Its rare for me to be moved by something and somehow this article of whales in last Sunday's New York Time Magazine really got to me."...new insights into the behavior of our long-inscrutable, seabound mammalian counterparts began forcing us to reconsider and renegotiate what once seemed to be a distinct boundary between our world and theirs. Scientists have now documented behaviors like tool use and cooperative hunting strategies among whales. Orcas, or killer whales, have been found to mourn their own dead. Just three years ago, researchers at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York discovered, in the brains of a number of whale species, highly specialized neurons that are linked to, among other things, the use of language and were once thought to be the exclusive property of humans and a few other primates. Indeed, marine biologists are now revealing not only the dizzying variety of vocalizations among a number of whale species but also complex societal structures and cultures.Whales, we now know, teach and learn. They scheme. They cooperate, and they grieve. They recognize themselves and their friends. They know and fight back against their enemies."
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This past February, I had the amazing experience of touching a baby Pacific Gray Whale in BahÃa Magdalena. It was incredible that after the initial encounter of 20 minutes the mother and the calf followed our tiny panga for a while. It sure made us appreciate a certain bonding aspect of this specific human-whale interaction. I posted the story and the video of this interaction here -
ReplyDeletehttp://talkingtraveler.blogspot.com/2009/02/handling-whale-calf-in-baja.html