Jun 3
The marine mammals act like midwives, supporting mothers and their calves through delivery.
seen from Australia
seen from New Zealand
seen from United States
seen from New Zealand
seen from Malaysia
seen from Russia
seen from New Zealand
seen from New Zealand
seen from Netherlands
seen from Netherlands
seen from Malaysia
seen from China
seen from Belarus
seen from New Zealand
seen from Netherlands
seen from New Zealand
seen from New Zealand
seen from New Zealand
seen from New Zealand
seen from Spain
The marine mammals act like midwives, supporting mothers and their calves through delivery.
stamps on whales. guinea-bissau, issued 1984.
Female named Rounder surrounded by family members when about to give birth to her second calf
Excerpt from this story from The Guardian:
Scientists have managed to film a sperm whale giving birth while other female whales worked together to support the mother and her newborn.
A team from Project Ceti, an international effort seeking to understand how whales communicate, was in a boat near a pod of 11 whales off the coast of the Caribbean island of Dominica on 8 July 2023.
A 19-year-old female named Rounder was surrounded by family members and others as she was about to give birth to her second calf.
Over nearly five and a half hours, the scientists documented the group’s behaviour, watching them from the boat, filming them with drones and recording the sounds underneath the waves. The data they collected, which was published on Thursday in the journals Scientific Reports and Science, represents an exceptional rarity in the history of science.
Out of 93 species of cetaceans – a group that includes whales, dolphins and porpoises – only nine have ever been observed giving birth in the wild. Rarer still was that whales not related to the mother were helping out.
The Project Ceti team member Shane Gero told the New Scientist: “This is the first evidence of birth assistance in non-primates. It is fascinating to see the intergenerational support from the grandmother to her labouring daughter, and the support from the other, unrelated females.”
The birth lasted 34 minutes, from their tails emerging from the water to the calf being born. During labour, other adult females dived under Rounder’s dorsal fin, often on their backs with the heads facing her genital slit.
Immediately after the birth, the pod’s behaviour “rapidly changed” as every member became active, according to the study in Scientific Reports. All the adults were “squeezing the newborn’s body between theirs, touching it with their heads”, the researchers wrote. The whales pointed their noses towards the newborn, “pushing it around, under the water, and on to and across their bodies above the surface”.
Fun Facts. 100% verified.
In the late 1970s, Pillsbury conducted a small market roll-out of a hot beverage based on the Toaster Strudel.
James Joyce wrote a one act play about a cow he called Mucky.
On an official visit to Washington, French President Emmanuel Macron told the American Press he believed “Ariana Grande owed it to the world to stick with the high ponytail”.
Tie-breaking votes in the Massachusetts State Senate can be cast by any Hall of Fame member of the Boston Bruins.
One of the hidden “bonus tracks” on the extended edition of Olivia Rodrigo’s Sour is just a recording of the singer ordering a pizza from Papa John’s.
Giving Grace and Rocky two of my favourite animals
Grace is a really big fan of sperm whales because he has POTS (which only got worse when they got to Erid because the gravity is twice as strong and the multiple excessive centrifugal forces did not help) and he's always really admired them for their ability to deal with such strong pressure when they dive
He tells Rocky about them along with giant+colossal squid and is all like "they're like you! they have a lot of limbs" and Rocky kinda rolls his metaphorical eyes about it because Grace is always drawing weird connections with his pattern recognition and squid are even more squishy and blobby but! they are also scary with the serrated suction cups and spinning hooks and he is a scary space monster
Was watching Avatar and thinking about how the attempted mass genocide of the Tulkun for the oil in their heads is EXACTLY like what the world did to Sperm Whales during and throughout the Industrial Revolution… also for the oil in their heads.
The RDA is really trying to factory reset history and start over the same planet killing BS on Pandora and I hate it 😭
stamp of whaling in the foveaux strait. new zealand, issued 1956.