Thousands of whales are being killed by passing ships. Can we save them?
On the other hand, that there are thousands to be hit means we’ve done something right about the whales.
Thousands of whales are being killed by passing ships. Can we save them?
On the other hand, that there are thousands to be hit means we’ve done something right about the whales.
Would it help if we taught cetaceans proper sea lane safety?
Hedgehogs have learnt not to curl up when traffic approaches but to run like buggery. One suspects whales will do similar over time.
AtC
That’s going to a few million years for the whales to re evolve anything that enables then to “run like buggery”
Gunker: Dive! Dive! Dive!
“Thousands of whales are being killed by passing ships. Can we save them?”
No, if they’ve been killed, there’s not a lot you can do. You can save the carcases for blubber and cat-food, I guess.
Cat food? Jap food more like.
“Whales” for a given definition of “Whale”.
Porpoises are technically whales, and they do get hit rather often because they don’t gtfo fast enough.
Then again, most of them are actually prey animals and not that smart, so that’s pure Darwinism for you…
The big’uns, if a ship hits them hard enough to get them killed, do quite a number on the ship…
Excavator Man, the types that gets usually murderised by ships aren’t Good Eatin’.
Same problem as the big cats. Pure carnivores, high urea content in the meat.
There’s a reason they were stricken off the Menu by our Ancestors…
What about all the whales being killed due to building off shore wind farms?
People say “Don’t eat carnivores” and I say “Lobsters” to that.
I’m not the resident biologist, but I assume fish work differently from mammals.
@ dearieme
Also “pike” or even “salmon”
BiW, Any gill breather that’s never seen the land has a set of adaptations that allows them to maintain osmotic homeostasis, usually highly specific globulins. And they flush properly like a Good Boi.
Post-land mammals don’t, or are only halfway into the process. And use urea to compensate for all the salt they float around in. And the smaller they are, the more pronounced this is.
Sort of the same for sea-birds.
It’s not that you can’t eat porpoise, but like shark (OmNom!), it will have to be really fresh, and must be prepared with care and some haste.
That urea turns into ammonia really fast, triggering release of other unpleasant stuff ( to us…). But for us the buck already stops at the ammonia.
Good thing humans don’t spend time passing ships, then. Not good for the haemorrhoids, not good at all.