https://www.noemamag.com/a-parliament-of-earthlings/
"On a chilly morning in January 1952, Alan Baldridge witnessed a murder.
Sailing off the coast of California in pursuit of a pod of migrating whales, he
heard screams in the distance. The pod abruptly vanished. Scanning the horizon,
he spotted a large gray whale “spy-hopping,” swimming vertically and raising
its head above the surface. Baldridge, a marine biologist at Stanford, decided
to investigate; drawing closer, he saw seven orcas singing hunting cries,
circling a small gray whale calf. As its mother watched nearby, the orcas began
devouring the lips, tongue and throat of the dead baby.
Baldridge’s story inspired a controversial research agenda. Soon after his
encounter, the Navy began using orca sounds in an attempt to control cetaceans.
Their hypothesis: Whales could decode information from sound, a contrarian
claim in an era when most researchers believed that animal noise was devoid of
meaning. One of the Navy’s first experiments involved sailing a catamaran off
the coast of San Diego, playing recorded orca screams to gray whales swimming
south on their annual migration. The results were “spectacular”: The whales
whirled around and fled north or hid deep in nearby kelp beds, slowly popping
their heads above the surface to search for predators. When they finally
resumed swimming south, the whales were in stealth mode: sneaking past, with
little of their bodies showing above the surface, their breathing scarcely
audible."
Via
Future Crunch, who wrote “One of the best talks at this year’s TED was
Karen Bakker’s mindblowing account of how humanity is gaining the ability to
eavesdrop on animal communication. She wrote this article about her research in
Neoma about two months ago, and it’s really worth checking out. Also, keep an
eye out for her talk.”
<
https://futurecrunch.com/good-news-poverty-indonesia-press-freedom-fiji-shade-america/>
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
