friend, Kevin Arnold of the Robopocalypse Comics Collective, created an image so relevant, it's needs to be in this post.

Art by Kevin Arnold, 2008
(Click for full-size image.)

Yesterday marked the 38th anniversary of the explosion of a whale near Florence, Oregon. If you haven't seen the video I definitely recommend viewing it as soon as possible. The reporter in the video, Paul Linnman, still remembers "making his way out of the area as huge chunks of blubber fell everywhere." Yes, these huge chunks of blubber even traveled a quarter mile away and rained down on the land, including an unfortunately smashed in car. Luckily, no one was hurt, although they all went away with little souvenirs -- dead whale particles all over themselves. Sounds fun, right?

Now, for the other type of exploding whale, we can turn to a sperm whale in Taiwan in 2004. This whale had died naturally and was simply being carted off to a research facility to be necropsied. The problem? Well, have you ever tried to relocate a whale on a flatbed truck? Sadly, the Physeter macrocephalus couldn't hold the gas in long enough, and exploded on the streets and people nearby.

A couple years before that, in 2002, a mature female orca beached near Dungeness Spit in Washington. The Seattle PI reports, "The necropsy, performed on a trailer, was neither pretty to see nor pleasant to smell. Scientists from state, federal and private organizations cut off the head, which almost exploded with gas when first punctured." Lucky for the scientists and people gathered around, there was no explosion to be had.