Tuesday, August 28, 2012

Phoning it in

sometimes I have interesting thoughts of my own, but today i am merely regurgitating some pilferings from the sweet time-sucking crack that is Facebook.

THUSLY.

{(a picture of a whale)}

In 2004, The New York Times wrote an article about the loneliest whale in the world. Scientists have been tracking her since 1992 and they discovered the problem:

She isn’t like any other baleen whale. Unlike all other whales, she doesn’t have friends. She doesn’t have a family. She doesn’t belong to any tribe, pack or gang...

She doesn’t have a lover. She never had one. Her songs come in groups of two to six calls, lasting for five to six seconds each. But her voice is unlike any other baleen whale. It is unique—while the rest of her kind communicate between 12 and 25hz, she sings at 52hz. You see, that’s precisely the problem. No other whales can hear her. Every one of her desperate calls to communicate remains unanswered. Each cry ignored. And, with every lonely song, she becomes sadder and more frustrated, her notes going deeper in despair as the years go by.

Just imagine that massive mammal, floating alone and singing—too big to connect with any of the beings it passes, feeling paradoxically small in the vast stretches of empty, open ocean.

{(a link where you can hear the song of the lonely whale, and the songs other whales who enjoy well-populated lives for comparative purposes)}

...

In other news, don't buy avocados from the refrigerated produce section, even if they're only 50 cents apiece. They are all dead, I tell you; dead and brown and mushy inside.
^^^I wrote that part myself without help from social media.

Saturday, August 18, 2012

Swallow the Sea

Today's Animal of the Week is a sea slug

glaucus atlanticus
Also called the Sea Swallow.
It's pelagic, which means it lives anywhere there's an ocean, except for the deep or sandy or cold parts.

It's hermaphroditic, hence the neutral pronoun ("morphodite", as the locals say).

It has counter-shading, which means when you look up from beneath, it's light to match the sky, but when you look down, it's blue to match the ocean. The up-side is the creature's belly; it floats relaxedly in the surface tension.

They get about as big as your hand (depending on the size of your hand) and eat jellyfish, saving the stingy bits for later use.