Showing posts with label Whales. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Whales. Show all posts

Friday, November 11, 2016

A mysterious sound from the depths of the sea, causing panic in a part of Canada. Locals desperate demanded military assistance

A mysterious sound seems to come from the seabed near Nunavut territory of Canada, and local hunters fear that the sound will ward off wild animals.

Described as a whistling ,, '' ,, buzz '' or ,, roar '' sound from the Arctic be heard for more than two months, and people desperately asking for help military. It is now conducted a thorough investigation.


Map of Nunavut photo: geographic.org
The sound comes from a place on the seabed, Hecla and Fury Strait, near Greenland. In Nunavut, there are about 31,000 people, mostly Inuit, who are scattered over an area of 1,750,000 square kilometers, the area is the northernmost populated area.

Among the local traditions are hunted large mammals, such as seals, caribou and whales. Hecla and Fury Strait is often the main location for hunting. Locals say that this summer the animals in the Strait disappeared at the same time that appeared sound.

,, This passage is a migration route for Greenland whales, seals and ringed seals beard. In that area there were very many, '' said local government official, George Qulaut. ,, This summer was not any. It is one of the major hunting areas, both winter and summer, '' he added.

In general, when a new mysterious phenomenon that science can not explain any new conspiracy theories. Locals believe the sound is from sonar surveillance of a mining company.





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The above post is reprinted from materials provided by Science Alert . Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

Friday, July 29, 2016

Rare footage captured near Australia: '' It is Migaloo, the white whale with porcelain skin '























A humpback whale whose skin is white as porcelain, was spotted off the coast of eastern Australia from some amateur enthusiasts who believe that they have discovered Migaloo, one of the rarest species of white whale, reports Le Figaro.



Rare Migaloo the whale is turning 30 ABC


























Cetacean was spotted offshore in Byron Bay, while traveling north on annual migration between Antarctica and warmer waters of Queensland, in northeastern Australia. "I cried with happiness when I saw the magnificent whale, I was pleased that we can there to sight." He told Australian radio man Alison Reid, who participate in an expedition designed to locate cetaceans. "It was miraculous, looks fantastic, unreal." Added Reid.



Discover Migaloo : An Extremely Rare Albino Whale - Passport Ocean

Humpback whales are in this middle period in their annual migration from Antarctica to the warmer waters of Queensland (state in northeastern Australia), where they are to mate and give birth to cubs.




























A study conducted in 2003 by Southern Cross University in New South Wales concluded that Migaloo is a male and have now aged between 28 and 30 years. Humpback whales have a life expectancy of about 80 years.



White whale Migaloo could make a stunning appearance off the Gold Coast today

"It's the only white whale in the Southern Hemisphere we know," said in the past, Oskar Peterson, who coordinates the White Whale Research Centre, based in Australia.În 2011 a young white whale probably old just a few weeks, was seen near the Whitsunday Islands, off the coast of Queensland state, but the chick has not been seen since. "We do not know if he survived," added Oskar Peterson.


Endangered population of humpback whales that swim off the coast of eastern Australia has increased considerably since the prohibition of whaling in the early 60s .The animal seems to be really whale Migaloo - an Aboriginal word meaning "white friend" - observed for the first time in 1991 and whose appearances are tracked blown thousand passionate about marine life.

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Thursday, July 28, 2016

Mysterious New Whale Species Discovered in Alaska
























Scientists say a dead whale on a desolate beach and a skeleton hanging in a high school gym are a new species. Yet experts have never seen one alive.Like many good mysteries, this one started with a corpse, but the body in question was 24 feet (7.3 meters) long.



The remains floated ashore in June of 2014, in the Pribilof Islands community of St. George, a tiny oasis of rock and grass in the middle of Alaska's Bering Sea. A young biology teacher spotted the carcass half-buried in sand on a desolate windswept beach. He alerted a former fur seal researcher who presumed, at first, that she knew what they'd found: a Baird's beaked whale, a large, gray, deep-diving creature that occasionally washes in dead with the tide.

But a closer examination later showed that the flesh was too dark, the dorsal fin too big and floppy. The animal was too short to be an adult, but its teeth were worn and yellowed with age.

It's just so exciting to think that in 2016 we're still discovering things in our world—even mammals that are more than 20 feet long.
Phil Morin | NOAA's Southwest Fisheries Science Center

Beaked whale
It turns out, according to new research published Tuesday, that this was not a Baird's beaked whale at all, but an entirely new species—a smaller, odd-shaped black cetacean that Japanese fishermen have long called karasu, or raven.

"We don't know how many there are, where they're typically found, anything," says Phillip Morin, a molecular geneticist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Southwest Fisheries Science Center. "But we're going to start looking."

It’s rare to uncover a new species of whale. Advances in DNA research have helped scientists identify five new cetaceans in the past 15 years but two were dolphins and most were simple category splits between fairly similar species. This animal, in the genus Berardius, looks far different than its nearest relative and inhabits an area of the North Pacific where marine mammal research has been conducted for decades.


"It's a really big deal," says study co-author Paul Wade of NOAA's National Marine Mammal Laboratory. "If you think about it, on land, discovery of new species of large mammals is exceptionally rare. It just doesn't happen very often. It's quite remarkable."

Skeletons, Beaks, and Bone Powder
Morin and his team examined the St. George carcass, took bone powder from old museum specimens, and reviewed DNA tests of whales from the Sea of Okhotsk. They studied skulls and beaks and analyzed records from whaling fleets in Japan. They even tracked down a skeleton hanging from the ceiling in a high school gymnasium in the Aleutian Islands.

This skull of a newly discovered species of whale shows its blowhole vestibule and its nasal and frontal bones.

PHOTOGRAPH BY L. MICHELLE RIDGWAY
The scientists conclude in their study published in Marine Mammal Science that this type of whale, which has not yet been named, is nearly as far removed genetically from the Northern Hemisphere's Baird's beaked whales as it is from its closest known relative, Arnoux's beaked whales, which swim in the Antarctic Ocean. The differences, in fact, are so dramatic that the animal has to be something else, they say.

An Unrecognizable, Baffling Creature

Of the 88 recognized living cetacean species, including orcas and humpbacks, bottlenose dolphins and Dall's porpoises, 22 are beaked whales. The largest of those, Baird's beaked whales, also called giant bottlenose whales, can reach 35 to 40 feet (10.7 to 12 meters) and weigh more than 24,000 pounds (10,900 kilograms). They travel in large groups, may dive 3,000 feet (914 meters), and can be underwater for an hour. While beaked whales are still hunted in Japan, little about them is known. In part that’s because they spend so much time feeding and exploring vast, deep canyons far from shore.

When Christian Hagenlocher on St. George, a 35-square-mile (91-square-kilometer) island inhabited by 100 people, frequented by hundreds of thousands of seals, and visited by 2.5 million birds, pointed out the dead whale in Zapadni Bay to former seal researcher Karin Holser, she thought it was a Baird's beaked whale. But later, as tides and currents revealed more of the animal, Holser realized she didn't recognize it at all. She consulted a colleague's cetacean identification book and sent pictures to other experts in Alaska.
Baird's beaked whales range throughout the North Pacific from Russia and Japan to Mexico. Genetic variation among Baird’s beaked whales was tiny. But for the five new black specimens Morin tested, all initially from the Bering Sea or the Aleutians, the sequences differed from the Baird's beaked whales significantly.

"The genetic variation within the forms was little, while the divergence between them was much larger," Morin says. "That's our strongest argument."

The whale still needs to be formally described and named, and Morin's findings would have to be accepted by outside experts who track cetacean taxonomy. But Pitman and others say the case is strong that it’s a new species.

"We're doing increasing damage to our environment, and we can't even begin to conserve the biodiversity we know is out there," Morin says. "Yet there's so much more about our world we don't even understand."

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Source; nationalgeographic

Saturday, July 2, 2016

The Stunning Beauty Of Whales And Dolphins
























Christopher Swann(57) is a British photographer with a long career behind him which has one very specific mark. For 25 years he’s been trying to catch the majestic beauty of large sea creatures – whales and dolphins, and he’s been doing it with a great success. His photos are showing all the beauty hidden in these sea giants which despite their size leave on us calming effect coming from the grace in their movements through watery vastness.

“I love the beauty and perfection of the sea,” Swann told mymodernmet. “Cetaceans epitomize that, and nothing is more perfect than any cetacean underwater, but whales are really special. To see animals so huge yet so graceful, so at ease and at one with their surroundings, is exquisite.”

Christopher Swan has decided to focus his career completely on these majestic creatures in the future. We think that’s a very good decision according to the wonderful photographs he’s been making so far. Look at some of his amazing photos in the gallery below and read what he says about his great passion.


































































































Photographer Christopher Swan