When you sit on the rocks at Orlebar Point and muse about what’s going on underwater, consider this: dolphins have been reported talking Whale in their sleep. From ABC News: News has come from France that some captive-born dolphins there have been recorded talking in their sleep — and talking in Whale, no less, not [...]
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I’d thought that Gabriola’s river otters hang out near the sea, but maybe I’m wrong about that. Today I saw a river otter cross North Road near Barrett. Is that typical? Where is the furthest-from-sea location that you’ve seen river otters on Gabriola? (Photo by Dmitry Azovtsev. Found here on the Wikimedia Commons site. This [...]
From Discovery News: Whales and Salmon: When Enemies Need Each Other. Both killer whales and Chinook salmon are endangered in the Pacific Northwest. And one of the biggest problems facing both animals is that one eats the other. According to a new study, a single small and vulnerable group of whales may eat close to [...]
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From Scientific American: Life at the Bottom: The Prolific Afterlife of Whales. On the final dive of the trip, the scanning sonar detected a large object on the seafloor. Piercing through the abyssal darkness down at 1,240 meters, Alvin’s headlights revealed a 20-meter-long whale skeleton partly buried in sediment. On reviewing the dive videotapes, expedition [...]
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Here’s something to ponder next time you watch orcas swim past Orlebar Point. From the Smithsonian Magazine: Understanding Orca Culture. Orcas have evolved complex culture: a suite of behaviors animals learn from one another. They communicate with distinctive calls and whistles. They can live 60 years or more, and they stay in tightknit matrilineal groups [...]
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The BBC reports that a stingray fish was seen using tools to solve problems. What hidden talents do you suppose Gabriola fish have? Do we have tool-using fish here, too?
Have you watched Gabriola’s jellyfish drift past, and maybe even seen the moon jellyfish in tidal pools at Whalebone and Sandwell? Have you wondered at them, and wished to know more? Off to the NYT, then, to read Much More to Jellyfish than Poison and Plasma. Fasacinating.
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Rare grey whale sightings off the northern tip of Gabriola Island have created a stir in the past week. The sightings have been off Orlebar Point, which juts out into George Strait near Berry Point. That’s from this article on the Nanaimo Daily News site. And, as the article points out, somebody has posted a [...]
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The whales you see swimming past Berry Point might be more musically inclined than you’d guess. From sciencemag.org: Whale ‘Pop Songs’ Spread Across the Ocean. Music mania is sweeping the ocean, and all the young male humpback whales are in on the latest trend. A new study reveals that, just like humans, humpback whales in [...]
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If you’ve watched whales swim past Gabriola, you might be interested to know that some of them may be migratory astronomers. Well, who knew? Wired reports: An eight-year project that tracked humpback whale migrations by satellite shows the huge mammals follow uncannily straight paths for weeks at a time. The results suggest a single migratory [...]
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I’ve found crazy numbers of golf balls on Gabriola beaches in the last few years, and have already mentioned why I worry about golf balls on the beach: what happens when birds and sea creatures eat those golf balls? And even if the golf balls aren’t eaten, they don’t biodegrade, do they? But wait, here’s [...]
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Turns out that whale-watching tours are even more damaging to whales than we’d thought. The Times Colonist reports: B.C. killer whales choking on boat exhaust. B.C.’s endangered population of southern resident killer whales face serious health issues from the exhaust emissions of pleasure and whale-watching boats, a study by a Victoria zoologist has found. [Source: [...]
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Here’s a valentine for you from the sea, Gabriola. It’s a clamshell, wedged into the sand and eelgrass at Whalebone Beach. (You’re supposed to think it’s heart-shaped.)
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What, you’ve just come home from peering at sea urchins at Drumbeg? Betcha didn’t think of their teeth, did you? From Science Daily: Ever-Sharp Urchin Teeth May Yield Tools That Never Need Honing. To survive in a tumultuous environment, sea urchins literally eat through stone, using their teeth to carve out nooks where the spiny [...]
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When you sit on the rocks at Orlebar Point, do you wonder who’s under the waves, and what those creatures are doing? Well, here’s more to wonder about. From slate.com: How Smart Is the Octopus?
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Do Gabriola’s octopuses have distributed minds? Maybe. Consider this article from Harvard Science: Thinking like an octopus. If you were an octopus, would you view the world from eight different points of view? Nine? The answer may depend on how many brains an octopus has, or, to say it another way, whether the robust bunches [...]
At the end of a Gabriola summer, we often find dozens of jellyfish washed up, dead, on the beach. These are Lion’s Mane jellyfish — the kind you hope never to meet while you’re swimming in the sea. They’re dead already when we find them on the rocks at Whalebone, right? So I took out [...]
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OK, beach-prowlers. What do you suppose this is? The photo was sent to me by a Gabriola blog reader who hopes you’ll know. Apparently the creature is about 9 inches long. Ideas?
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