Wildlife & Railway Art - Frédérique Lucas

Art and other miscellaneous ramblings. I wish the railway to wildlife balance was even, but I have to admit it's mostly wildlife for now. If you want trains and nothing but trains, see my sideblog.

[namu-the-orca]

Our last Mediterranean morning of the holiday. I'm back home again, but what beauty and peace and quiet we had! I miss the cicadas but I'm glad the grasshoppers here can somewhat substitute.

[namu-the-orca]

I am currently on a sailboat in the Mediterranean and Something is healing Inside

[namu-the-orca]

Look at allll dose CHIGGENS

[namu-the-orca]

I am currently on a sailboat in the Mediterranean and Something is healing Inside

[namu-the-orca]

Speaking of cool cetacean footage, look at this GORGEOUS video I stumbled across on youtube. Close encounters of the 1st kind, B1 to be exact (yes the joke barely works but im still making it). Love love love those close up spy hops in the beginning you can see every pit in their skin and the front views really drive home how weird and.... bulbous their faces are. I love them a very normal amount.

[namu-the-orca]

your work is so inspiring!! :D im having trouble finding sources for cetacean anatomy, muscles, just studying their form in general for cetaceans. how do you study them? do u have any guides or tips :”)

Hiiiii!!! Thank you so much that is always so lovely to hear <'3 Oooff I must say when it comes to muscles i also have very little cluesTM. But frankly, the few plates I have seen basically show them as they are; one long smooth muscle puppet (for the most part).

My one and only real go to for study is photos! lots and lots and lots of photos. or videos of course, they can be very helpful to see how their bodies move and reveal shapes through different angles and movements. i especially love photos that make you go WTF, and then ooooo never knew their head worked like that. they give you insight, help imprint shapes into your head and when you use them for studies, get you practicing that 3D shape from more unexpected angles.

Look at the gape on Bubbles, how her right lip flares out super far from her teeth! (Bubbles the Short-finned pilot whale, photo © Seaworld)

Look at the funky shape on this one in front view! How the cheeks poke out and the eyes sit on their own little mounds and there's an extra hump under the dorsal fin! You don't see that crap in side view (Spinner dolphin approaching diver, photo © Barry Fackler)

Or look at... whatever this is!! (female or juvenile Blainville's beaked whale, photo © Seth Conae)

Also - I know this does not apply to all people - but if you have the means to see cetaceans for real that can help a lot too. Either through reputable whale watching (take lots of photos to use as your own reference for later, wild cetaceans don't usually stick around and especially not close!) or visiting an accredited aquarium. i got a lot of extra feel for the little details of bottlenose anatomy through seeing them up close almost every day for a few months. also museums are cool for looking at skeletons and skulls! however i've always found their bones to be of little relevance when regarding their outside looks.

so unfortunately no more insightful tips than looking at the wet beasts a lot (either digitally or in real life) and drawing drawing drawing drawing drawing drawing

[namu-the-orca]

A more-or-less-3-month shrumpdate: the blue things have multiplied successfully.

There are a lot of them now. Still seeing an interesting variety of gradients and colour patterns but I have set up a "weirdo" tank where all the shrimpies that aren't quite what I'm looking for go. The three colonies I bought from do seem to have the same genetics because they aren't throwing any wild types. In the weirdo tank I got one blue-red combo shrimp! They have funny genetics.

[inatungulates]

Himalayan bharal Pseudois nayaur nayaur

Observed by sid9611, CC BY-NC

[vintagewildlife]

Killer whales By: M. Wursig From: Encyclopedia of the Animal World: The Hunters 1988

[local-hellhound-steals-spaghetti]

If it's not too grim to ask, if a whale needed to be euthanized, how would it be done? This isn't necessarily about Timmy the whale but it has me wondering that, if he was in the care of those who were actually responsible, how could an animal so big be given as painless of a death as possible?

It's a tough and difficult thing to do:

How to Euthanize a Whale

Finding ways to ease the suffering of beached whales has been a challenge. Whale experts may have found an answer.

The goal is always to be considerate of the animal and make it as quick and painless as possible. But it is obviously very emotional and very upsetting for everyone. No one wants to euthanise, but it's far better than a slow and agonising death. Especially when it comes to strandings.

[local-hellhound-steals-spaghetti]

I find Stranded No More to be a fascinating example of the Dunning Kruger effect. They call themselves a “watchdog” group that doesn’t seem to have any practical expertise.

This is a social media “organisation” that does nothing but criticise and point fingers at rescue organisations and refuses to believe that euthanasia is an ethical choice for stranded whales. Their “help” for Timmy was AI generated diagrams of the pectoral fin tow idea stolen from Sea World’s Forster rescue.

But let’s talk about their points:

1) Whales can be extremely sick but still survive - the reason Timmy was able to survive as long as she did due to the chronic stress responses she was experiencing, resulting in periodic bursts of adrenaline that was keeping her alive. A whale that is lying on a sandbank for 2 weeks and continuing to restrand is not healthy.

At this point she was disoriented and likely had internal damage. Her breathing was very raspy and her respiratory rate was very high, indicating an elevated state of stress

2) Timmy’s body condition was extremely poor - just because her ribs weren’t jutting out doesn’t mean she wasn’t emaciated. Her spine was very clear to see, she had lost blubber. Compared to the successful rescue of the juvenile in Forster, NSW, she was in a very bad state

3) Timmy’s “improvement” was based on the assessment of a veterinarian with no experience with cetaceans, let alone baleen whales. The time spent in that brackish water had caused significant deterioration. Again, compare to the Forster humpback juvenile, which Stranded No More and blacklisted vets were pointing to as “proof” Timmy could be saved.

The situations were chalk and cheese and if this whale had shown up in the state Timmy was, ORRCA, Sea World and National Parks would have all likely agreed on euthanasia. It’s not a “cartel”. It’s current best practise based on animal welfare science.

No one wants to euthanise whales!!! This idea that we’re all itching to kill stranded whales is just so ridiculous on so many levels and deeply insulting to the people actually helping whales.

Stranded No More also asserts that efforts to refloat whales are “half hearted” because the expectation is the whale needs to be euthanised. This is also deeply insulting and I’d invite them to go and stand neck deep in frigid salt water all day and let me know if they feel like they could be half hearted about it.

Rapid response to strandings is important - but not by mobilising the general public without any experience or instruction or by refloating without any assessment. That is just stupid and dangerous.

Large whale strandings are extremely emotional and intense. It’s impossible to push an adult or even a juvenile humpback whale into the ocean without some sort of mechanical aid. And if then, the conditions of the ocean can make things dangerous for the whale and the people.

With smaller cetaceans we have a little more flexibility in finding less swell and rough surf. But if the animal is sick and weak, pushing them back out into the ocean is basically drowning them.

It makes me so angry, as someone who is trained in marine mammal rescue response and has assisted in multiple dolphin health procedures, that this “watchdog” is making the jobs of marine mammal rescue response so much harder by implying some sort of conspiracy. And that we just need to keep pushing sick whales back into the water and seeing what happens.

Spoiler alert: people are already doing that! They just restrand! And they may restrand somewhere even more secluded and hard to get to.

We had a beaked whale strand at Bondi recently and a bunch of surfers very roughly threw it back into the ocean. This is a deep diving rare pelagic species. ORRCA lost the chance to assess health, get samples ect. It restranded on a secluded beach and died shortly after.

We know what happens! It’s why euthanasia as a protocol was developed. Because every refloat attempt is extremely stressful for the animal and it’s not fair to them to keep putting them through so much stress just to appease our saviour complexes.

Anyway Stranded No More has no idea what they’re talking about and uses obvious confirmation bias to justify any point they make, pointing to a small handful of cases where healthy whales were successfully refloated (which is ALWAYS the goal, regardless of what they keep saying) - and ignoring the cases of the sick whales or the constant restrandings cases.

[local-hellhound-steals-spaghetti]

Here is the video of the interview with Dr. Karen Stockton from Massey University: https://video.snapstream.net/Play/6y8oR10lWZ1hkq1gqUEXMG?accessToken=d5b50dhv8z53f&fbclid=IwdGRjcAR42YpleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBzcnRjBmFwcF9pZAo2NjI4NTY4Mzc5AAEewGmz9ovC8WoMfXZbQ-TXKi5HsZvCVm0RCE7YCs9c457qOiS_S6oyPIpWO9g_aem_rT2cLkVoslDwnlJ144U0EA

CNN Newsroom - Timmy the whale

Updates of news from around the world. - Powered by SnapStream Cloud Sharing

[inatungulates]

Common bottlenose dolphin Tursiops truncatus

Observed by cetaceannerd, CC BY-NC

[namu-the-orca]

Patches! He's such a cool guy. There is still quite strong debate regarding the underlying cause of his white patches. Many say they are purely genetic markings (ie unchanging markings he has always had), however I personally have always believed it is more like a genetic mutation that prevents recolouration of scar tissue. Normally Bottlenose dolphins' skin has very good recolouration properties. Even with more serious scratches or deeper wounds, the damaged tissue regains colour so when healed, the original wound is hardly visible. It can only be felt, and a scar line seen in close up. However there are cetacean species, like the Risso's dolphin and many beaked whales, where scratches quite explicitly do not recolour. On the contrary, the smallest blemish remains a stark, pure white. In these species the tally of scratches seems to serve a social function. I wonder if Patches carries a mutation that causes something similar to happen with him. Most of his white patches seem to have the shape of rake marks, and the others (like on his dorsal fin, around his mouth and on his melon) are places where dolphins often sustain damage either from feeding or raking/social interaction.

At the same time, I have compared photos of Patches between 2008 and 2020, and he does not seem to gain many new white patches. The only ones I could quickly find when reviewing them just now are a scratch on the right side of his dorsal fin and a white spot beneath it. It seems unlikely a bottlenose dolphin would go for years without being raked more. And indeed, on some recent photos you can see rakes on him that have clearly not turned white. A very, very interesting individual!

[namu-the-orca]

91° South

A painting based on a dream I had, from no less than 7 years ago. Honestly I don't really remember the dream itself anymore, but in the morning I'd immediately scribbled down these weird white killer whale-esque creatures and that's all I had left of that original vision. All I remember well is that they were completely off-white with big square foreheads and little nubbins, and lived in the Antarctic. But the scribble sat unfinished for years because I just couldn't paint what I saw in my head. Now I finally could! It's been really fun tinkering away at this and I'm very happy to have finished a "real" painting again. I hope you'll enjoy these blorbos from my head.

Original scribbles from 2017 under the cut!

There were two versions, one with just the trio and one with a whole pod surfacing in the ice hole too. In hindsight that might have been the more visually interesting option. But it's also more cluttered and more work so...

[namu-the-orca]

Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you... the Sydney Opera House.

[paper-wounds]

“If I Am Killed For Simply Living” — Althea Davis

[acti-veg]

‘While bats can only sense the outer shapes and textures of their targets, dolphins can peer inside theirs. If a dolphin echolocates on you, it will perceive your lungs and your skeleton. It can likely sense shrapnel in war veterans and fetuses in pregnant women. It can pick out the air-filled swim bladders that allow fish, their main prey, to control their buoyancy.

It can almost certainly tell different species apart based on the shape of those air bladders. And it can tell if a fish has something weird inside it, like a metal hook. In Hawaii, false killer whales often pluck tuna off fishing lines, and “they’ll know where the hook is inside that fish,” Aude Pacini, who studies these animals, tells me. “They can ‘see’ things that you and I would never consider unless we had an X-ray machine or an MRI scanner.”

This penetrating perception is so unusual that scientists have barely begun to consider its implications. The beaked whales, for example, are odontocetes that look dolphin-esque on the outside—but on the inside, their skulls bear a strange assortment of crests, ridges, and bumps, many of which are only found in males.

Pavel Gol’din has suggested that these structures might be the equivalent of deer antlers—showy ornaments that are used to attract mates. Such ornaments would normally protrude from the body in a visible and conspicuous way, but that’s unnecessary for animals that are living medical scanners.’

-Ed Yong, An Immense World

[namu-the-orca]

Cetacean echolocation is one of those things that boggles your mind once you really start to think about the implications. They can see each others' hearts beating fast with fear or excitement. They can see if another dolphin is healthy, or pregnant; how the fetus is doing; if they have ingested debris. Their echolocation is also incredibly precise: a bottlenose dolphin could discriminate between cilinders differing in wall thickness by just 0.23 mm (0.009 inch) from 8 meters away!! And they certainly notice when something is off.

I'm not sure if I ever shared this story before here, but in Curacao, when I was allowed to assist in a guest interaction programme, there was suddenly consternation in the pool behind us. A guest had entered the water and the dolphins were going crazy, paying no heed to the trainers anymore. The lead trainer that was with me gave the dolphins to me to watch over while she went to help. When she came back she told me what had happened. The guest that had caused so much uproar had left the water again and was asked if he had done anything to upset the dolphins. He hadn't, and he couldn't imagine what was wrong... until he mentioned he had a pacemaker. The younger dolphins in the pool had never seen someone with a pacemaker before and apparently it rocked their world.

It was such a wild experience, and offered such a cool insight into how dolphins experience their world. I'll never forget it.

[namu-the-orca]

False killer whale - 2026 - Sealife

The third and last friend of the Sealife commission, the fantastical False killer whale. Another favourite of mine. And another species painted previously, and though this latest version still looks a lot like her predecessors, I luckily still managed to find some new details to include. I've always loved these noodles (seriously, there are some photos that will boggle your mind - black spaghettis flying in the air) and it's always a fun day to draw one. I hope you like her too!

[local-hellhound-steals-spaghetti]

I was very lucky to be involved in Open Ocean training with Dolphin Quest during my internship there and I’m so happy to see it evolve into what it is today.

Cirrus is a former navy dolphin, so she took to the open ocean very easily and is the one who does the open ocean walks.

When I was there, there was still the netted ocean habitats. The net was there to provide the dolphins with extra security when going out there. But damn that thing was a pain to maintain. That thing needed to be inspected manually on any day ocean habitat training was happening - ensuring there was no damage to it.

Then it had to be cleaned every 6 months and it took a team of interns and trainers two whole days to remove it, clean it and put it back in. That was a loooong two days.

For Ocean Habitat training we were still working on encouraging some of the younger dolphins like Cooper, Marley and Cavello to go out to a netted habitat.

The dolphins were very hesitant and sometimes would bolt back through the tunnel if they felt it was too much. Other dolphins just flat out refused to enter the tunnel entrance lagoon because even that was too much for them.

A lot of people have this idea that dolphins in human care are desperate for more space and would swim off without a second thought. The reality is that the dolphins don’t understand why they should leave the comfort and safety of what they know to be their home and venture into unknown environments. How are they supposed to know that’s actually ~natural~ and ~better~ for them? They don’t care about that, they care about what is reinforcing, what feels safe and where their social groups are.

We literally have to convince them and reinforce them and show them it’s okay and trainers really need to have a good relationship with their animals for this to happen.

Honestly I was so surprised in seeing these reactions and seeing how the dolphins responded to being offered larger habitats. They really just. Didn’t care.

We created a reinforcement history around the open ocean and the ocean habitat. It didn’t offer any intrinsic value and the dolphins only showed interest and motivation in going out there when they were reinforced for it.

Simply being given a bigger area to swim in doesn’t necessarily mean they’re going to be happier.

[namu-the-orca]

THISSSS. Open water training is definitely one of those things that surprises people a lot to hear about. As mentioned above, many just assume the dolphins would be delighted to be out in the ocean and make a run for it. In Curacao I also had the chance to see quite the opposite was true. One of the young females was just starting her open ocean training, which started with swimming through a gate to an intermediate pen. And it was difficult to convince her that was an okay thing to do. Didn't help that her mother was quite adamant about keeping her daughter inside too, even though the young female got curious after a while.

It was noted by trainers that the males were usually braver and easier to train for open ocean work than the females, and some speculated this was due to the males only having themselves to worry about, while the females also kept their calves and pod in mind.

I had the wonderful chance to accompany the dolphins outside a few times, once with a mum and son, the other times with a male duo. More than anything they seemed to enjoy the chance to spend time playing together in the waves and with their trainers. More than they ever paid attention to being "home" in the wide open ocean.