Tag archives for whales
Posted by Orcas vs. Sperm Whales from Blue Sphere Media on Vimeo.
The other day Alexis Manning posted a link in the Nat Geo Daily 10 to a video showing rare footage of a pod of orcas attacking a family of sperm whales (watch above). The video is from Blue Sphere Media, a production company with the tagline: “We fuse dramatic imagery with intimate and thought-provoking stories,…
Posted by On our radar today: Video footage shows killer whales attacking sperm whales, the space debris issue is becoming more and more dire, and…
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This week, Boyd’s guests tell tales of lions stealing camera equipment, former whalers who used 19th-century techniques into the 1980s, how to reveal the magnificence of a chicken, and much more.
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John-Michael Lee caught thresher sharks off Redondo Beach in California when he was a boy. “We’d float on a mat in the water, reach down with our hands and just catch them by the tail,” recalls John-Michael. “They were about three to four feet long, but most of that was tail.”
“When I go diving now,” he remarks, “I don’t see many sharks anymore.”
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Worms that eat dead whales at the bottom of the ocean also mate inside the bones, a new study shows for the first time.
On this week’s show, meet a woman who free-dives with great white sharks, a man who skied to the North Pole in the darkness of winter, and photographers who can turn such darkness into a colorful portrait of a world we can’t see.
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By Mark J. Spalding, President, The Ocean Foundation It’s gray whale migration season on the west coast of North America. Gray whales make one of the longest migrations of any mammal on Earth. Every year they swim over 10,000 miles roundtrip between Mexico’s nursery lagoons and feeding grounds in the Arctic. At this time of…
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One spill-echoing artwork, a ceramic wall-mounted sculpture called “Eyak’s Jaw,” was made in remembrance of the 20th anniversary of the Exxon Valdez oil spill. Within a rich bed of intertidal life forms – sea start, kelps, and urchins, a viewer glimpses the jawbone and conical teeth of an orca. The actual jawbone of the male…
National Geographic’s Top 10 Tweets of 2012
Posted by Ted Chamberlain on December 13, 2012 
What did National Geographic Twitter followers retweet most in 2012? Intriguing transmissions on strange emissions—from the sun as well as wombats—subatomic science, and stargazing. Lots of stargazing.
Is it a hippo? A giraffe? What about an elephant or even a dinosaur? In this brand new video, people in Times Square in New York City are asked to name the largest animal on Earth. It is produced by Mission Blue, Sylvia Earle‘s ocean advocacy group, as part of a new online video series titled “Mission…
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Greetings, NewsWatch readers: this is Tim Binder, the Vice President of Collection Planning at Shedd Aquarium in Chicago. For many years, I’ve been involved with beluga whale conservation research in the field and here at home. Today I’d like to invite you to join me on a research expedition to the shores of Alaska. Beluga…
Posted by Gemina Garland-Lewis starts her field work as a National Geographic Young Explorer recording the stories of old whalers and the now extinct whaling culture in the Azores.
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Talk about the call of the wild—you can now track endangered North Atlantic right whales with a new iPhone and iPad app.
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In August 2008, I was fortunate enough to join an expedition ship on a circumnavigation of the Svalbard Archipelago in the Arctic Circle, going as far north as 81⁰N. I was on a personal mission to experience and celebrate this Arctic wilderness. Life on a grand scale in this far away place of rock and ice.…
Posted by One of the benefits of being in the water with humpback whales is that it makes me appear svelte by comparison.
Scientists Making Efforts to Track Mythical Narwhals
Posted by Alyson Foster on November 7, 2011 
The long and spiraling tusk that grows from the center of the narwhal’s forehead has helped make that animal the subject of sailors’ lore and earned it the nickname “unicorn of the sea.” That nickname may be even more fitting given the narwhal’s almost mythical elusiveness. For a long time, very little has been known about the medium-sized whale that calls the inhospitable waters of the Arctic home. Now efforts are underway to find out more.
New Ocean Ideas: Viewers’ Choice Winner Announced
Posted by Andrew Howley of NG Staff on April 28, 2011 
When asked how she could help tackle the biggest issues facing the ocean, wildlife artist Jane Kim thought big: paintings-stretching-for-miles big. National Geographic then voted her the Viewers’ Choice Winner among 15 ideas. See Jane’s art and discover her inspiration and hopes for her Migrating Murals project.
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Three thousand square miles of Alaska’s Cook Inlet have been designated as critical habitat for the endangered Cook Inlet beluga whale, NOAA’s Marine Fisheries Service announced today. “Scientists estimate there are less than 350 Cook Inlet beluga whales left in the wild. This distinct population segment was listed as endangered in October 2008,” the Fisheries…
The primary feeding ground for the Critically Endangered western gray whale may be devastated if a proposed third oil and gas drilling platform is allowed to operate offshore of Russia’s Sakhalin Island, an international coalition of NGOs said today.
By Frederick M. O’Regan Our planet’s great whales and those who care about them can breathe a bit easier following last month’s meeting of the International Whaling Commission (IWC), in Agadir, Morocco. A controversial proposal advanced by the Chair and Vice Chair of the IWC would have rewritten rules to resuscitate the whaling industry in…
By Hans-Dieter Sues In the movie The Lost World (1997), the eccentric chaos theoretician Dr. Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) remarked on the all-too-soon apparent instability of the “Jurassic Park” world: “Life will find a way.” It always does. Some animals and plants make a living in almost unimaginably weird ways. For an evolutionary biologist like…
A proposal circulating among the 88 nations that comprise the International Whaling Commission would allow an official resumption of commercial whaling in many parts of the ocean. The International Fund for Animal Welfare is making an urgent appeal to the U.S. Government to save the whales. By Patrick R. Ramage As our Ship of State…
British Foreign Secretary David Miliband announced the creation of a Marine Protected Area (MPA) in the British Indian Ocean Territory yesterday, doubling the total area of the world’s oceans under official protection. The new MPA includes a “no-take” marine reserve where commercial fishing, including whaling, will be banned. The British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT) consists…
By GrrlScientist (via @ Living the Scientific Life @ScienceBlogs) Yesterday afternoon, experienced whale trainer, 40-year-old Dawn Brancheau, was attacked and killed by 30-year-old male orca [killer whale], Tillikum, during the afternoon show at SeaWorld, in Orlando, Florida. The 12,000 pound male orca, Orcinus orca, apparently grabbed his trainer and thrashed her to death in front of the…
A draft compromise on whaling released by a working group of the International Whaling Commission (IWC) today set a dangerous precedent that the international community must reject, the Switzerland-based conservation charity WWF said. The compromise fails to secure a future for whales, the Pew Environment Group said in a separate statement. The Pew Environment Group…
