Dad is calling again, should I answer?
"Hi Daddy, what's up?"
"Ohh I'm just watching t.v. and was thinking about you, there is a show on Thursday night at 8 o'clock about orcas by Jean-Michel Cousteau"
. . .
Turns out that Orcas are very cultured. The matriarchal resident pods of the Pacific North-West are the pods that most of us know about. They stay with their mother's their whole lives and when a full grown adult male looses his mother, they have been known to mourn for weeks, sometimes dieing from lack of food. They have been known to help lost boatmen find their way and were sensationalized in the 1980's and 1990's by Keiko (Free Willy) who was taken from his mother in the waters of Iceland. Keiko was eventually returned to the Atlantic Ocean only to be rejected by the tight-nit pods of the area. He would eventually take his last breath on the coast of Norway.
There are other cultures of Orca all over the world. Orcas have the largest range of all the marine mammals but number fewer than 100.000 worldwide. The residents off the coast of New Zealand are not matriarchal but do stay in very tight nit pods of 20 or 30 individuals. They hunt baby baleen whales, sharks and manta rays. An orca might find a manta ray and call over another orca that is better at catching the rays. The second orca will then roll over on it's back and pick the ray out from under a rock and flip it on it's back, making the ray go limp. The two orcas will share the manta ray.
The calls of the orca are also cultured geographically. The calls of the Australian orca tend to sound 'twangier' (much like the people of Australia) than the calls of the transient pods or pods in other parts of the world. Orca have dialects down to the family level and do not tend to mix well with orcas that have a different cultures and languages. Some transient orca meet with 200 or 300 other orca to hunt huge balls of fish that gather near the North Sea. The year that the team went to film this Orca feeding frenzy, the orca didn't show up. Neither did the fish. The waters that at one time were teaming with fish and orca were almost completely deserted.
The second half of the two hour special was about salmon farming. The salmon farms of British Columbia have depleted the wild salmon from the rivers, and sea lice are infesting salmon spawn before they are ready, before they have scales. Salmon are the main food source for the resident Orca certain times of year. Salmon also feed the bears, the sharks and humans as well. Salmon are also predators of the deep. The fish, whales and even humans all contain alarming levels of toxins. I'm not sure what we must do about this, but I know that something has to change.
Yesterday was Earth Day. Save the Whales.
There are other cultures of Orca all over the world. Orcas have the largest range of all the marine mammals but number fewer than 100.000 worldwide. The residents off the coast of New Zealand are not matriarchal but do stay in very tight nit pods of 20 or 30 individuals. They hunt baby baleen whales, sharks and manta rays. An orca might find a manta ray and call over another orca that is better at catching the rays. The second orca will then roll over on it's back and pick the ray out from under a rock and flip it on it's back, making the ray go limp. The two orcas will share the manta ray.
The calls of the orca are also cultured geographically. The calls of the Australian orca tend to sound 'twangier' (much like the people of Australia) than the calls of the transient pods or pods in other parts of the world. Orca have dialects down to the family level and do not tend to mix well with orcas that have a different cultures and languages. Some transient orca meet with 200 or 300 other orca to hunt huge balls of fish that gather near the North Sea. The year that the team went to film this Orca feeding frenzy, the orca didn't show up. Neither did the fish. The waters that at one time were teaming with fish and orca were almost completely deserted.
The second half of the two hour special was about salmon farming. The salmon farms of British Columbia have depleted the wild salmon from the rivers, and sea lice are infesting salmon spawn before they are ready, before they have scales. Salmon are the main food source for the resident Orca certain times of year. Salmon also feed the bears, the sharks and humans as well. Salmon are also predators of the deep. The fish, whales and even humans all contain alarming levels of toxins. I'm not sure what we must do about this, but I know that something has to change.
Yesterday was Earth Day. Save the Whales.
3 comments:
At one point you were going to major in marine biology, right? Maybe you still are or still should! I learned a lot from this.
I hope you love your amazing Daddy as much as I do!
Baby, you wrote this up good! Very nicely written. Good show, weren't it?
Do you remember how I used to make you watch all the Bill Nye the Science Guy shows? And after a while you even liked them and watched them on your own?
"Consider the following..."
I still want to be a marine biologist, I'm not as involved in my major right now because I'm kind of land locked, but this show really showed me how much I want to do this with my life!!!
I remember the episode about chromosomes very well, he kept talking about genes and would throw in a few jokes about his parent's jeans!!!
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