#cetacean

[hope-for-the-planet]

Thank you for sharing this! This is another one of those situations where we are just now seeing the noticeable, dramatic payoff of years and years of quiet, unnoticed environmental work.

"Experts say years of conservation efforts have resulted in some of the healthiest waters in generations, with booming fish populations, clearer ocean waves and more chances to interact with our urban aquarium."

This quote also really got me:

"'It never gets old, it’s always thrilling,' said Celia Ackerman, a naturalist with American Princess Cruises who captured the images. As a child growing up in Brooklyn, Ackerman couldn’t wait to move out of the city so she could study marine animals. 'I would have never imagined I could enjoy them here right in my backyard.'"

[vickysaurus]

Whales! I know this is kicking in an open door but folks, they are really fucking big

[filurig]

instructional booklet for basal and listless ceteceans feeling like looking for porpoise

[great-and-small]

I think one of my favorite things about cetaceans (whales and dolphins) is the way they exhibit little signs of culture varying from pod to pod. For example, in the 80s there was a wild dolphin named Billie in Adelaide who was placed in dolphin rehab after being injured, and she spent some time amongst captive dolphins while recovering. Just from watching the Marineland dolphins, Billie learned to perform a trick called “tail walking” which is a behavior that dolphins don’t really do in the wild. However, when Billie was released back into Port River after her recovery, she loved tail walking so much that she taught it to all of the other wild dolphins in the pod as well as her daughter. Billie would regularly race up to boats and tail walk alongside them to the delight of passengers

There was a period for several years where pretty much all of the dolphins in Port River were tail walking on a regular basis until the fad eventually wore off, as fads do. Billie herself though never stopped exhibiting the behavior until her death in 2009 from renal failure. What a remarkable animal she was; I love what her story tells us about dolphin behavior and cognition.

[feather-bone]

Bowhead whale! The longest-lived mammal, reaching ages of over 200.

[ID: an illustration of a dark grey whale with a white chin swimming in profile to the right. The background is a wavy sea on the bottom and a sky of planets in orbit on top. End.]

[aberrantologist]

Pebanista, a newly discovered extinct relative of today's South Asian river dolphins and the largest freshwater odontocete.

[inatungulates]

Grey whale Eschrichtius robustus

Observed by susannespider, CC BY-NC-ND

[mindblowingscience]

More than 150 years ago, a San Francisco whaler noticed something about killer whales that scientists may be about to formally recognize—at least in name. Charles Melville Scammon submitted a manuscript to the Smithsonian in 1869 describing two species of killer whales inhabiting West Coast waters. Now a new paper published in Royal Society Open Science uses genetic, behavioral, morphological and acoustic data to argue that the orcas in the North Pacific known as residents and transients are different enough to be distinct species. They propose using the same scientific names Scammon is believed to have coined in the 19th century.

Continue Reading.

[fleebites]

oops💥💦

[knuppitalism-with-ue]

Another sketch brought to you by #paleostream!

Makaracetus, the "trunked whale", a basal cetacean that had a bizarre skull indicating some kind of weird nose. My interpretation took inspiration from desmans, aquatic moles.

Edit: I forgot, I also made a quick sketch of one cleaning your aquarium

[lil-tachyon]

Cetacean Psiberwarfare

[typhlonectes]

This whale may be the largest animal ever. We have no idea how it got that big.

A newly discovered extinct whale called P. colossus is challenging the blue whale for the title of heaviest animal to ever exist.

Dubbed by its discoverers Perucetus colossus, or simply P. colossus, the titanic animal may not be just a record setter. P. colossus is also compelling scientists to reconsider their ideas about how animals are able to grow to gigantic sizes. “This is another way in which you can get big,” said Hans Thewissen, a paleontologist and whale evolution expert at Northeast Ohio Medical University. With a body that looked vaguely like that of a manatee rather than a blue whale’s, it clearly did something different than other whales to maintain its huge mass...

Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2023/08/02/largest-animal-whale-p-colossus

[amnhnyc]

Meet the long-finned pilot whale (Globicephala melas)! Reaching lengths of up to 25 feet (7.6 meters), it's the second largest member of the dolphin family; the orca is the largest. This nomadic cetacean is widely distributed, and can be seen throughout the oceans of the Southern Hemisphere. It wanders in search of food such as squid, fish, mollusks, and other sea critters. This species is highly social, with family units called pods consisting of up to 100 members. Pilot whales have even been observed participating in multi-pod gatherings with more than 1,000 individuals congregating at once!

Photo: titouan_roguet, CC BY-NC 4.0, iNaturalist

[arminreindl]

Odobenocetops is a profoundly fucked up whale. The younger species, O. leptodon, had tusks way over a meter in length yet they were too fragile to be used for fighting or digging. The neck in both species was incredibly flexible as shown above O. peruvianus lacked a melon and couldn't echolocate, instead relying on binocular vision (O. leptodon had a small melon, which is better than nothing I guess) and they fed much like walrus, which means they would spit compressed water at the ocean floor to uncover shellfish, grab them with their lips and use their mouth as a vacuum pump to suck out all the soft parts only oh yeah and some speculate that it might have had whiskers covering its face

[cold-neon-ocean]

Demon whale here to ask you about your whaling ship's extended warranty~

His name is Bryg, (short for Brygmophyseter)!

[diblmetta]

Aquatic fury concept🐬

Love messing with speculative evolution and I’ll take any excuse to research more on cetaceans lol