Posts tagged as dolphins
Pay to Hang Out with the World's Second Most Evil Animal
Liberal climate-change-believing scientists are still trying to cozy up to the horrible rapists of the sea, to get the dolphins to reveal their secrets and to finally start SPEAKING ENGLISH. (Good news: for $2,495, you can spend ten days without Internet or phone on a boat off the Bahamas hanging out with dolphins. Let's hope you get to see lots of brutal gang behavior and gay dolphin sex! I'm really tempted actually.)
Conching: The Latest Craze Sweeping Australian Dolphins
Are you up on "conching?" It's like "planking" or "horse maning" except that it's done by dolphins instead of humans, and instead of being done solely for the purposes of display and photography (though it does make for some cool pictures) it also apparently helps the dolphins eat. It goes like this: dolphins trap small fish inside empty conch shells, and then bring the conch shells up to the surface of the water, and tip the fish into their mouths. Like we do with a pack of M&M's. But they use their beaks, instead of their hands. This behavior has been witnessed at least six times now in Shark Bay on Australia's western coast. Pretty amazing, right? Pretty great! Until one of the dolphins decides he wants more power, and would prefer anarchy to easy fishing, and smashes the conch shell and kills the smart fat dolphin, and exposes the dark, Hobbesian truth of dolphin nature. Which, of course, we already know about.
Are Dolphins Talking About Us Behind Our Backs?
Cool! Dolphins apparently change their clicking and whistle sounds in the presence of other species of dolphins in order to better communicate with each other. Or so indicates the audio research of biologist Laura May-Collado of the University of Puerto Rico, who recorded pods of bottlenose dolphins and Guyana dolphins separately, and then as they came into contact with each other off the coast of Costa Rica. As Dr. May-Collado told BBC Earth News: READ MORE
Moko The Dolphin, Late 1990s-2010
Sad news from New Zealand today, as it seems that Moko the friendly dolphin has died. A lone bottle-nosed dolphin that had taken to swimming with humans in Mahia Bay south of the city of Gisborne, Moko became a popular tourist attraction and made headlines worldwide two years ago by guiding a pair of distressed pygmy sperm whales out of dangerous shallow water. His life was not without controversy, however. Over the past year, as Moko entered his adolescence, reports of increasingly aggressive behavior spread. Due to the sensitive nature of the following video, and since this is an obituary and all, we'll bury it below. READ MORE
Space Water Spouting From Saturn's Moon Means Space Water!
A moon off Saturn is is spouting water in such a way as to indicate the presence of, you know, a whole bunch of water. Cameras on NASA's Cassini probe (helmed by our favorite astronaut/rock star Dr. Carolyn Porco) first captured images of water vapor and ice particles shooting through cracks near the south pole of Enceladus, a small moon, about one-seventh the size of Earth's, six years ago. But physical samples of stuff, taken more recently with an on-board plasma spectrometer (I totally have to get one of those) reveal the presence of negatively charged water particles-usually evidence of liquid water activity such as crashing waves. READ MORE
