Yellowfin tuna, Thunnus albacares

You like to think you’re doing the world a favor, and doing your part by making sure that can of tuna you pick up at the supermarket is “Dolphin Safe”, however, have you ever stopped to think what it might be doing to other sea life?

To properly understand the conundrum, we first need to look at the underlying history of “Dolphin
Safe” tuna.

The story goes something like this.. Way back when, a bunch of environmental activists got together and exposed those nasty tuna fisherman for the vermins they were. They were reeling in record amounts of tuna sure. But how did they find the tuna? Truth of the matter is, there are really only two ways to go about looking to tuna in the sea; rigorously searching using sonar, boats, and planes, or following around the dolphins.

No one really knows why, but dolphins tend to be associated with huge schools of tuna. So whenever a group of these tuna fishermen went out, they looked for pockets of dolphins and cast their lines.. It worked. They brought in record amounts of tuna, but they were also harming the dolphins.

We got all worked up about the poor dolphins, so the fishermen had to get creative. They now use floating objects on the ocean surface to attract the tuna, and then circle around them with a bunch of boats and reel in everything in the circle using seine nets.

Well surprise surprise… The dolphins are now safe, however any number of other species are now being caught as by-catch in bigger numbers than ever! You see, it seems that most sea faring creatures are drawn to these interesting floating things in the ocean, as they’ve never seen them before.. They go in to investigate, and BAM! They are stuck too!

So, did we REALLY do a favor by introducing “Dolphin-Safe” tuna? The dolphin isn’t endangered after all, but some of the other sea creatures being reeled in now are.. So we saved one species, but put another 100 or more at risk of extinction…

You can read a more extensive examination of the problem by visiting Southern Fried Science.

Bowhead whales

No, they don’t need to take showers! Bowhead whales apparently have the ability to sniff the air!

This discovery could drastically change our theories on how baleen whales find their food, as researchers now have a sneaking suspicion that the bowhead whales actually sniff out swarms of krill, their main food source.

This discovery was made when scientists hacked open the body of a bowhead whale and noticed that there was olfactory receptors which linked to the nose and the brain.

Up until now, it was thought that whales, along with dolphins, had no sense of smell.

Professor Hans Thewissen, a Cetacean expert from the Northeastern Ohio Universities College of Medicine, and colleagues based in Alaska and Japan, stumbled upon this discovery while taking a gander at the size of the brain in bowhead whales.

The whales were reeled in as a part of the biannual Inupiat subsistence hunt, and Professor Thewissen’s team was granted permission to take a gander at the brain cavities, to figure out how much of the brain actually filled up the brain casing.

“Upon taking a brain out, I noticed that there were olfactory tracts, which, in other mammals, connect the brain to the nose,” Professor Thewissen explained, “I followed those to the nose, and noted that all the olfactory hardware is there.”

This really caught the scientists off guard.

“At first glance, it would appear that whales would not have much use for smell, since everything they are interested in is below the water,” Professor Thewissen explained, “Olfaction is, by definition, the reception of airborne molecules.”

He went on to explain that in most cetacean species which have been put under the microscope to date, which have mainly been whales with teeth like dolphins, sperm whales and orcas, the hardware needed for them to be able to smell was absent.
“Based on this most people assumed that no whale had a sense of smell.”

With a little more digging and prodding, and some extensive tests, it was confirmed that the discovery that the bowhead can indeed smell, is accurate.

Bowhead whales exhibit a large and developed olfactory bulb, which seems to be very similar in structure to the hardware other animals have which can also smell.

It was also discovered by researchers that the bowheads also have functional olfactory receptor proteins, and this is one quality that toothed whales are lacking. These receptors are what provide the biochemical infrastructure for them to be able to smell.
“It is remarkable that this animal, which appears to have very little use for olfaction, retained that sense,” Professor Thewissen said. “We speculate that they are actually able to smell krill and may use this to locate their prey. Krill smells like boiled cabbage.”

Also, unlike most other species of whale, the bowhead actually have separate nostrils, which leads scientists to think that they may be able to not only smell, but determine from which direction the smell is coming.

I guess this means the next time you go bowhead whale watching, remember to wear your deodorant.

Right whale with calf - The same type of whale as in the story

Well, this is interesting.. A whale which was showing off its moves in Table Bay, jumped up out of the water “Free Willy” style, and what happens? The whale lands on top of a sailboat.

The whale flattened the steel mass and brought down the rigging before gallantly sliding back into the water and swimming on its way.

“It was quite scary,” commented Paloma Werner, who had previously been enjoying the trip with her boyfriend come business partner, Ralph Mothes.

“We thought the whale was going to go under the boat and come up on the other side. We thought it would see us.” Ms. Werner continued.

However, this was not the case, as the boat had its engine turned off.

The manager/scientist of the Cape Town Mammal Research Institute at the University of Pretoria, Meredith Thornton, shed some light onto the subject for us: “Whales don’t see much by way of their eyes but by sound in the water.”

Given that the whale had such poor eyesight, and that the water was particularly rough, Thornton commented that the whale, presumably a young whale most likely did not even realize the boat was in the way.

The hapless couple first spied the whale when it was a stone’s throw away, from their yacht. It jumped out of the water once, and before they could make a move, the whale was only a hair lengths away from the vessel.

“There was hardly any wind, so we couldn’t get out of the way,” countered Werner. “We didn’t have time to take any evasive action.”

This just goes to show you, when you are out gallivanting around, always keep your engines running.

whale meat

If you have your tongue set on eating some whale meat tonight, you may consider heading off to Ulsan. There has been a sharp increase in the number of local restaurants in this major city over the past year, they now tally over 100, the city government reported this past Sunday.

The number of restaurants has climbed nearly four hundred percent since last year, and the it is the city with the most since the International Whaling commission placed a worldwide halt on commercial whaling back in 1986.

The officials of the city have said that minke whale is the hottest item on the menu. However, hunting whales for commercial purposes is outlawed around the globe, that is of course unless they are caught “accidentally” in fishermens’ nets.

Korea specifically is one of the countries in the world which is the most strict when it comes to the enforcement of the laws which protect endangered species.

Nonetheless, a lot of “accidents” occur, and whale meat continues to be a traditional local delicacy in the city. These whales will sell for anywhere from 25 million won ($21,000) and up, when the supplies are low and the demand is high. On the black market, an illegally caught whale will go for somewhere in the 16 million won ($14,000) range.

The illegal trading of these endangered species is the main reason these restaurants can give you those delectable whale dishes on their menus. Many environmental groups are crying foul, and are pushing for more monitoring and higher penalties for illegal hunting of whales.

That being the case, you can expect to see many more “accidental” catches, and many more dishes to come.

RIO De JANEIRO – The bright pink dolphins of the Amazon River as very docile, and gentle creatures. This unfortunately makes them easy pickings for the people who trap them using harpoons and nets, as they will simply nose up beside the fishing boats to say hello.

The sad fact is that their dead, dismembered bodies are now making appearances on riverbanks in numbers that are mind boggling. Their flesh has been used as bait, and the remains have been chucked away carelessly, with no concern for how this is going to affect the species. Researchers are warning that if something is not done soon, these dolphins may suffer the same fate as those in other parts of the world; extinction. “The population of the river dolphins will collapse if these fishermen are not stopped from killing them,” explained the top aquatic mammals expert at the government’s Institute of Amazonian Research, Vera de Silva, “We’ve been studying an area of 11,000 hectares (27,000 acres) for 17 years, and of late the population is dropping 7 percent each year.”

In plain English this means that somewhere in the neighborhood of 1,500 dolphins are hunted down and killed every year in Mamiraua Reserve of the Western Amazon, where da Silva studies these remarkable creatures.

Da Silva went on to explain that researchers first began to discover the discarded remains of these pink dolphins along the banks cerca the year 2000. They had obviously been struck down by human means, as they had been hacked and quartered, their flesh stripped away like so many a fish fillet.

The appearance of these dolphin carcasses are indicative that the killing of these dolphins is on the rise, the environmental agents and researchers say. The problem is so large in scope that the government has even admitted that there is a problem and something needs to be done about it. It is already illegal to kill these dolphins without explicit permission from the government – as is the case with all the other animals of the amazon. However, nothing is really being done in terms of enforcing those laws.

There are less than five full time environmental agents on site, which are supposed to be in charge of protecting the wildlife in the jungle region which spans across two-thirds of the Amazon. This area is two times the size of Texas, so it is no wonder that nothing gets enforced. The Brazillian Institute of Environment and Renewable Natural Resources (Ibama), had this to comment on the situation, “It’s a matter of priority, and right now the government is focusing on deforestation, the killings of these dolphins exists – it’s a fact.” Although nothing has been said on what exactly is being done to rectify the matter.

The pink dolphin’s flesh is a popular commodity amongst anglers, as it is a rather effective bait for catching a breed of catfish in the area, known as piracatinga.

Bottlenose dolphin

Tokyo (AP) – “The Cove”, an award winning documentary which exposes a Japanese village engaging in the acts of hunting down and killing dolphins, has finally made its debut on Saturday after being delayed by angry nationalist protests.

Of the six cinemas which started showing the film, a small number completely sold out, and the others were just plain empty. Another 18 cinemas are scheduled to show the film at a later time.

At a popular art theater in Tokyo, Image Forum, somewhere in the neighborhood of 30 protesters were seen brandishing Japanese flags, and were shouting out slogans against the film. The police were seen trying to stop shoving matches between the protesters and the small group of supporters for the film.

The film goers didn’t seem to take notice, and weren’t the least bit reluctant to go and see the film, as the first two showings at the theater were completely sold out.

One movie goer, Tomokazu Toshinai, had this to say about the film, “I didn’t know about dolphin hunting. Whether it’s TV or movies, Japanese have a right to know these things.”

In the last month, three other theaters which were scheduled to show the film canceled the showings, after some rather intense protests and telephone campaign against the documentary. The Nationalist groups are saying that the United States produced film is Anti-Japanese, has no bearing on reality, and is in cahoots with a militant anti-whaling organization.

Sea World seems to have gotten itself in quite a bit of hot water lately. They have begun to reach out the federal agency which is investigation the death of a killer-whale trainer at the SeaWorld location in Orlando Florida, to talk about the possibility of negotiating a settlement, even before the investigation is complete.

The idea is for SeaWorld to strike a “pre-citation settlement” with the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration. The organization has been investigation the safety practices of SeaWorld since February 24^th, when one of their trainers, Dawn Brancheau, was killed by a 6 ton killer whale by the name of Tilikum.

However, SeaWorld is grasping at straws, as pre-emptive agreements with OSHA are relatively unheard of, and to actually reach one would require that the Orlando based SeaWorld Parks and Entertainment to agree to some work safety changes. This settlement might also allow SeaWorld a little more breathing room, and limit the amount of fallout from the safety probe, by making sure it is over as quickly as possible.

It wasn’t made clear on Monday whether or not the OSHA was even willing to consider such a setlement with SeaWorld. The OSHA has very recently begun to take a more strict approach to the enforcement of policies for theme parks and other entertainment venues.

SeaWorld has been “on notice” since last month after a bunch of work related injuries, and even deaths at SeaWorld Orlando, and Walt Disney World.

Now some happy news from the ocean: blue whales have been spotted in migratory routes and feeding grounds in the Pacific that has been void of blue-whales for over half a century. Sightings are also increasing in the Atlantic, and recent research suggests that the Antarctic blue whale population is growing at a heartening 6% a year. About 440 blue whales have been spotted in the western Atlantic and about 200 in the eastern, including large numbers off Iceland. These are likely to be just a fraction of the total amount of blue whales present in these waters.

“The overall numbers are still tiny compared with the original populations before whaling started, but the trend is at last in the right direction,” said John Calambokidis, a marine scientist whose research on whale movements and populations has just been published in the journal Marine Mammal Science. “This may represent a return to a migration pattern that existed in earlier periods for the eastern north Pacific blue whale population,” he said.

Richard Sears, founder of the Mingan Island Cetacean Study in Canada, has noticed a similar trend with blue whale sightings increasing in the north Atlantic during the past few years. Sears is cautiously optimistic, but warns that the increase in sightings may be partly due to more people looking for whales. “There is still no room for complacency,” he said.

Until the 20^th century, blue whales were normally avoided by whalers since these oceanic giants were too large and too fast for traditional ships to handle. With a maximal reported length of over 30 meters and the capacity of exceeding 170 metric tons in weight, the blue whale is the largest animal even known to have existed on our planet and capturing it using an old fashioned sailing vessel is certainly no picnic.

Before the invention of the steam-powered whaling ship and the exploding harpoon, the estimated global population of the blue whale was somewhere between 350,000 and 400,000. By the 1960s, no more than 5,000 blue whales were left.

Unlike whales such as the humpback which has undergone a remarkable recovery since the international ban on whaling was imposed, the blue whale populations have not shown any clear signs of recovery during the last few decades and scientists have worried about them being too shattered and fragmented to be viable populations in the long run. Illicit harvesting has also been a problem – files handed to the International Whaling Commission by Alexey Yablokov, environmental adviser to Boris Yeltsin, showed that the Soviet Union killed over 9,000 blue whales from the time of the ban until 1972.

“These revelations go some way towards explaining why blue whale populations stayed low for so long,” says Dan Bortolotti, author of the book Wild Blue. “It also suggests that they may now have a chance to recover — but only if the ban on hunting all large whales stays in place.”

The annual whale expedition off the Japanese port city of Kushiro ended this weekend after having caught 59 minke whales, the Japanese Fisheries Agency said in a statement.

The whales where caught as a part of a research program that whaling opponents claim is just a cover for commercial whaling. A maximum capture of 60 whales is allowed under this research program, which is authorised by the International Whaling Commission (IWC).

The Fisheries Agency says the goal of the hunt was to study the feeding patterns of the whales and their effect on fish stocks. Initial examination of the stomach contents of the killed mink whales revealed mostly pollack, krill and anchovy. The complete results of the study will be presented at next year’s IWC meeting.

Japan also catches about 1,000 whales in the Antarctic Ocean and the northwest Pacific Ocean each year under another IWC research programme.

Minke Whale Facts

· Once perceived as asingle species, the minke whale population has quite recently been recognized as consisting of two distinct species: the Northern Mink Whale, Balaenoptera acutorostrata, and the Southern Mink Whale, Balaenoptera bonaerensis.

· Also known as Little Piked Whales or Lesser Rorquals, Mink Whales prefer icy waters but are found world-wide.

· Balaenoptera acutorostrata is listed as Least Concern on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, while Balaenoptera bonaerensi is listed as Data Deficient since it was recognized as a separate species so recently.

· Together, the two species are believed to form a population of over 1 million Minke Whales world-wide.

Florida anglers are being sharply criticized after a video of them free-gaffing a Mako shark off South Florida this week was made public on the Internet.

In the video, which was uploaded to Youtube and also displayed on the website of a Florida TV station (can be seen below), the anglers can be seen trying to gaff a free-swimming shark. The shark ventured close to the boat after being attracted to a swordfish that the anglers had alongside their vessel.

Since no rods or reels appear to have been used by the anglers as they captured the 748-pound Mako shark, they may have acted in violation of state and federal law. “I’d hazard that I’m not the first to pick up on these fine points of the law but if the video does indeed tell the full tale then these laws need to be enforced,” said Luke Tipple, a marine biologist and director of the Shark-Free Marina Initiative. “If however the fishermen can provide video evidence of them using PRIMARY tackle (i.e. hook and line) to initialize the capture then they would be within their rights to have landed the shark. If this turns out to be the case then I will instead turn this report into a cautionary tale of how the media should be more responsible in reporting on shark harvests, particularly when dealing with species considered by some to be globally threatened.”