Harbor seals might be called “pooch vitamin” and gray whales “scratchiest robot” — or at least those are a couple of the wacky names I derived with the help of spell-checking software.
Scientific names don’t normally give me much of a problem — primarily because I don’t use them all that much. If I’m writing an article about an animal or plant, I sometimes include the scientific name for the sake of precision, since some species are called by different things in other parts of the world.
I don’t know how to pronounce most scientific names, and I almost always need to double-check the spellings. As Sloan Tomlinson of Entomology Uncensored points out, auto-correct is no friend of scientists stuck with using proper taxonomic names.
L-112 in happier times. The 3-year-old orca died in February, and her death is the subject of an intense investigation.
“Clearly the animal was blown up,” he told Scott Rasmussen, a reporter for the Journal of the San Juan Islands.
When I asked Ken to explain, he provided a lot more detail and informed me that he was calling for a law-enforcement investigation into the whale’s death by the National Marine Fisheries Service. Why he is seeking more than a biological analysis of the death will become clear in a moment.
What Ken is suggesting is that L-112 was killed by a bomb, possibly dropped from an aircraft during a training event in the Navy’s Northwest Training Range off the West Coast. His evidence is circumstantial, but he wants some answers.
What we know for sure is that this young female orca washed up dead at Long Beach on Feb. 11 in relatively fresh condition, allowing a complete necropsy, including CT scans of the head and dissections of the internal organs and head.
Joe Gaydos, a veterinarian with The SeaDoc Society who participated in the necropsy, said the whale showed signs of “blunt force trauma” with injury to the right and left sides of the head and right side of the body. Blunt force trauma might be what a human would experience if dropped from a helicopter onto soft ground, he explained.
Morgan, the young orca rescued at sea and nursed back to health in a Dutch marine park, will stay put in the Netherlands while an Amsterdam judge considers her ultimate fate.
Killer whale activists around the world are thrilled that Morgan will not be shipped this week to a marine park in the Canary Islands of Spain, where she reportedly would become part of SeaWorld’s corporate collection of captive orcas.
A judge in Amsterdam District Court ruled today that more research should be done to determine whether Morgan should be set free or stay in captivity. For now, the judge said, Morgan should remain in Harderwijk Dolphinarium but be moved into a larger tank with other marine mammals.
The judge ruled that advocates in the case — including Orca Coalition, Free Morgan and the dolphinarium — should work together to find a common solution. Also the Agriculture Minister in Holland, which last week issued a permit to move Morgan, must take more responsibility in deciding the future of the whale and not abdicate his decisions to the dolphinarium, according to the judge.
“Of course the fact that she now remains in the Dolphinarium for the short term is not ideal and it is definitely not a solution. But as she is temporarily moved to a larger tank and we continue to fight for her freedom, this really is an important first step in the right direction.
Moving Morgan to the larger tank will allow her to socialize with dolphins that she has heard from a distance.
According to a report by Jason Garcia of the Orlando Sentinel, SeaWorld Parks & Entertainment was behind the proposed move to Loro Parque on the Canary Island of Tenerife, where five other SeaWorld-owned killer whales are on display. Many killer whale advocates assert that SeaWorld is eager to obtain Morgan for breeding purposes.
A plan to release the whale (PDF 552 kb) was developed by a group of killer whale supporters, including Ken Balcomb of the Center for Whale Research and Robin Baird of Cascadia Research, both in Puget Sound. The idea would be to place her in a good-sized sea pen, where she would be trained to follow a boat and respond to acoustic signals. Morgan could then be released with observers nearby to see how she responds to other killer whales.
Returning her to her home region would be difficult challenge because of rough winds and waters.
In a most unlikely accident, a 30-foot humpback whale breached out of the water during a sailboat race in the Pacific Ocean Thursday, snapping off the mast of L’Orca, one of boats in the race.
A breaching humpback whale crashed into this sailboat, L'Orca, breaking off the mast and leaving other damage.
Then the whale was gone, leaving behind only bits of scraped-off skin and blubber, a broken mast and some messed up rigging. The boat could not continue in the Oregon International Offshore Race.
The accident occurred about 30 minutes into the race, which began at 9 a.m. at Buoy 2 near Astoria, Ore., with a destination of Victoria, B.C.
“Our boat speed was about 9 knots over the water. All of a sudden, a few inches or a foot maybe off the starboard side, a whale came breaching out of the water … hit the mast about halfway to three-quarters of the way up and proceeded to fall forward off the starboard side of the boat.
After the whale was gone, the crew came out on deck and cleared the lines and other hazards. Other boats in the race came to assist before the Coast Guard arrived to provide assistance to Astoria. The Coast Guard video also shows the damage to the boat and bits of blubber left behind.
The incident sounds similar to a whale-boat encounter last summer off South Africa, when a southern right whale crashed into a sailboat. In a video by CBS News, technicians were able to slightly enhance the original video taken from another boat. Here’s an interview on The Today Show with the boat’s occupants.