Balloon head dolphin

P. hoekmani (image from the Beeb article)

Archeologists have discovered the fossilized remains of a new type of dolphin on the bottom of the North Sea. The dolphin, christened Platalearostrum hoekmani after the Dutch fisherman Albert Hoekman, who trawled up a bone from the beastie's skull in 2008, seems to be most closely related to the modern-day pilot whale and probably lived between 2 and 3 million years ago. It had a bulbous forehead and a short, "spoon-shaped" rostrum (snout) and would have grown up to 6 meters long.

Pilot whale (G. melas)

Internet gleanings/current events

Some cool stuff in recent news:

First, this. Astronomers have discovered an Earth-like planet orbiting a red dwarf, Gliese 581, about 20 light-years away. It's in the habitable zone, meaning that water could exist in liquid form on the surface. Life, Unbounded explains:

With a 37 day orbit (putting it about 0.15 AU from the 1/3rd solar mass star) there's a good chance that GL 581 g is tidally locked - with a permanent day and night side, although it's by no means clear that tidal locking is inevitable. This poses significant questions about any climate on the planetary surface - something astronomers and planetary scientists have been worrying about for a while for this kind of scenario. A thick enough atmosphere and thermal transport could help even out the drastic day/night temperature difference and keep things stable.

 And then this: two dolphin species, the Guyana dolphin and the bottlenose dolphin, have been observed to alter the structure of their calls during interspecific interactions. This is cool for several reasons: first, it adds to our evidence that dolphins are skilled mimics. Secondly, it opens the possibility that these two different species could be capable of communicating with each other in some way. From the Beeb:

When bottlenose dolphins swim together, they emit longer, lower frequency calls, that are modulated.

In contrast, Guyana dolphins usually communicate using higher frequency whistles that have their own particular structure.

But often, the two species swim together in one group. These interactions are usually antagonistic, as the larger bottlenose dolphins harass the smaller Guyana dolphins.

When the two dolphins gather, they produce quite different calls, Dr May-Collado has discovered.

Crucially, calls emitted during these multi-species encounters are of an intermediate frequency and duration.

In other words, the dolphins start communicating in a style that is somewhere between those of the two separate species

In sadder news, Shiloh, one of the bottlenose dolphins at the National Aquarium in Baltimore, has died after a long illness. She was the mother of Chesapeake, the first calf born in captivity at the Aquarium, and the grandmother of Bayley, who is now about two years old. Shiloh was estimated to be about 31 years old, which isn't bad for a dolphin, but the news still came as a shock. I studied Shiloh's whistles for more than a year. Her contact call was a pretty, modulated upsweep with which I became very familiar. I'm going to miss her. So long, Shiloh, and thanks for all the fish.

And finally, I went to hear Richard Dawkins and Neil DeGrasse Tyson speak at Howard University the other day. The talk was an unscripted chat about the "poetry of science". Tyson spent a little too much time showboating - I would have like to hear more from Dawkins, devoted little fangirl that I am - but overall it was most enjoyable. I have to say, though...  Tyson was voted World's Sexiest Astrophysicist by People Magazine in 2000, but that Richard Dawkins is foxy. That hyperliterate Oxford-honed diction, that silver hair, that sultry voice... sigh.

Oh, and there are lots of new songs in the works: the Gargle Blasters are working on a cover of Pink Floyd's Young Lust... ooh, I need a dirty woman.



Coming attractions:

• The finished version of Homeopathy (in both censored and uncensored form... because this is a family blog)
• The finished version of Uncertainty (now with 100% more awesome due to sax solo by my dad)
•  More Young Lust
• Tabula Rasa (too full of angst for immediate release)
• The Night You Can't Remember (Magnetic Fields cover!)
• The Internet Song (work in progress)

Man, we almost have a setlist! Watch out, open mic night - the Gargle Blasters are coming.

Moko is dead

A sad story today: Moko, a dolphin living off the coast of New Zealand, became famous in 2008 when he was observed to guide two pygmy sperm whales to safety after they had become stranded between a sandbar and the beach. He played with swimmers and boaters, sometimes getting so enthusiastic that he prevented the swimmers from returning to shore (playing is serious business). A dolphin carcass washed ashore yesterday and, based on its markings and teeth, it's probably Moko.

The Beeb has more.

Whaling news + new art

After a week-long circle jerk, the 62nd International Whaling Commission meeting in Morocco has ended. The 24-year old moratorium on commercial whaling remains in place, but no progress has been made. From the WWF:

But it could have been worse. The IWC was considering a worrying new proposal that could allow commercial whaling in the Southern Ocean for the first time in almost 25 years – and would also set commercial whaling quotas for whales listed as threatened by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN).


WWF has always fully supported the maintenance of the IWC’s 1982 moratorium on commercial whaling. Unfortunately, whaling at a commercial scale continues by a small number of countries. We want to see all whaling come under stricter IWC control.

An interview with Iceland's "whaling king" reveals the jackassery that environmentalists face in some countries:

Kristjan Loftsson, Iceland's millionaire whaling king, doesn't really see the difference: "whales are just another fish," he said at a crunch meeting of the International Whaling Commission.


...


Loftsson is untouched by a wave of recent research showing that cetaceans -- the order grouping whales, dolphins and porpoises -- are closer to humans that once thought in their ability to communicate, recognizing themselves in a mirror, and create what anthropologists would call culture.


"I don't believe it. If they are so intelligent, why don't they stay outside of Iceland's territorial waters?" he shot back, attributing such ideas to "a bunch of crazies."

Yup. The stupid, it burns.

A few more recent articles on cetaceans:

• Chicago biologist fears Gulf oil threat to dolphins
• Russia's new oil exploration threatens gray whales
  

And a new painting!

Moratorium harpooned

The Independent has an article today on the upcoming International Whaling Commission meeting, and what's likely to come out of it. At the same time that Australia is challenging Japan in court over its illegal whaling practices - one small step forward - it looks like the 24-year moratorium on commercial whaling is, in a giant leap backwards, about to be scrapped.

From the article:

The moratorium on commercial whaling, one of the world's major environmental achievements, is in danger of being abandoned after 24 years at a meeting of the International Whaling Commission (IWC) which begins this week in Morocco.


A proposed new deal, which stands a realistic chance of being passed at the conference in Agadir, would allow the three countries which have continued killing the great whales in defiance of the ban – Japan, Norway and Iceland – to recommence whaling legally in return for bringing down their catches.


However, many conservationists do not believe that catches will actually fall under the proposed new agreement, and one of the world's leading whaling scientists recently described it in testimony to the US Congress as "a scam ... likely to fool many people".


...


Should the moratorium be dismantled, it would represent one of the most damaging setbacks ever for wildlife conservation. The ban, which was agreed in 1982 and became operational in 1986, was introduced after a long and intense campaign by environmental pressure groups such as Greenpeace.


They were protesting against the intense cruelty of whaling, where the killing is done by firing explosive harpoons into the large, intelligent animals, and also against the fact that many of the stocks of the great whales had been drastically reduced by over-hunting, with blue whales driven to the brink of extinction.


Although large-scale whaling came to an end with the ban, and populations began to recover, three countries carried on killing: Japan, by labelling its hunting "scientific research", and the Norwegians and Icelanders by lodging formal objections. Since 1986 the three nations have between them killed more than 30,000 whales, the Japanese leading with more than 1,000 whales a year – mainly minke whales, but also Bryde's, fin, sei and sperm whales.


But the global total of kills has nevertheless fallen to a tiny fraction of what it was, and the moratorium has been an unqualified success from a whale conservation point of view.


The deal which may do away with it, which has been on the table for three years, was first thought to be merely a diplomatic compromise to end the perpetual confrontation at IWC meetings between the whaling nations and the anti-whaling countries. But recently it has become clear that it had a different purpose, and was cooked up in the US – by leading figures in the Bush administration, among them being Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska, who, until his conviction for taking unreported gifts in 2008, was the longest-serving Republican senator in American history.


One of the most powerful figures in US politics, Senator Stevens sought a deal with Japan after the Japanese caused problems for the US by objecting (as a bargaining counter in IWC negotiations) to the whale-hunting quota for Alaskan Inuit peoples, who have a traditional hunt for about 50 bowhead whales.


Senator Stevens is believed to have put pressure on the then-US Whaling Commissioner and IWC chairman, William Hogarth – whose budget, in the US National Marine Fisheries Service, Mr Stevens controlled as a member of the Senate Appropriations Committee – to open talks with Japan, which Mr Hogarth duly did at the 2007 IWC meeting in Anchorage, Alaska.

...


Justin Cooke, who is the representative of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature on the IWC Scientific Committee, took the deal apart in the US Congress, in evidence to the House Committee on Foreign Affairs. Dr Cooke said: "The proposal is disingenuous and I suspect that it will fool many people." It was a scam, he said, in which the calculation of how many whales could be killed was being left to politicians rather than scientists.

I have always considered Ted Stevens a slimy bastard, but this latest revelation upgrades him to a walking, talking, waste of oxygen.

Click here to download Dr. Cooke's testimony in Congress. Short, sweet, and worth reading.

If your attention span is longer and your tolerance for bullshit higher than mine, you can download the full 43-page proposal here.

Good news, very bad news

First, the good news: Australia is set to pursue legal action against Japan for its illegal whaling program. From the Beeb:

The Australian government says it will lodge formal proceedings at the International Court of Justice in The Hague next week.


The move comes ahead of a meeting of the International Whaling Commission (IWC) in Morocco next month, where agreement is being sought on a new approach to whaling, which would allow commercial hunting but with strict quotas.


Australian Environment Minister Peter Garrett and Attorney General Robert McClelland said in a joint statement that the move underlines their "commitment to bring to an end Japan's program of so-called scientific whaling".

And now the bad news. The first picture I've seen of a dolphin killed by the BP oil spill has hit the internet. A warning: this picture is graphic and may at the very least ruin your day. Click here.

Finally, Ann Weaver in Tampa wrote an article a few days ago about the effects of the spill on local dolphin populations. She reviews what little we know about the devastating damage the spill has done to the food chain, and speculates that dolphins will not be able (or willing) to leave the area.

From the article:

Couldn’t our adult dolphins just move, just head north or south where there was less oil or more food? Possibly. But even if the waters were unequally disturbed by the oil, and there were healthy waters to go to, dolphin psychology could keep the dolphins from fleeing the meltdown.


One, dolphins are pretty free-form but they do have habits. Changes during construction on the John's Pass Bridge further suggest that their habits die hard. They may stick to their habits despite diminishing food and water quality.


Two, dolphins live in home ranges, which are where they’re found most often. They may stick to their home ranges despite diminishing food and water quality. About sixty of the dolphins we’ve seen are residents who would stick around John’s Pass.


Finally, there’s the glaring psychological difference between humans and other animals: Humans move. Animals don’t. Granted, some animals migrate to another troop at maturity. But animals become endangered or extinct because, when humans destroy their habitat, the animals either have no place to go or don’t know to go.


Randy Wells of Mote Marine described our coastline as a mosaic of overlapping dolphin home ranges.


Let’s say, for the sake of argument, our local dolphins found John’s Pass untenable and decided to move. They would encounter dolphins already living in every area they went. There are no free waters where “our” dolphins could go.


Another major concern of mine is the expansion and potential connection of dead zones. A dead zone is an area of water that is so depleted of oxygen that no sea creatures can live in it.


The Gulf of Mexico already has a dead zone the size of the state of Massachusetts, created by the fertilizers that get into the mighty Mississippi from America’s breadbasket and end up in the Gulf. Lesser dead zones (if there is such a thing) pock the Western Florida shoreline. God forbid these all get together.

A bleak forecast.

Bethune on trial

Pete Bethune, a member of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society (brilliantly parodied by South Park) goes on trial in Japan today.

Accused of boarding a Japanese whaling vessel, he pleaded guilty to four charges, including trespass and obstructing commercial activities, but denied a fifth charge of assault.

If convicted he could receive a maximum sentence of 15 years in prison.

From the Beeb:

The New Zealander was the captain of the Ady Gil, a futuristic kevlar boat which was sliced in two in a collision with a harpoon ship in January and sank.


The following month he boarded the ship, the Shonan Maru 2, from a jetski.


Sea Shepherd said his intention was to perform a citizen's arrest on her captain for the attempted murder of his crew, and present a bill for the lost boat.


But instead he was detained himself and the Shonan Maru 2 set sail for Tokyo where Mr Bethune was arrested by Japan's Coast Guard.


Commercial whaling has been banned worldwide since 1986.


Japan justifies its hunt as scientific research, while not hiding the fact that whale meat ends up in restaurants and shops.

If my ship had been sliced in half (dramatic video of the ramming here) by a whaler on an illegal commercial mission, I'd be pretty pissed off too. An arrest and a bill sound pretty reasonable. I have no idea why this incident couldn't have been brought to court under international law, or why the Kiwis aren't significantly angrier. 

Also, since when is throwing stink bombs considered assault?

Cetacean news

Here's a site that compiles news about dolphins and whales. Updated (almost) daily. Enjoy.

 Also, some of my favorite dolphin desktop wallpapers.

Cetacean picspam after the jump!

Another one bites the dust

Three papers (~25 pages last week) and one final down, one thesis to go, one week to finish it. It's going alright - 38 pages so far, and I'm shooting for 42 or so.

I'd be delighted if it ended up being exactly 42 pages long, because there's a distinct Douglas Adams theme running through it... I'm writing about dolphin intelligence and communication, so of course I had to cite him:

“Intelligence” is an ill-defined concept to begin with. Even among humans there is no universally agreed-upon definition, nor any meaningful measure of individual intelligence. As Darwin wrote in his discussion of intelligence, “no classification of the mental powers has been universally accepted.”And, as Douglas Adams wrote, “Man has always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much...the wheel, New York, wars and so on...while all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man...for precisely the same reason.”

(Full disclosure: I have this on a t-shirt.)

Meat

Meat from Japan's "scientific research" whaling program is turning up in US and Korean stores. The Beeb reports:

Scientists say they have found clear proof that meat from whales captured under Japan's whaling programme is being sold in US and Korean eateries.


The researchers say they used genetic fingerprinting to identify meat taken from a Los Angeles restaurant as coming from a sei whale sold in Japan.


They say the discovery proves that an illegal trade in protected species still exists.


Whale meat was also allegedly found at an unnamed Seoul sushi restaurant.


Commercial whaling has been frozen by an international moratorium since 1986.


But a controversial exemption allows Japan to kill several hundred whales each year for what is termed scientific research.


The meat from these whales is then sold to the public in shops and restaurants in that country.

From the article, it seems the meat was advertised straight up as whale meat. While it boggles the mind that eateries selling endangered species escaped notice for so long, I suppose it's better than the alternative: dolphin and whale meat with toxic levels of mercury deliberately mislabeled and sold to unwitting customers as more expensive stuff.

Wonder how toxic this stuff was?

Mammals in the House

Congress has scheduled a hearing on marine mammal captivity, the Orlando Sentinel reports. The House Subcommittee on Insular Affairs, Oceans and Wildlife will meet on April 27th to hear testimony. Animal welfare advocates hope the meeting will lead to tighter regulations on the industry, which has had some of its not-so-shiny areas brought to light by the recent death of a SeaWorld trainer by a killer whale in Orlando and the Oscar-winning documentary "The Cove," about dolphin captures in Japan.

From the article:

The Sun Sentinel explored the world behind marine parks in a 2004 investigative series. It found that over the previous three decades, about 1,500 sea lions, seals, dolphins and whales in marine parks had died at a young age, some from human hazards such as capture shock and ingestion of coins and foreign objects.

The industry took root in Florida when the first marine park, Marineland of Florida, opened in 1938, and fostered an international trade with killer whales now worth up to $5 million each.

Until the 1980s, many of the marine stars came from the wild, with Florida waters supplying bottlenose dolphins that ended up at parks in Europe, Israel and Canada. U.S. attractions stopped capturing marine mammals more than 15 years ago and now rely on breeding.

Today, of the 1,243 marine mammals in the nation's parks, zoos and aquariums, only 15 percent were caught in the wild, a Sun Sentinel analysis of federal data shows. Another 14 percent were found stranded on beaches, and the rest were born in captivity.

Sarah over at WaterNotes, a conservation blog, has some further thoughts on the hearing:

This is a huge development for many reasons and – I feel – a golden opportunity for zoos and aquariums to give a voice to their husbandry practices, reveal their missions, and inform the public about the size and scale of their education and conservation programs.  It’s a chance to separate the institutions who get it right (and most likely carry AZA credentials) and those that have a long way to go.  It is also a chance to discuss what the role of zoos and aquariums can be and what more they can do, towards fulfilling the obligations of the MMPA [Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972, info here and here] to use contact with and observation of marine mammals to inspire our next generation of ocean advocates and stewards.

Yet more whales

Slate has another thoughtful, well-written meditation today on whales, humans, and our conflicted relationship over the course of history. Whales have played many roles. First they were sea monsters: Leviathans, lurking in the places on the map you didn't go. Then to some they became sustenance. Then they became the illumination, the perfume, and the corsets of the 19th century. They have been myth, food, money and light, but we still know very little about them. As the piece notes, we knew what the Earth looked like from space before we knew what a sperm whale looked like underwater.

Whales are something different now. They've always been objects of curiosity, but now they are the subjects of intense research and the darlings of an adoring public (Save The Whales!). The piece ends:

The truth is now, as it's ever been: We need whales more than they need us. Once we hunted them for their industrial resources. Now we demand to be entertained by them. What they want, most probably, is to be left alone.

In other news, one dolphin and possibly two swam up Newtown Creek in Brooklyn today. The creek is one of the most polluted industrial dead zones you can imagine, swamped with factory waste and raw sewage. No word on what's going to happen, but it doesn't look good.

Sea World

Double post today, because I've got time on my hands.

Dawn Brancheau, a 40-year old trainer, was killed during a show at the Orlando Sea World when one of the orcas, Tilikum, attacked her. Numerous media reports focused on Tilikum, noting that he had been involved in several human deaths before, and expressing shock at the menace he posed to his human handlers. The implication is that this was a problem whale with a taste for human blood. Tilikum was simply an orca being an orca.

Not all the coverage has been that shallow, of course. The BBC has a post on the larger question that the attack raised: is it at all ok for whales and dolphins, who live in complex social groups in the wild, to be kept in captivity?

From the article:

No-one knows what triggered the latest incident, and experts agree that it is almost impossible to determine why the orca, called Tilikum, reacted as it did.


But it does highlight the tensions that occur when we choose to interact closely with these huge animals. It is also debatable what to do with those orcas, also known as killer whales, that remain in captivity.


"They are highly social animals that tend to live in cohesive groups, so it's quite an artificial environment to capture them and put them in a small area," says Dr Andrew Foote, an expert on wild orcas from the University of Aberdeen, UK

"The tragic events are a reminder that orcas are wild, strong and often unpredictable animals," says Danny Groves, of the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society (WDCS).

Once again, I'm conflicted about this. I'm involved in research on cetaceans in captivity, and much of the work that has been done has contributed enormously to our knowledge of these animals. The research is often focused on the welfare of the animals: how they live, how they interact, and how they communicate. The more we know, the more we can use that knowledge to keep them alive and healthy in the wild.

This research is heavily dependent upon profits aquariums make on their shows. In other words, the money that allows us to study them comes from exploiting them.

They are conscious and self-aware, some of the most intelligent species on the planet, and we restrict them to tiny pools and amuse them with pool toys and fish in exchange for flips and funny noises. They must be bored out of their minds.

But the data we get is so very compelling. We learn more about their cognitive capabilities all the time, and our hazy picture of their consciousness is slowly coming into focus. The more we understand them, and the way they think (they do think, and anticipate, and contemplate themselves), the more we can advocate for better treatment. But the final outcome of that better treatment, to my mind, might be to release as many captive animals as possible. 

I think we've committed a crime against our closest intellectual relatives, and I know that I am entirely complicit in it. We comfort ourselves by softening the blow - providing enrichment, plentiful food and healthcare, and a clean, if cramped, living environment - but a prison is still a prison, too narrow for their minds. 

I wouldn't advocate releasing them now (I'm just that complicit), but I think there will be a time when we come around. Maybe around the same time I become a vegetarian, and therefore morally perfect.

Whaling, torture, beer

Updates, developments, and tactical nuclear beer. Read on...
 
Whaling

A development on a previous post on whaling and the dolphin drives: an article from the BBC's Richard Black on the International Whaling Commission and its most recent proposals. The new plans aim to regulate whaling "in a way that countries still engaged in the hunt and those opposed to it could both live with."   

Politics, of course, is central. From the article:

If the proposals were adopted, then, anti-whaling governments would find themselves partaking in the setting of quotas for hunts that according to their own beliefs ought not to exist at all, and in the knowledge that they will be probably be excoriated by environment groups on an issue where public opinion in their countries is pretty firmly on the environment groups' side.

Meanwhile, governments of hunting nations would have to be prepared to accept quotas that are below levels urged by companies operating the hunts. This could be a particularly thorny problem in Iceland where the whaling industry is urging the public to see it as a creator of wealth and employment in a time of economic hardship.

The biggest issue of principle, meanwhile, is that this plan would not remove or even phase out whaling in the Southern Ocean, where Japanese harpoons are busiest.

 Torture

In an update to this post, an article in Slate does a post-mortem on the Bush years, honing in on the lawyers behind the throne. As the writer puts it, we've erased the legal lines surrounding torture and replaced them with nothing. From the article:

The rule of law requires that there be a floor. For decades most of us believed that Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions was such a floor. Its bar against "[o]utrages upon personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment," was clearly meant to apply not just to POWs or battlefield soldiers in uniform but to all captives. Common Article 3 was intended to be the lowest we went, as Aziz Huq has written: "the point beyond which no nation can go without losing its claim to dignity and honor." But then along came the Bush lawyers, and they managed to saw into the floorboards. A sub-basement for prisoners at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo opened beneath us, and our dignity and honor disappeared into it.

Beer

Finally, a propos of nothing, exciting developments in beermaking!

A controversial Scottish brewery has launched what it described as the world's strongest beer - with a 32% alcohol content.

Tactical Nuclear Penguin has been unveiled by BrewDog of Fraserburgh.

BrewDog was previously branded irresponsible for an 18.2% beer called Tokyo, which it then followed with a low alcohol beer called Nanny State.

I want some. Also, 10 points for calling it "Nanny State".

Non-human persons

There's an AAAS conference coming up in San Diego, focusing on the ethical implications of dolphin intelligence. Several very interesting people will be speaking. A few of them are quoted in this article, which outlines the ongoing controversy about intelligence and animals and what it means, or should mean, to us. The abstract for the conference:

The dolphin brain has a large cerebral cortex and a substantial amount of associational neocortex. Most anatomical ratios that assess cognitive capacity place it second only to the human brain. More important, recent research in marine science has revealed that dolphins have a remarkable degree of cognitive and affective sophistication. For example, dolphins can recognize their image in a mirror as a reflection of themselves -- a finding that indicates self-awareness similar to that seen in higher primates and elephants. These and other studies, which have found that dolphins are also capable of advanced cognitive abilities such as problem-solving, artificial language comprehension, and complex social behavior, indicate that dolphins are far more intellectually and emotionally sophisticated than previously thought. Considerable research indicates that they are significantly different from fish and other marine species, and this research has significance for commercial policy and practice. This symposium will present the scientific findings and explore their ethical and policy implications.