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Hephaestion
Deeply Shallow
Joined: 11 Apr 2006
Posts: 24243
Location: Where the Wild Things Are...
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 Posted: Sun Jul 26, 2009 6:34 am Post subject: Whale impaled on cruise ship in Vancouver |
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Ugh...
| Quote: | A cruise ship pulled into the Port of Vancouver on Saturday morning with a dead fin whale impaled on its bow.
Jeff MacDonald, who was at Canada Place watching the ship come in, said seeing the impaled mammal "was a shock. You don't expect to see something like that and, you know, there's a lot of people staring at it — it's a very sad thing to see — and you kind of wonder how it would happen in the first place.
[...]
Christianne Wilhelmson, the managing director of the marine conservation group Georgia Strait Alliance, said incidents like this are all too common.
"It's kind of a tragic example of what happens when ships meet whales … There's more and more tanker traffic, there's more and more cruise ship traffic and what you have is an animal that's trying to make its way through all this."
Wilhelmson said that traffic generates a lot of noise underwater, which confuses the whales.
"They can't talk to each other, they can't hear their environment. We're going to have more incidents like this," she said.
"It's very possible that what happened here is the animal just had no idea the ship was there and this tragedy happened because of that." |
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"The dignity of an animal is measured by his capacity to revolt in the face of oppression." -- Mikhail Bakunin |
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Hephaestion
Deeply Shallow
Joined: 11 Apr 2006
Posts: 24243
Location: Where the Wild Things Are...
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| Posted: Mon Jul 27, 2009 8:09 pm Post subject: |
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video clips @ link
As an aside, I never knew (until I heard reports of this incident) that the Fin Whale is the second-largest mammal in the world, behind only the Great Blue. (The one in this case is a juvenile, though, so he ain't all that big.)
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"The dignity of an animal is measured by his capacity to revolt in the face of oppression." -- Mikhail Bakunin |
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TS.
Delicious schadenfreude
Joined: 11 Apr 2006
Posts: 14585
Location: Toronto, ON
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| Posted: Mon Jul 27, 2009 8:22 pm Post subject: |
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| Hephaestion wrote: | video clips @ link
As an aside, I never knew (until I heard reports of this incident) that the Fin Whale is the second-largest mammal in the world, behind only the Great Blue. (The one in this case is a juvenile, though, so he ain't all that big.) |
This whale is 70 ft long. That is still pretty damn big. Full grown Blues don't get much bigger than 100 feet.
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"Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blind-folded fear." - Thomas Jefferson |
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