Word: humpback
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Nature should have told him that when he heads south from Alaska during his herd's annual autumn migration to warmer water, he has to bear right at San Francisco. Instead, the 40-ton, 40-ft. humpback whale turned left and headed inland under the Golden Gate Bridge. For more than a week he has been swimming aimlessly in the shallow Sacramento River delta 40 miles northeast of San Francisco, a freshwater environment that eventually may kill the giant saltwater mammal...
...whaling, has been setting annual quotas ever since. For this season the permissible commercial take had dwindled to 13,851 whales, 80% of them small minkes. That was less than a third of the total eight years ago. Hunting of such endangered species as the blue, bowhead, right and humpback is now forbidden altogether, except by or on behalf of Eskimos and other native peoples, while sperms may be taken only by coastal-based ships...
...monk seal, the hoary bat and the predacious caterpillar. (There are no snakes on the islands.) Maui's waters teem with more than 700 species of fish, perhaps 20% of which are to be found only in Hawaii. The island's most faithful visitor is the humpback whale, the sportive, 40-ton leviathan that returns each whiter to the Lahaina roadstead to play and calve -and enthrall the onlooker...
...mammal research program, found that in the right whale, "Low frequency sounds occurred in similar stanzas lasting 11 to 14 minutes...These phonetic components...were so orderly that listeners could predict the appearance of the next type of signal." Carl Sagan noticed that the same phenomenon occurs in the humpback whale who is known to sing "songs" that are up to 30 minutes long, and then to repeat them a little later "phoneme for phoneme." He asks, "Is it possible that the intelligence of Cetaceans is channeled into the equivalent of epic poetry, history and elaborate codes of social interaction...
Deep Voices (Capitol). All whales make sounds, but humpback whales sing songs in regularly recurring cycles that last anywhere from a few minutes to half an hour. During the past two years, Animal Behaviorist Roger Payne and his wife Katy recorded this music of the deep and produced Songs of the Humpback Whale, which sold more than 100,000 LPs. Their second whale record contains the only recorded sounds of the elusive blue whale, as well as the latest hit by a herd of humpbacks-which, the Paynes have discovered, change their song each year. To the accompaniment of lapping...