We add carbon. And specifically, we get value from the fact that whales are going to fertilize more phytoplankton, both as they live today and as they reproduce and have whale calves that also grow up and do the same thing, and hopefully then restore whale populations to where they used to be.The hope is that if we restore whale populations, then we're going to get a big increase or a significant increase in the amount of phytoplankton, which,
Distraction is really good. Whale eye. This is something trainers talk about all the time.
to the music then someone got up to whale and who he's raning this week be
Thereís a healthy turtle population. This is a green turtle at a dive site called Cousinsí Rock. Of course, there are whale sharks too. This is one of the best places to photograph whale sharks. Very large whale sharks, mostly female. Iíve only ever seen one male whale shark in Galapagos. This was one of the only really friendly onesIíve ever seen there, who just hung out. I mean, all of those divers on the surface are out of air. What weíre doing is trying to snorkel around this whale shark whoís
Andrea: Mm-hmm. Lee: or, or maybe some of the stuff cause you are, I guess, you're the new season of Whale Wars that starts tomorrow?Andrea: Right, it airs tomorrow night on Animal Planet at 9 and it'll be on every Friday night this summer.
From that we did some calculations that put a price tag on whales ranging from about $2 million for, say, a humpback whale -- so these are really just the great baleen whales and sperm whales -- up to the blue whale , which is really worth roughly about $4 million by our latest calculations.And we're prorating them by the whale biomass.
usually just get rid of it or make it so tiny that you can barely see it. Like the hind legs of whales . You know, whales evolved from mammals that lived on land. They had hind legs. They went into the water. They lost those hind legs. So the fact that T-Rex still has arms, that means something.The other thing that means something is, yeah, the arms are the size of my arms in terms of how long they were, which is weird. You know, this is a bus-sized animal with arms, the size of my arms.
The transmission of acoustic information by whales across large distances in the ocean is now well established. Whales , for example, can dive down to what is called the SOFAR channel.It's a very particular, if you like, layer in the ocean that, because of specific temperature, salinity, and pressure conditions, acts like a long distance communication mechanism
where you're walking down the street and the Skies open up and some voice of God says to you you're here to save orca whales or whatever it might be um I really believe that purpose is simply acommitment that's inspired by experience and probably the biggest experience that inspired my commitment to women and
they say absolutely this is an extremely intelligent animal. whales and the freedivers who have been studying them?
OK, so what you're looking at-- all the different colors represent keywords that relate to their causes-- ocean, acidification, sustainable seafood, sharks, whales , tuna, over-fishing. And they use a keyword methodology so they can fetter out someone who mentions "Ocean City, Maryland," versus"save the ocean. And they look at the amount of chatter that's happening around those key words.
And from six or five feet away from a whale 's eye? Whales , dolphins, porpoises. The number one culprit is fisheries bi-catch.
Cheng: The question is about whether heís still there or not. I have not seen any recent pictures of Scar. They do leaveóMales leave the area where they grew up when they get whales , as well. This was taken with a Canon 5D Mark II. [water
Shepherd, in particular, because it's so effective. Sea Shepherd is a very effective group. We're not a group of protesters. We don't wave signs and banners and ask poachers to stop killing whales . When we say we're gonna save whales , we actually go and save whales . A lot of people know of our Antarctic campaign. That's our most famous one. But we also do a whole lotof other campaigns around the world. Right now, Sea Shepherd's main ship, the Steve Irwin--or one of our two ships--the Steve Irwin is in the Mediterranean right now saving the last
But that was my thought was just a few months down the line, we're gonna have to save these whales . Well, later that day, I started really noticing that all around us in the ocean--andwhere these whales were migrating--there was actually plastic bags floating everywhere.
Lee: it's changed how they operate, and maybe for the better. Maybe not, I'm not sure, I don't know all the details, but what do you guys think about that? whales . Lee: Sir. man in audience5: Is that question that comes up for me is then who is, you said that governments aren't taking any action and whatnot, so who is, on the planet, taking action? What
and four miles deep uh for most of my my route uh it's home to as well as seals things like uh killow whales people think I'm not sure quite how far north they go certainly Arctic shock sound scary they're blind which isgood um but they also track uh movement they can sense movement in the water that's not so good um you know giant
About eight and a half short tons. So a colleague of mine, Tom Holtz, described them as an orca on land, but that's it. It is a killer whale -sized animal but on legs, on land. And those are massive predators. So you're looking at something absolutely colossal, and I think that is what will stun you. I think people don't realize how big a lot of animals are, which sounds weird, but I used to work in a few zoos, and something I think you notice is when you go and see things like
And if you were to compare that with, I guess, the Amazon forest, is that comparable, meaning one blue whale equals one part of an Amazon forest or one entire-- Yeah. We haven't done that exact calculation, but yeah.
So there is a mechanism whereby whales can communicate with one another across very long distances. A whale can be singing off the coast of Ireland, and you can hear it in Bermuda. And so this is how this cultural transmission occurs.
And we get every moment that the fish is getting closer and closer. The whale 's head's here. So this is kind of distant.
And we also have these senses, and I'll show you that in just a minute. A whale can echolocate. What they do is they send out a click, and they wait for the echo of that click to return.
All away to the east coast of Siberia to Anadyr where I picked up this Russian ice breaker-- it's not quite fully an ice breaker. small whale boats, with no other choice but to drag these boats and their few belongings
This was my one and only attempt to make a composite at that time. The whale on the right swam up to my friend here, and immediately did a 180 and came right back at me. And I took some photos.
stops playing] So that gives you an idea of how many there are. This was shot in one take. Eleven whale sharks went by. Okay. This is another shot. I call this one ìinterspecies encounter.î This is actually in the talk that Ricardo embedded on the Google Events. So if you want more information about this shot and this area, you can go check
through these?" And, unfortunately, whales don't always make it through. And I suspect that not all the whales that we saw migrating probably even made it down to the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary. Because, unfortunately, commercial fishing uses massive, massive nets and whales , dolphins, sea birds, turtles and everything else, happens to swim into it just to catch a few specific fish. And, while most people don't eat whale , most people do eat
And animals can sequester carbon directly. So whales are so large, of course, that they actually store many tons of carbon on their bodies. But what whales really do is that they interact with the phytoplankton in the oceans to actually fertilize the phytoplankton, which
So on the one hand, you have this explosion in scientific research on acoustic communication in all sorts of species, from charismatic megafauna like whales and elephants, to honeybees, bats, coral. I hope we get to talk about coral.
Now, they're both looking at sperm whales . Sperm whales , unlike humpbacks, communicate in sort of a-- it sounds like Morse code, is the best way to describe it. It sounds like something-- if you were near a sperm whale , which are some of the loudest animals on the planet, it would sound
So I know that sounds insane to many of you. Sperm whales , of course, don't have a sophisticated form of communication. They can't exchange information the way you and I can.
Now, that brain is about six times the size of yours. Sperm whales have had this size brain for around 30 to 40 million years. We've had our current-size brain about 200,000 years.
So in the scope of brain evolution, that's a long time. Sperm whales have a neocortex, which in humans governs things like reasoning, language. Their neocortex six times the size of ours.
And his story is extremely fascinating, both from a technical standpoint and for how he is able to change the conversation of whale conservation away from just the whales jumping out of the water, like the Pacific life visual to something even more compelling more direct, which is these face to face interactions with whales , and the look in their eyes, so to speak.
And also, the person left our group and is swimming after the whale , trying to get photographs, and compromising the encounter. The whales are swimming away. And that's very symbolic to me.
And from six or five feet away from a whale 's eye? issues whales face. Whaling makes up less than 1% of what's killing them.
These whales come up and they were eating the krill.
But then, like within less than a week with this group we went down there and we saved 500 whales from getting harpooned. And so, it's just direct action like that that makes us really want to just keep on working with Sea Shepherd all the time.
where these whales were migrating--there was actually plastic bags floating everywhere. And whales , turtles, birds and other animals, they actually eat plastic thinking that it was food. Because millions of years of evolution, unfortunately, hasn't prepared them for the reality that now that there's plastic all in the oceans, we actually very much have
Andrea: Right. Right, well, a lot, a lot of this is driven by economics. And so with the whaling, well--just going back to the whaling operation though--when we save over 500 whales , we're costing them millions of dollars every year. And a lot of what's going on is this is actually being subsidized by governments, in the way of fuel subsidies and also just direct fishing subsidies. So, addressing those and costing them that much
Lee: it's changed how they operate, and maybe for the better. Maybe not, I'm not sure, I don't know all the details, but what do you guys think about that? the whalers out and then we wouldn't need to go down there every year, but will continue to go down as long as there's an illegal whaling operation.
My white whale is apatite—from the Greek word meaning “to deceive”.
You were talking and your research papers talk about finding the lifetime value or finding the net present value of a living elephant or a living whale as we were talking about. How does somebody go about doing this?
Really interesting. Yeah, so what you're talking about is literally an open market where we would all know what the price is whether-- and with the whale population.
by using the whale as a medium to express themselves.
After the Twitter Fail Whale really took off, I was also experiencing a lot of challenges in terms
like your Twitter whale and we would love to invite you to do a pale whale for Conan's new show on TBS.
- A 40-foot sperm whale , which was stranded in the Firth of Forth for more than four days, is now thought to be swimming towards open waters again.
- Good luck to the whale .
And they whale on factory ships.
and had a whale of a time.