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KIROKAZE
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@wrasse72
i’m so glad i’m alive in this era because we’re starting to actually linguistically study sperm whale language and may soon be able to translate it
The mammals' mysterious clicks contain a stunning level of complexity, a new study shows.
i saw this headline and wanted to take my shirt off and dance on a table
Wait… it’s possible that I could one day learn to speak whale?
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Nautilus expedition live streams (+ their commentary) | 2025
🦈 Dive into the Museum’s collections with Ryan Thoni, curatorial associate of Ichthyology, and meet the shark that inspired the Jaws movie poster!
That is so awesome, I knew they were fast but this was not how I expected to find out Mako sharks can swim up to 96km p/hr???
‘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
The water coolers of the deep sea. 💧
The fingered goblet sponge (Heterochone calyx) is one of the largest sponges on the Pacific coast. Their funnel-shaped bodies can grow up to two meters (nearly seven feet) tall and fan out two meters (nearly seven feet) across. Remarkably, the skeleton of this massive animal is made of microscopic slivers of silica glass called spicules. As the sponge grows, the glass spicules fuse together, creating rigid joints in between. This intricate three-dimensional structure remains intact long after the tissues die.
Fingered goblet sponges support bustling communities of life. Much like coral reefs in tropical waters or the old-growth forests on land, countless critters make their home in sponge gardens.
Small snailfishes and shrimp seek refuge from predators inside a cavernous sponge, hiding from predators patrolling nearby sand channels. Crabs and feather stars climb up the sponge towers to feed in the current or release their eggs for maximum dispersal. Thousands more unseen animals thrive inside the nooks and crannies of the sponge.
Increased demand for metallic minerals could lead to mining in pristine areas of the deep sea, harming animals like Heterochone. Mining equipment plowing across the seafloor could damage sponges, and the plume of sediment from mining waste could clog their filtering mechanism. Life moves at a slower pace in the ocean’s frigid depths. It can take years for Heterochone and other deep-sea sponges to recover from disturbance, in turn threatening all the animals that depend on sponges. Decisions we make in our everyday lives can affect all animals, even in out-of-sight places like the deep sea.
Share what you have learned about Heterochone and sponge gardens to help protect these unique habitats. Help us spread the word about safeguarding the ocean’s pristine wilderness. The future of our big blue backyard depends on us.
𓇼 ⋆.˚ 𓆉 𓆝 𓆡⋆.˚ 𓇼
what are you about
Spiral salp colonies
aka me and the mutuals
Ocean Floor Painted in Pastel ♡
Because sometimes you just need to watch a nudibranch floof around the seafloor for an entire minute 🥰🤗
This relatively large sea slug (Tritonia tetraquetra) can grow to 22 centimeters (about eight inches) in length. The two horn-like structures on Tritonia's head are rhinophores that allow the sea slug to "smell" chemical signals dissolved in seawater and help find its prey—deep-sea corals. It crawls onto corals and eats the soft polyps using its rasp-like tongue, called a radula. Two rows of white fluffy gills line the back of this precious poof, and that pretty pink color comes from its rosy-hued prey. Also known as nudibranchs (pronounced “nood-i-branks”), this group of sea slugs lives in virtually all the world’s oceans, from the tide pools down into the deep sea. Unlike the dark, slimy relatives of the slugs we see in our gardens, they come in a wide array of bright colors and psychedelic patterns. Like many other deep-sea animals, the nudibranchs of the deep are poorly studied. Though scientists have named about 3,000 shallow-water nudibranchs, we have identified far fewer species that thrive in the deep ocean.
Shark Fact
Epaulette sharks, a small type of reef shark, can "walk" on land during low tides. They do this by their pectoral and pelvic fins evolving to be more like feet so that they can crawl outside of the water from pool to pool during low tide.
They are able to lower their hearts and the rate at which they need to breath to be able to go outside of the water.
Walking on land allows for better hunting as well as to move to more oxygenated pools of water.
Caribbean reef squid are very enigmatic creatures and can be difficult to find during the day, thanks to their camouflage, but are much more easily spotted at night due to their reflective eyes and more bold attitude in the dark!
Most who are interested in cephalopods have heard of chromatophores (the cells responsible for their color-changing prowess) but lesser known are the iridophores that lay beneath that lend their skin unique reflective properties; their eyes are tightly packed with these cells, and give them their flashing-coin quality!
What can baleen whales even DO about orca whales. Like can they even fight back. Imagine being a huge fat floating mass of delicious meat living in an open void with no shelter to retreat to and there are these mouth torpedos that might just decide to show up and rip you open just whenever.
Whales would have gone extinct rather quickly if so. But despite the modern tendency to hold killer whales up as some kind of unstoppable super-predator, other whales have evolved several defensive measures, which work to different extents, but the fact that whales do have scars from killer whale attacks is proof enough that they can and do escape. As a general rule, size does matter, and young and weak whales are far more likely to be killed than adult, healthy whales.
There are two main options: flight or fight, which represent different tradeoffs. For speedy prey, it may be energetically wasteful to chase after it. For aggressive prey, the risk of injury may not be worth it.
Rorquals like the fin whale (below) represent flight. They evolved for speed. They may not be able to outrun killer whales, who are fast enough to outpace Dall's porpoises, but they can present the killer with an undesirable amount of effort to expend. However, those whales then have little ability to defend themselves if caught.
If escape is out of the question, then the whale can and does fight back. Sometimes whales turn belly up to protect their vulnerable flippers and undersides. The tail itself is a powerful weapon (more on that below). There's at least one account from 1866 where a bowhead whale was seen smashing its flukes on a killer whale's head, apparently killing it.
Whales that fight back tend to be more robust, more maneuverable, and often have encrustations of barnacles on their bodies, like on this grey whale below. The barnacles on them act both as armor and as sharp edges that can cause injury.
I know that the original post said baleen whales, but sperm whales have to be mentioned as they're big bags o' blubber too. They're big, they have teeth and strong tails, and live in pods of their own. Males alone are probably too dangerous for even a pod of killer whales.
Remember when I mentioned the tails? A pod of sperm whales will adopt the "marguerite formation" when under attack. This puts the vulnerable member in the center, surrounded by a wall of tails.
Finally, special mention has to go to the humpback whale. A rorqual (normally a flight species), it has evolved to fight instead. They use their tails and long, barnacle-encrusted flippers to defend themselves, and group together when under attack. The combination of tail and sharp-edged flippers provides the humpback with protection front and back.
And it gets better. Humpbacks will go out of their way to mob killer whales, even interfering in killer whale attacks on other marine mammals and driving them off. Adult humpbacks, with their natural weaponry and great size, are probably the only animals that deliberately engage with and drive off killer whales with impunity, with sightings of even single humpbacks approaching 10+ killers fearlessly.
What I'm trying to say is that Cassie totally would have kicked David's ass in humpback whale morph.
All images from Wikipedia.
References
Ford, J. K., & Reeves, R. R. (2008). Fight or flight: antipredator strategies of baleen whales. Mammal Review, 38(1), 50-86.
Jefferson, T. A., Stacey, P. J., & Baird, R. W. (1991). A review of killer whale interactions with other marine mammals: predation to co‐existence. Mammal Review, 21(4), 151-180.
Pitman, R. L., Deecke, V. B., Gabriele, C. M., Srinivasan, M., Black, N., Denkinger, J., ... & Ternullo, R. (2017). Humpback whales interfering when mammal‐eating killer whales attack other species: Mobbing behavior and interspecific altruism?. Marine Mammal Science, 33(1), 7-58.
Quick add on bc fun :
Flight species might also have evolved tactics to avoid being detected!
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/mms.13228
Trevor A. Branch. (2025) Most “flight” baleen whale species are acoustically cryptic to killer whales, unlike “fight” species
coral of the Great Barrier Reef by William Saville-Kent (1893)
When things get tough in adulthood, it might seem appealing to return to simpler times.
When things get tough in adulthood, it might seem appealing to return to simpler times. One bizarre marine creature has taken this approach to dire situations quite literally, regressing its physical adult body to a juvenile stage once the stress of starvation or injury has subsided. Until now, the immortal jellyfish (Turritopsis dohrnii) was the only species thought to be able to wind back the clock on jelly-puberty like this, but now it's joined by Mnemiopsis leidyi, better known as the sea walnut or the warty comb jelly.
Contiue Reading.
A small Japanese puffer fish is the creator of one of the most spectacular animal-made structures. To impress the female puffer fish, the male labors 24 hours a day for a week to create a pattern in the sand. If the female finds his work satisfactory, she allows him to fertilize her eggs. She then lays them in the middle of the circle, leaving the male to guard the eggs alone.
Life Story (2014)
