Word: cetaceans
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...June 2005 I attended an annual whale-tasting event held by the Japanese Whaling Association at the national legislature in Tokyo. Restaurants from around Japan served their best cetacean recipes - whale sushi, whale sashimi, whale on crackers, canned whale, whale with Osaka noodles - to black-suited Japanese legislators, who grazed from one table to the next...
...Shonan Maru No. 2 has a different story. Japan's Institute of Cetacean Research (ICR), which operates Japan's whaling fleet, claims that its vessels had been under "continuous attack" on Wednesday and that earlier in the day, the Ady Gil had fired butyric acid projectiles - more commonly referred to as stink bombs - onto the deck of the Nisshin Maru, another whaling ship in the vicinity. Furthermore, at the time of the collision, the ICR says, the Ady Gil was attempting to entangle the Shonan Maru's rudder with a large rope. The actions, says the ICR, are "nothing...
...regional network of marine-mammal experts says the Langseth may have done more harm than good during its nearly four-month tour. The area where the ship was sailing is home to about 34 cetacean species, of which seven are fragile marine-mammal species, like the critically endangered Indo-Pacific humpback dolphin that lives along a 60-mile (100 km) stretch of Taiwan's west coast. "Seismic airguns are very loud, and under certain circumstances they can cause actual physical damage," says Rose. "When a species such as the humpback dolphin is already facing many threats and is hovering...
...turns out he's Ric O'Barry, a forgotten face from 1960s pop culture. As a young man, he captured and trained Flipper--or rather, the five dolphins that played that beloved cetacean. He became a passionate opponent of keeping dolphins in captivity after the death of one of the Flippers, a bottlenose named Kathy. Now he's a crusader on a mission: In a small, isolated cove in Taiji, Japan, where O'Barry has become a part-time resident (and pest), thousands of dolphins are being trapped and slaughtered every year. Since 2003, O'Barry has been desperately trying...
...Indeed, baiji aren't the only animal facing extinction. Wang says the finless porpoise, another large cetacean native to the river, has also seen its population plummet because of shipping and hydrological engineering. When Wang surveyed the river in the early 1990s, he found about 1,200 of the porpoises; 15 years later, there were fewer than half that number left. But Wang says it may not be too late to save the species. Galvanized in part by the baiji's disappearance, Chinese scientists are taking aggressive steps to rescue the finless porpoise, including breeding the animals in a lake...