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There Are Whales Alive Today Who Were Born Before Moby Dick Was Written
- 001sky 13y agoNot related to the content, but the construct and display of this article is less than conducive to reading it.
- lifeisstillgood 13y agoAnd today is the day of vengeance ! "Planet of The Cetaceans"
- huxley 13y ago[TAYLOR falls to his knees screaming] YOU MANIACS! YOU BLEW IT UP! OH, DANG YOU! GOLDANG YOU ALL TO HECK! [TAYLOR buries his head in his hands, point of view switches to reveal half-buried in the sand and washed by the waves is MARINE WORLD]
- lifeisstillgood 13y agoironically, any two hundred year old whale will know exactly the feelings of loss and devastation on finding your species has been all but wiped out.
- chris_wot 13y agoWe really should kill them to examine them for scientific purposes. Plus, whale blubber is yum!
- chris_wot 13y agoOffended? This is precisely what the Japanese do.
- daliusd 13y agoI guess you were not subtle enough :)
- chris_wot 13y agoAu contraire, it appears that I was too subtle!
- IE5point5 13y agomeh, some cultures would find Americas industrial beef farming just as offensive.
- veidr 13y agoDude, there are cows alive today who were born before the McRib was architected.
- Perceval 13y agoI had whale "bacon" sashimi in Japan a few years ago, and it was better than I expected.
- grecy 13y agoIt makes me very proud to be Australian when the Aussie navy puts their warships between the Japanese whaler fleet and the whales. The implied statement is "Shoot that harpoon at us and see what happens". So far, it's been a lot of posturing. Many hundreds of whales have been saved.
- srean 13y agoMoby dick's kin the sperm whales are incredibly interesting. One of their remarkable ability is to dive deep, fast and long. Among all free diving warm blooded animals they go the deepest. They dive to depths 25 times deeper than their other equally famous and endangered cousin the blue whales. The blue whale is the largest known animal to have ever inhabited the earth. To give an idea of how deep they dive, here is a picture http://i.imgur.com/ESp2j.jpg http://i.imgur.com/ESp2j.jpg It needs to be magnified for perspective and for the little surprise at the bottom. It is interesting how they manage to hold their breath for so long and yet manage to survive the bends (decompression sickness). The whales are seriously challenging our assumptions about animal intelligence, empathy, society, culture and language. For a long time we believed that the primates were at the top. Search Ted talks and youtube for dolphin intelligence, dont miss the Attenborough ones. For lack of a better word they are just amazing. Dolphins are for example known to build difficult to make toys (air bubble vortex rings) just to entertain themselves. They have to discover how to make it. Sometimes they can be quite possessive, they would break the toy if someone not so knowledgeable wants to play with it. Once a dolphin figures it out how to make one, his/her peers eventually figure it out too. So it kind of spreads within a group like fashion. This behavior has been observed both in captivity and in the wild. Dolphins in captivity try to imitate us and seem to have no trouble mapping our body parts to theirs. A story goes that a scientist observing an young dolphin from an underwater portal had blown a cloud of cigarette smoke at it. The dolphin promptly went to the mother and did the same to the scientist with milk ! It is now strongly believed that they call each other by name. They try to imitate human speech which takes enormous effort on their part because unlike for example parrots their vocal tract is not conducive for this at all. People believe this to be an indication of their strong desire to communicate with us. And they originated from ungulates: hoofed warm blooded animals. It came as a surprise to me that that there were hoofed carnivorous animals.
- samizdatum 13y agoThe long lifespan of whales could actually shed some light on human evolution. Whales, along with many other mammalian species (including humans) exhibit a perplexing divergence of somatic and reproductive senescence. Female whales hit menopause long before their lives are over, in some cases spending the majority of their lives in a non-reproductive state, which prima facie seems rather maladaptive. A number of hypotheses have been proposed to explain what seems like widespread evolutionary selection for menopause, and none of them are completely satisfactory. The "grandmother hypothesis", for example, posits that experienced grandmothers assist in the care of their grandchildren, increasing their odds of survival. Certain species of whales, including Orcinus orca, the killer whale, exhibit early-life menopause, and form stable matrilineal groups, making them ideal candidates for testing the grandmother hypothesis. Interestingly, studies on killer whales observe no significant correlation between living grandmothers and grandoffspring survival rates, though there are plenty of unaddressed confounding factors. Humans are the only species where the grandmother hypothesis is supported by data, but the dearth of corresponding data in whales suggests the dramatic disparity in our somatic-reproductive senescence might be more strongly selected for by factors we are not yet aware of.
- has2k1 13y agoA convenient theory for longevity is, late menopause implies a selection (in the history of the species) against all of forms early age killers. So, I find it fascinating that a warm blooded (or even cold blooded e.g turtles) animal with an early menopause can ward off cancer for that long.
- rthomas6 13y agoThis is a bit of a stretch, but perhaps if whales are as smart as we think they are, elders are advantageous because they can pass down wisdom to younger whales.
- mhartl 13y agoYour suggestion is essentially the "grandmother hypothesis" mentioned in the parent comment.
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- vrypan 13y agoSlightly off-topic, but I can't help it: This is exactly why we picked the bowhead whale for our mascot at www.longaccess.com. :-)
- srean 13y agoI dont think you deserved the downvotes. longaccess indeed seems an important endeavor to undertake. All the best.
- zipfle 13y agoInteresting that their evidence --a stone arrowhead found in a whale-- is actually also described in Moby Dick itself: --- It so chanced that almost upon first cutting into [a whale, not Moby Dick] with the spade, the entire length of a corroded harpoon was found imbedded in his flesh, on the lower part of the bunch before described. But as the stumps of harpoons are frequently found in the dead bodies of captured whales, with the flesh perfectly healed around them, and no prominence of any kind to denote their place; therefore, there must needs have been some other unknown reason in the present case fully to account for the ulceration alluded to. But still more curious was the fact of a lance-head of stone being found in him, not far from the buried iron, the flesh perfectly firm about it. Who had darted that stone lance? And when? It might have been darted by some Nor' West Indian long before America was discovered. gutenberg.org full text: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2701/2701-h/2701-h.htm http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2701/2701-h/2701-h.htm
- huxley 13y agoMoby Dick is so encyclopedic and digressive that I'm not surprised that any given random fact about whales might appear in it.
- maw 13y agoIndeed, and this is my favorite random fact about whales in Moby Dick: "Be it known that, waiving all argument, I take the good old fashioned ground that the whale is a fish, and call upon holy Jonah to back me."
- antimagic 13y agoAnd they still haven't read past the first fifty pages because, like everyone else, they get bored and put the book down. Seriously though, I find it remarkable that bowhead populations have come back so fast considering how long they live. The oceans must have been absolutely teeming with them back in the day, if they reproduce that fast and live that long.
- huxley 13y agoIt is their loss, the modern reader needs to take a cue from Ahab and not give up on Moby Dick. Nathaniel Philbrick's "Why Read Moby-Dick?" gave me the kick I needed to tackle the book and I am grateful to him that I did (and plan to do so again).
- antimagic 13y agoI'm thinking that the modern whale is not a big fan of Ahab...
- huxley 13y agoA discerning modern whale would know that it is a mistake to dislike a work of literature because its characters are flawed and distasteful. Ahab could give that whale insight into the often obsessive nature of humanity, its willingness to sacrifice riches and life on the altar of revenge. Plus Moby Dick really kicks ass in several scenes.
- antimagic 13y agoI think their objection is more that Ahab was all about killing them... Other than that, your average modern whale is generally fairly accepting of human foibles.
- madaxe_again 13y agoThere are clams alive today who hatched while the Ming dynasty was extant. There are trees alive today which sprouted ten thousand years ago. Hell, Pando (albeit a clonal colony) could be 1,000,000 years old. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pando_(tree) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pando_(tree) Astounding depths of time for a single organism to persist over - but ultimately dependent on a very sedate pace of life.
- mansabchohadry 13y agodon't know when will be my account activated :D on ycombinator :D
- exratione 13y agoThe Methuselah Foundation has funded one of the research groups interested in comparative studies of the genetics of longevity, helping them to obtain the resources to sequence bowhead whales. This is one of those lines of work that is next to impossible to get funding for from the normal institutional channels at the present time: https://www.mfoundation.org/work#bowhead-whale https://www.mfoundation.org/work#bowhead-whale ----------------- Given the declining costs of DNA sequencing, all kinds of research that used to be prohibitively expensive even a few years ago is now becoming possible. For example, we recently awarded a $10,000 research grant to Dr. Joao Pedro de Magelhaes at the University of Liverpool to sequence the genome of the bowhead whale in order to study mechanisms for longevity in this warm-blooded mammal whose lifespan is estimated at over 200 years. Not only are bowhead whales far longer-lived than humans, but their massive size means that they are likely to possess unique tumor suppression mechanisms. “These mechanisms for the longevity and resistance to aging-related diseases of bowhead whales are unknown,” says Dr. de Magelhaes, “but it is clear that in order to live so long, these animals must possess aging prevention mechanisms related to cancer, immunosenescence, neurodegenerative diseases, and cardiovascular and metabolic diseases." The bowhead whale study will be conducted at the state-of-the-art Liverpool Centre for Genomic Research and results will be made available to the research community.
- thebiglebrewski 13y agohttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pAW4mntPM-w http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pAW4mntPM-w
- whistlerbrk 13y agoSomewhat off topic... but I encourage everyone to watch the Blackfish documentary. These are incredible, amazing, highly intelligent animals. Different nations have their own languages. They know who we are, they know what we're doing to them, they know when we're making them do tricks for them for food for other's amusement.
- the_watcher 13y agoAquatic mammals are fascinating. They are so clearly mammals, yet they've adapted the mammalian traits that we take for granted as land-based evolutions to living in the water. I'm reminded of the bomb sniffing dolphins right now.
- arunc 13y agoAnd, we the humans are here to destroy everything dumping nuclear wastes into the ocean.