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The residents of California’s Santa Monica Bay have some rather noisy neighbors—and they’re not happy about it. That is the conclusion of a new study which shows that blue whales feeding off the coast of California stop calling to each other when a nearby naval base powers up its sonar for training exercises. It’s not [...]
Bad news for whales out of the Russian Far East: over 100 belugas are reportedly trapped in water between ice floes in the Chukotka region, cut off from the sea. Fishermen in the area—one of the poorest in Russia, bordering the Bering Sea—report that the white whales have been essentially boxed in by approaching ice [...]
Commercial whaling has been banned since 1986, but some still flout international standards by hunting the animals. Japan gets nearly all the attention—and the reality TV shows—in part because it usually takes more than 1,000 whales a year, but it’s not alone. Both Norway and Iceland also hunt a few hundred whales commercially, mostly for [...]
“They say the sea is cold,” D.H. Lawrence wrote, “but the sea contains the hottest blood of all.” Whales aren’t just physically majestic, but as warm-blooded mammals who give birth to live young, they provide a human link to an underwater region that can often feel so alien. Still, between the last vestiges of whale [...]
There’s no accounting for musical taste — particularly when the kind of music you’re talking about doesn’t even originate in your own species. Bird songs may be lovely, but whale songs? Say what you will about the combination of whoops, clicks groans and faintly flatulent rumbles that whales use to communicate and woo, the odds [...]
As authorities scrambled to pick up the pieces after a deadly earthquake hit the southern New Zealand town of Christchurch on Tuesday, government workers further south had just finished handling an altogether different kind of natural disaster. Over the weekend, more than 100 pilot whales were found on a remote beach on Stewart Island off [...]
The Associated Press has a nifty exclusive: an interview with the mayor of the Japanese town of Taiji. If that name rings a bell, it’s probably because you’ve seen The Cove, the Oscar-winning documentary that details the dolphin slaughter carried out by the residents of the village. Though The Cove makes it seem as if [...]
