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January 21, 2006
The Whale

When a white whale visited Bonn in 1966 (scroll down to synopsis) a huge public discussion broke out about capturing or killing it.

The animal, defying all attempts to catch it,  made it back some 250 miles through the river to the open sea on its own mind.

Blair Corp. did catch the whale in London today but it died on the makeshift transport.

The whale struggled with the effects of being out of the water as it was ferried toward the Thames Estuary, officials said.

Sad.

Posted by b on January 21, 2006 at 20:42 UTC | Permalink
Comments

I listened to some radio interviews this evening from veterinary experts on BBC 5 Live. One veterinary phatologist (sp) said that beaching sea mammals and those that go upstream and die show signs of brain damage due to worms and toxins from the autopsy.
Message to the World.

Posted by: Cloned Poster | Jan 21 2006 22:10 utc | 1

@Cloned poster
Who knows, it is difficult to tell and there is no doubt that sick whales become disoriented and are more likely to become beached but many otherwise healthy whales also beach themselves, not including pod members who have followed a sick kaumatua* ashore.
If this fellow was in good health he must have been badly mishandled.
My sister has a beach house over at golden bay where the kids and I get to spend a sizeable chunk of the summer.
The shape of the Bay, which ends at Farewell Spit as well as it’s location, the southern boundary of Cook Strait means that there are a huge number of whale strandings there, and we have been involved in some of the rescues which are becoming much better organised and far more successful than they used to be.
There was a stranding of about 80 pilot whales a few weeks ago and the vast majority were successfully rescued.
The whales must be protected from the sun as they get sunburn even easier than a be-freckled celt such as myself. Their bodies must be kept moist to ensure cooling plus this will lessen the risk of atrophy and infection of the epidermis, and if possible the larger family members can’t be left to lie on their bellies without some sort of floatation or way of preventing all of the whale’s weight being concentrated in one area for too long. Their bodies are designed to survive in the near weightlessness of swimming.
Lastly the whale will be extremely disoriented and not used to sounds that aren’t carried to them through water, so quiet and the gentle reassurance of touch as long as it is sterile and moist can help.
There was sufficient time to organise this.
Because time is critical, that is, the whale should spend as little time as possible out of the water, ferrying the poor bugger down the Thames for the benefit of thousands of screaming tourists and local anthropomorphs would not have been a positive experience.
That is why a couple of nights ago I suggested that he be carried back to his pod by heavy lift helicopter. That would not have been a pleasant experience for him but it would/should have been mercifully short.
On reflection probably not a conspiracy, just a cock up. We had lots of them at Golden Bay until the govt stepped in and made one organisation responsible for stranded whales.
A rescue co-ordinator, who has sole authority/ responsibility is put in place asap.
*Kaumatua (Maori) a recognised family elder or wise person. Age alone doesn’t qualify one, kaumatua are selected by the people and never by self-nomination. (big lesson there for modern democracies) and are relied upon to use their judgement to help an iwi (tribe) reach a resolution of important matters.

Posted by: Anonymous | Jan 21 2006 23:06 utc | 2

Sorry that was me above. i musta tossed my cookies (bad pun alert)……maybe the NSA has got me. Arrrrggghhhh!!!!!!

Posted by: Debs is dead | Jan 21 2006 23:09 utc | 3

Frankly I don’t understand why the Brits didn’t sell a hunting permit to “harvest” the whale. A lot of whales are killed every day for food and oil, why should this disoriented fellow be any different.
Instead we get treated to a week-long media circus and the UK taxpayers pay for it all.

Posted by: dan of steele | Jan 22 2006 9:24 utc | 4

On CNNI this morning, CET:

Everybody in America has a mother. Why can’t they find my mother, who was taken away from the SuperDome by America’s finest. They can find a whale, but they can’t find my mother.

Louisiana’s governor went to the raging weeping woman, made phone calls.

Posted by: Hamburger | Jan 22 2006 12:27 utc | 5

Hey, why let a few facts get in the way of a bit of Brit bashing?
a) The rescue was not connected with the UK gov (Blair Corp).
b) The team that handled the rescue are an experienced crew of trained volunteers [1] that have been doing this for years.
c) There’s a huge difference between turning a stranded whale on a beach adjacent to open seas and one that’s grounded a long way up a very shallow river.
If it didn’t work out this time then it’s a huge pity but it wasn’t due to conspiracy, cock-up or complacency. If you think you can do better then either volunteer or contribute to the people that get off their arses and do real things rather than pontificating on web sites like this. Oh, and if you want to bitch amongst yourselves about the treatment of whales then the governments of Japan and Norway would be a far more suitable starting point.
[1] From the British Divers Marine Life Rescue web site:
BDMLR now train over 400 volunteer Marine Mammal Medics a year and have 20 whale rescue pontoons located at strategic points throughout the UK, waiting to help stranded whales and dolphins.
Our teams are on standby to respond immediately to any marine disaster or marine mammal stranding anywhere in the UK. All our volunteers regularly train to refresh rescue techniques and meet socially to keep in touch with each other and raise funds.
Thirteen Marine Animal Rescue Ambulances are sited throughout the UK ready to be sent to an incident. We also have four Rigid Inflatable Boats (RIBs) which can be on site anywhere in the UK within 24hrs.
Disclaimer: I’m not in any way connected with BDMLR other than as an admirer of their excellent work.

Posted by: Joe Bloggs | Jan 22 2006 17:27 utc | 6

ot, but I found the following story interesting:
US navy captures Somali ‘pirates’
The Somali government has signed a $50m (£28m) two-year deal with a private US marine security company to carry out coastal patrols.
anyone got any thoughts on this?

Posted by: Anonymous | Jan 22 2006 20:05 utc | 7

crap, the above was me.

Posted by: Uncle $cam | Jan 22 2006 20:06 utc | 8

It was immediately apparent that there was no state involvement in ‘rescuing’ that whale. There was state involvement in harassing it though. For nearly two days police launches fizzed around the poor thing trying to steer it where they deemed it would be ‘safe’.
Meanwhile england, a nation overloaded with anthropomorphs who just don’t realise that 9 times outta 10 the best thing you can do with any animal is leave it the fuck alone, zoomed in at it on helicopters, for god’s sake the BBC was offering instant fame to any fool who got a cellphone picture of it!
I feel sorry for the whale rescue mob doubtless they had good intentions (well most of em) but they were a day late and a dollar short. I have never seen anything quite so pitiful as that poor fucking creature strapped down out of the water on a bright summers day while every man and his dog hooted at the parade.
If they couldn’t use a helicopter, why was the ‘rescue’ done in the middle of the day?. If it had been done at night time when the sun wouldn’t have been out and it would have been cooler the operation may have stood a chance.
No it was done in the daytime, not only because it was a good parade but also because the thing would have been deemed a hazard to navigation, and that concern for allowing one of the satellite machines of mammon to continue grinding the flesh of humans from basra to biafra was probably the cause of it being grounded.
I don’t know where you get the idea that ocean side whale strandings occur “on a beach adjacent to open seas” when they inevitably occur right up the end of ‘tidal flatland’ on a very low gradient so that the stranding which often occurs following a king tide leaves the whales up to a couple of miles from the sea once the tide has retreated.
The obstacles are very similar so as long as the population of chinless wonders wanting to ‘stroke the nice dolphin’ can be kept to a minimum it may be possible to ‘save’ this animal.
Keeping the whale protected from the sun by some form of shade, and having a few people who really know what they are doing put in up to 15 hours work is vital.
Then the best plan is to wait for nature to take it’s course and the tide to come in.
This is where experience really matters because the once passive whale can become extremely dangerous to be around in that period between the tide being in far enough to give it full mobility and it being in just enough to give it limited mobility ie moving its body, tail and flippers which are very powerful and can cause great damage.
on the surface pontoons may seem to be a useful tool for moving stranded cetaceans.
They can help with the smaller marine mammals, but using some sort of floatation pontoon on a large whale frequently means the end of sentience for that being.
Mind you I didn’t see a pontoon in use with the london whale, for some reason the ‘experienced’ rescuers had the poor bugger completely out of the water.
I don’t blame them as I’m sure that they were probably doing their best under difficult circumstances.
Namely Mammon, would have been having a bit to say about this mammal holding up the works.
I’m afraid that is the inevitable consequence of a charity doing the work of the state. That is if the english did have a committment to marine mammals the rescue co-ordinator would have had sufficient authority to keep the greedheads in place until the rescue had been properly effected.
Of course it’s easy to sit on the other side of the world saying how it should be done.
That doesn’t deal with the plain truth which is unless the english own up to the fact although they quite like the idea of whales in person, and not on some ‘nature video’, having them in that situation may force the human population out of it’s comfort zone.
Especially in regard to making the ‘nut’ for that week. As far as I can tell all of this fuss followed by inevitable death is just more hypocrisy from a nation famed for it.
e.g. encouraging it’s senior military staff to wank on about the stupidity and brutality of the US occupation forces in Iraq at the same time as those self same chinless cretins are assiduously covering up their own acts of stupidity and brutality.
ps I generally don’t brit bash as Joe Bloggs put it. I confine my contempt to england unless the population of one of the other nations on that island permit a lickspittle to toady around the english.

Posted by: Debs is dead | Jan 22 2006 20:27 utc | 9

The info about the poor whale was very confusing from the start. Sometimes on news reports it was described as “old”, sometimes as “adolescent”.
The consensus from early on (that is, Richard Savin, the guy from the Natural History Museum) seemed to be that it was very sick to have piloted itself up a freshwater channel into central London at all, and thus unlikely to survive.
I didn’t cycle down to the river to have a look-see on account of this, didn’t want to gawk at a creature in its death throes.
If it had been healthy and the prognosis good, I would have cycled down with some calamares – its preferred foodstuff, apparently.

Posted by: More Than Usually Dismal Science | Jan 22 2006 21:31 utc | 10

what a sad story!

Posted by: business babe | Jan 23 2006 0:50 utc | 11

The Chemical Marriage
http://www.buffalonews.com/editorial/20060121/1052257.asp
Anyone putting their $’s on Hillary v. Condi
needs a pharmaceutical lobotomy. And anyone
who thinks Hillary will play any better than
Condi needs a sharp stick up their ass.
If we make it to 2008. There is absolutely
no doubt the Fed is M3onetizing the deficit
back onto the taxpayer, which is US folks,
who can’t afford staggering US$ devaluation,
visible in skyrocketing commodity prices.
“Non sunt multiplicanda entia praeter necessitatem.” Occum’s Razor Revisited.
Like 10,000 points of light, the rental
market will sputter and die out, retail
will fold like a house of cards, autos
will stagnate in used car and repo lots,
and Dollar Store bulk foods will soar.
Doesn’t anyone remember 1973 and 1984?
The rich, behind their cloistered walls,
will covort in jewels, gold, extravagant
cars, helipads, Kristal for bath water.
With no intrinsic value but momentum play,
and ‘use it or lose it’ monetary devalues,
the world’s stockmarkets will churn and
roil, huge gallumpfing bubbles of pump-
and-dump in a chase to the bottom crash.
The nations of the world will be forced
to monetize stagflation onto their own
citizens, who have to choose between a
packet of Ramen, or gas for their bemo,
a can of Spam, or oil to cook it with.
And sleep twelve to a room.
Colin Powell and Condi Rice in 2008.
Why not, it’s all become a charade!
The Neo World has turned inside out.
Rosicrucians doing it to Mohammedans.
May you never know hunger.

Posted by: Carin Rutherford | Jan 23 2006 1:19 utc | 12

Another big problem for whales is sonar.
Talk about tinnitus from hell. I wonder what the human equivalent would be?
One time I came home to a malfunctioning, unplugged, shrieking CO alarm–the dumb thing was, I forgot I even _had_ a CO alarm and I couldn’t locate the source of the sound because it was so overwhelming. I even got a ladder and climbed up into my attic to see if my landlord had left something up there. I didn’t smell smoke, so I didn’t think there was anything on fire. I began thinking that I was going mad or that someone was beaming this sound into my head….I think my search lasted for about 10 minutes.
God knows what it did to my poor cat.

Posted by: catlady | Jan 23 2006 3:31 utc | 13

LOL!
Catlady, the same thing happened to me this week, except that I never discovered that it was the CO alarm battery. I kept toe-teetering upon phone books piled onto a kitchen chair in order to reach and replace 4! consecutive new-but-expired? smoke alarm batteries. Finally I gave up and just put up with the intermittent noise all day. The dog hid under the dining table. Dear husband came home and re-installed the last battery [it was obvious to him that I was installing them ‘the wrong way’] before he turned to notice the CO alarm below….

Posted by: gylangirl | Jan 24 2006 1:03 utc | 14

Yes. I seriously wonder if some military testing was going on to drive the fish bonkers. I saw much of that in St. Croix.

Posted by: Malooga | Jan 24 2006 3:28 utc | 15

Dear Debs,
As a rule I usually ignore such blatantly bigoted outpourings such as yours. I was going to dismiss it on a line-by-line basis but to plumb the depths of your ignorance would require a bathyscape. Being a charitable type that gets upset easily by the sight of the less-abled suffering in their cluelessness I suppose you deserves a brief response. Here are a few ideas you may like to explore:
1) In the northern hemisphere it’s currently mid-winter and the temperature was hovering above zero during the rescue.
2) The anthropomorphism you seem so horrified by is not a purely English trait. It even stretches to politically clued-up Asians in Britain.
3) The rescue crew used purpose-built pontoons. If you didn’t see them but still felt the need to comment.
4) Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have their own legislative assemblies. England doesn’t. The aforementioned three nations can vote on purely English matters but not vice versa.
5) Many members of the Labour government are Scots. The previous Labour Party leader was a Scot. Tony Blair is part Irish. The next Labour Party leader and Prime Minister is a Scot. Google for Scottish Raj and see what you find.
There you go, far more of a reply than an ignorant, racist bigot such as yourself deserves. I’d suggest you obtain a chip for your other shoulder so that your world view and knowledge become a bit more balanced.

Posted by: Fred Bloggs | Jan 24 2006 10:28 utc | 16

Hey, love this CEP stuff. Better still, let’s disband the whole Act of Union 1707 nonsense.
Oh – and get real – DiD calling you a pommie prick isn’t exactly racist.

Posted by: DM | Jan 24 2006 11:23 utc | 17

DM,
The 1707 Act of Union was desperately needed by the Scots as they needed English cash to dig themselves out of the deep doo-doo that was a consequence of them bankrupting the country with the Darien Scheme. Yes, those poor, downtrodden Celts were busy being global imperialists themselves but screwed up badly.
I’m pleased to see that you think that Debs isn’t racist. By implication you still think she’s a ignorant bigot as I used all three words and you only called me on the racist part.
I assume Debs is a Kiwi. If so, she is also an imperialist invader as any Kiwi is the decendent of invaders, be they European or Maori. She conveniently forgets this. If she had the slightest clue about anything she’d know that pretty much every person alive or in the past is also an imperialist unless they are resident and a direct decendent of the first humans in the Rift Valley.
And why isn’t calling someone a Pommie prick racist? Is racism something only suffered by non-white people? That’s a rather condescending attitude to take.

Posted by: Fred Bloggs | Jan 24 2006 13:07 utc | 18

@Fred .. because ‘pommie’, ‘septic’ and other name calling is just banter. Mostly good humoured banter.
DiD (male), me, you, and a sizeable number of Americans are all the same mongrel “British” stock (Celts, Picts, Scots, Anglos, Norman, Danish, Norweigian, Irish) so “race” isn’t applicable. Try tracing your family history. Unless you are Catholic, there’s little chance that you can find your way earlier than the early or mid 1800’s (a lot of us peasants didn’t even have registered births).
Stick around. You might even get to like DiD.

Posted by: DM | Jan 24 2006 23:17 utc | 19

DM,
While ostensibly British I am of very mixed stock, part of which is Irish so I don’t have an axe to grind about Celts except for the ones that seem to enjoy playing the part of professional victimhood. Can you recall a Brit ever moaning about the Romans or the Vikings or any other group that has invaded the islands? No, me neither 🙂
The “good humoured banter” thing. It all depends on context. One of my Aussie friends always calls me a Pommie Bastard with a grin on her face so I know how it should be taken. I’ve also heard the same two words used with very different meaning. Debs seems to clearly land in the latter camp.

Posted by: Fred Bloggs | Jan 25 2006 1:24 utc | 20

i am not buying the good humor banter. you have a bone to pick w/eugene’s ‘attitude’ ? seems like a lot of spit and vigor for what?

Posted by: annie | Jan 25 2006 1:47 utc | 21

There you go, far more of a reply than an ignorant, racist bigot such as yourself deserves. I’d suggest you obtain a chip for your other shoulder so that your world view and knowledge become a bit more balanced.
i should have referenced my post

Posted by: annie | Jan 25 2006 1:53 utc | 22

Annie,
Who are referring to? Your post is a tad unclear. Who is Eugene?

Posted by: Fred Bloggs | Jan 25 2006 2:05 utc | 23

human and whale
why do we care? a dolphin that got stranded in the sound near vashon a couple years back. dominated the news. dramatic costs and rescue to return it to its family. these mammals of the sea have a unique connection to our conscious.

“Super Whale” – our relative in the water Environmental and animal welfare activists often speak about the whale in the singular. We are told that the whale is the world’s largest animal, that it has the world’s largest brain, that its brain is large in comparison to body weight, that it is social and friendly, that it sings, that it has its own child care system, and that it is threatened, etc. It is true that the blue whale is the world’s largest animal and that the sperm whale has the world’s largest brain (although it is small in comparison to the animal’s size), but most of the other assertions are difficult to prove. Those that do hold some truth are rarely true for more than one or two of the more than 75 different whale species which exist. When one speaks about the whale they are combining all the characteristics found among the various species, such that the whale has them all. But such a whale does not exist; it i s a mythical creation, a “super whale”, which is also given human traits. To New Zealand’s IWC commissioner the whale has become our counter-part in water, and for the previous Greenpeace-Denmark leader, Mikael Gylling Nielsen, it is “the human of the ocean”. Whales, and particularly dolphins, are made an object of cult- like worship of groups caught in the “New Age” movement.
In attempting to mystify whales, weight is laid on two related circumstances. Particular emphasis is given to the fact that whales have existed for millions of years. Some people claim their long history alone gives them special rights to the sea. The whales become some type of oceanic “indigenous people”. Another argument is that whales have had more time to develop their intellectual capacity. Whales are said to have been highly intelligent when humans were still “nocturnal insects”, to quote Mikael Gylling-Nielsen. The age of whales places them over humans; they become our teachers.

Posted by: annie | Jan 25 2006 2:13 utc | 24

eugene debs , is dead

Posted by: annie | Jan 25 2006 2:18 utc | 25

i have a fascination w/sonar. can you even imagine?? it’s such an evolved form of communication, totally outrumps eyes and ears. instead of describing something we could just send the signals we experienced , bypassing the need for ‘description’. and the ability to ‘see’ inside a being or object gives one a cognitive ability it’s hard for me even to fathom. no wonder dr. lilly went from studying the effects of LSD to dolphins.
i’ve been really stressed out. this alito thing seems like 11/04 all over again. are we beached?

Posted by: annie | Jan 25 2006 3:00 utc | 26

Seems this whale thread never dies.
What the deadly combination of civilization and denial has brought us is increasingly more costly and invasive interventions for underlying conditions of imbalance we are loath to address or change. This is true in many fields, especially medicine, where mankind is inventing numerous drugs to remedy the effects of the industrialized, processed food diet. We are not going to address ocean ecology or sonar sound levels or whaling, so instead we will make a costly showy tawdry spectacle out of saving a single whale. The ‘spectacular’ expiation of collective guilt.
Whale songs can travel thousands of miles, but an increasingly noisy ocean is drastically cutting down their ability to communicate, according to new research that suggests ever-increasing noise could impede the beasts’ ability to navigate and find mates.
Whales sing at a low frequency, at the very bottom of the range of human hearing. To hear the whales, “you have to broaden your listening range,” said Christopher Clark of Cornell University, adding that “their voices are beautifully adapted for long-range transmission. They are acoustically extremely prolific.”
By singing at low frequencies, whales are able to communicate across oceans — it’s how they keep track of their pod and alert friends of a good place to eat.
Using an underwater sound surveillance system more typically employed for tracking submarines, Clark and his colleagues zero in on specific whale songs and even track whales based on where the songs originate from.
Puerto Rico to Newfoundland
“If we went to the shelf-edge of Puerto Rico, we could hear blue whales off Newfoundland 1,600 miles away,” Clark said here this weekend at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
But Clark and other scientists are concerned that the growing “acoustic smog” in the world’s oceans, and particularly the waters near popular migration and feeding routes, is interfering with whales’ ability to communicate with songs.
“A blue whale, which lives 100 years, that was born in 1940, today has had his acoustic bubble shrunken from 1,000 miles to 100 miles because of noise pollution,” said Clark. “The noise pollution is estimated to be at the industrial noise level where OSHA would require us to wear headphones.”
Noise pollution is doubling every decade in an urbanized marine environment, Clark claims, mostly due to shipping traffic.
“If females can no longer hear the singing males through the smog, they lose breeding opportunities and choices,” he said.
Clark suggested that the shipping industry overhaul their ships and begin using quieter propellers. A more economically feasible fix might be to reroute shipping traffic so that it no longer passed through popular whale habitats, he said.
Spaced out
Very little is known about whale communication. Clark and his colleagues, U.S. Navy acoustics experts Chuck Gagnon and Paula Loveday, have been been using the underwater microphones of the Sound Surveillance System to track blue, fin, humpback and minke whales. They find that the process of communication among whales is a broader concept, in both time and space, than humans have conceptualized.
“There is a time delay in the water, and the response times for their communication are not the same as ours,” Clark said. “Suddenly you realize that their behavior is defined not by my scale, or any other whale researcher’s scale, but by a whale’s sense of scale — ocean basin-sized.”
Whale sonar is also important for navigation.
“Whales will aim directly at a seamount that is 300 miles away, then once they reach it, change course and head to a new feature,” Clark said. “It is as if they are slaloming from one geographic feature to the next. They must have acoustic memories analogous to our visual memories.”
Populations declining drastically
In separate research presented this weekend, DNA analysis of whales shows their populations grew steadily through history, with drastic declines recently.
“Whales have shown remarkable resilience to cataclysmic events — until the last one — which is us,” said Steve Palumbi of Stanford University’s Hopkins Marine Station. “Ice ages, sea level change and even loss of local food sources did not interrupt their lives. Living in a fluid environment, they could move to new areas of productivity and find food even as the climate around them changed.”

Posted by: Malooga | Jan 25 2006 4:03 utc | 27

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