With Japanese Whalers now enroute to Antarctica, the world begins to gear up and watch a drama unfold.

Silently floating between the powers that decide their fate, whales are unarmed and defenseless.

Only in recent years has man just begun to understand these magnificent creatures and, as such, have begun to realize the natural treasure about to be destroyed.

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It turns out that the wavelength of neutrino oscillations is about the same as the wavelength of whale songs.

That fortunate cosmic coincidence has led to a collaboration between particle physicists and biophysicists. To quote the CERN press release as quoted by Charles Day

“European astroparticle physicists are developing together KM3NeT, a large undersea neutrino telescope in the Mediterranean, dedicated to tracking neutrinos from astronomical sources. The deployment of deep sea neutrino detection lines for current experiments such as Antarès in France, Nemo in Italy and Nestor in Greece has opened up the possibility of also installing monitoring devices for the permanent study of the deep sea environment: studies of ocean currents, of bioluminescence, of fauna and of seismic activity.”

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I just found a site which listens and records whale songs going on at this very minute! And you can listen to them right now, too!

The cool thing is that you can listen to whales right from your computer desktop, thanks to a new website.

The LIDO (Listening to the Deep Ocean Environment) site offers a live feed to 10 hydrophones sprinkled around European waters, and one in Canada. Several more are scheduled to come soon in Canada and in Asia.

The network’s primary aim is to record and archive long-term subsea noise so that researchers can study the effects of human activity on whales and dolphins. Read the rest of this entry »

The prosperity of the early American colonies and its Industrial Revolution was no doubt fueled by incredible massacres of whales: I million sperm whales, 384,000 blues, 275,000 humpbacks, 92,000 bowheads and 10,000 North Atlantic Right Whales. This does not include Japanese whaling.

The above numbers of remaining whales are staggering when one considers what is now left in our oceans today: 500-1,000 North Atlantic Right Whales, 8,000 Bowhead, 12,000 Blue Whales, 10,000 humpbacks and 200,000 sperm whales. When one considers the quantities of whales prior to 1900, one can actually see why ALL whales are endangered.

During that time, whales were hunted for their oil, wax and baleen. However, with the discovery of petroleum, whale hunting is no longer advancing at a rapid pace. That may seem favorable; not when one compares the populations of whales before the 1900’s.

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Today I ran across a wonderful BBC video clip which actually is a simply wonderful little story in itself:

“World free-diving champion Tanya Streeter spends two weeks diving with humpback whales in the Turks and Caicos Islands as they migrate southward. In this short animal video, she examines the tail flutes that are as destinctive as a human finger print and takes a closer look at the amazing methods a mother humpback whale uses to teach her young calf how to breathe underwater. Brilliant footage from BBC sea life show ‘Diving with Whales’.”

I would like to correct it though.

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Scientists for many, many years have wondered about the question about whales songs. Behaviorists feel that whale songs are learned whale behavior and nothing else. Yet in recent years, marine researchers have recognized and tracked specific whales, noting that each year, whale songs do change over time. A whale’s basic song stays the same, but there are noticeable changes in the pitch sound and melody in the whale’s song.

I have had several profound encounters with whales. Prior to having actual contact with them, I was always fascinated with their songs. It was if there was a communication being spoken, but what was it?

It’s funny, you know. We have Hollywood movies built around creating languages. Special linguists develop alien languages and these language specialists are paid huge amounts of money to create new languages which seem to communicate (these fake languages are even subtitled in English!). And yet in hearing a REAL new language on this planet, one that has been around for thousands of years, we can’t always decipher what is being said. Why is that?

How many years did it take us to decipher the Babylonian language, much less Egyptian? It was only with the discovery of the Rosetta Stone that man was then able to discover his roots. Read the rest of this entry »