No Bones About It!

In my last post I mentioned that I was preparing to work with Lee Post, aka "The Boneman." This is all in relation to my job as an AmeriCorps environmental educator at the Port Townsend Marine Science Center. It has been an amazing experience so far and I can't wait to see how the rest of the week turns out!

The last two days have been spent training volunteers to measure and photograph bones from our gray whale skeleton, which is used as a teaching tool, instead of being fully articulated as an exhibit. The trainings are all in preparation for an even bigger project at the marine science center -- the articulation and exhibition of a transient orca skeleton -- and I am so grateful that I get to be here in this time and place to be involved with this hands-on project.

Cervical vertebra from a juvenile gray whale. Photo taken on my camera phone of the experimental photography set-up.

Ever since working as an educator at The Whale Museum on San Juan Island, I had wondered what it would be like to articulate a whale skeleton. I read Lee Post's books on articulation, but never dreamed I would get to do any articulating myself. And now, some years later, I'm preparing to do exactly that; I'm training volunteers and learning about articulation from Lee Post himself!

Happiness is...

...reading the new book on blue whales, Wild Blue, by Dan Bortolotti. (Preview it on Google Books here.)

...watching a slideshow on the Southern Resident orca population, put together by the folks at The Whale Museum in Friday Harbor. (Want more? See part two here.)

...getting a package with blacklight and blacklight-sensitive paint for creating a class activity on marine mammal echolocation.

...preparing to work with Lee Post -- "The Boneman" -- on a bone/skeleton articulation project.

...the anticipation of the Ways of Whales workshop on Whidbey Island at the end of this month, put on by Orca Network.

...getting another cup of coffee, which I'm off to do right now.

Doesn't take a lot to make me happy, does it?

121 Years

Is it really 2009 already? I've been so swamped with work lately, writing curricula on orca communication and sound underwater, that I've hardly had time for anything else. As I type this I'm catching up on all my favorite marine science blogs and watching the live dissection of a great white shark. (Have you watched that yet?)

Philip over at the New England Aquarium's Right Whale Aerial Survey Blog reports that a North Atlantic Right Whale has been seen in the Azores by biologists at the University of the Azores Dept. of Oceanography and Fisheries. This observation marks the first time a right whale has been seen around there since 1888. That's 121 years since the last sighting! Also, it turns out that this specific whale had been seen and cataloged by the folks at the New England Aquarium as recently as September of 2008. Whoa. So cool!

As exciting as this news is -- and it is very exciting -- I'm even more impressed with the Right Whale Catalog that the New England Aquarium has put together. Maintaining this resource must be a huge undertaking, and I'm glad to see it readily available online. You know what they say: "Sharing is caring!"

Whale Workshop Weekend and Whale Song

At the end of January, down at Camp Ocean Pines in Cambria, California there will be a Humpback Whale workshop, led by scientist and co-founder of the Whale Trust, Dr. Jim Darling. Dr. Darling's current research is on the function of Humpback songs, which he studies from the Hawaiian island of Maui. Lucky guy!

I wonder if Dr. Darling has read Fluke by Christopher Moore? In the book, the characters figure out that the songs of Humpbacks can be translated into binary, and from that into English. What, you don't think that's possible? I would love to see someone try. I can see the article title now, "It actually means something!: Humpback song translated into binary code," or, "It has nothing to do with mating: What it really means and why they want to play Wii so bad."

Okay, who's going to help me get the Humpback/binary project started? First we'll need funding...

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!