Janie Hermann, a member of the environmental research group Whale Point, was one of team of residents and environmental workers, who worked desperately for almost nine hours Wednesday to keep the female calf cool and wet before the tide was high enough for the mammal to escape.
“It was so heartbreaking,” she said. “She was calling out from land. A transient call is quite mellow and has a sad tone to it, so listening to her — oh my gosh — that just goes right through your body and your heart.”
At first, the cloudy and windy weather worked in the orca’s favour, but when the sun came out and beat down on the marine mammal, the rescuers knew they would have to work fast to keep her wet. A group of about five people approached the whale carefully so as not to startle her, and draped her in water-soaked sheets.
“She kept lifting her tail as though she was testing out the height of the water. It was very intelligent on her behalf. Her level of patience was shocking, because you know she just wanted to go. Then that moment came… She took off like a bullet. She was going so fast and vocalizing, vocalizing toward her family,” she said.
There’s a theory that early Europeans started saying “brown one” or “honey-eater” instead of “bear” to avoid summoning them, and similarly my friend has started calling Alexa “the faceless woman” because saying her true name awakens her from her slumber
English has an avoidance register used in the presence of certain respected animals, which sounds fancy until you realize it’s spelling out w-a-l-k and t-r-e-a-t in front of the dog.
Icelandic folklore requires you avoid saying the names of evil whales, otherwise you’ll draw their attention.
Yall have evil whales?
Iceland does! They are the illhveli, literally “evil whales”, and they live to kill you. They love nothing more than killing and eating humans and sinking their ships. Their greatest enemy is the steypireydur (that’s blue whale to you), which is the greatest of the good whales and the protector of sailors.
All evil whales are, well, evil. So evil that if you speak their name at sea, they will hear it and home in on you. So instead you use all sorts of euphemisms for their names. Also if you try to cook their meat it literally disappears from the pot. That’s right, they’re so evil, you can’t even eat them.
They include such types as the hrosshvalur (horsewhale), with big eyes and a red mane and tail. This is probably the best known and most feared of the lot.
The raudkembingur (redcomb) is especially cruel and bloodthirsty even by illhveli standards. If you manage to escape it, it will die of frustration.
Good luck escaping the mushveli (mousewhale) though, it has legs! And will clamber onto the beach in pursuit!
Or what about death from above? The stökkull (jumper) leaps high into the air and pile-drives boats to pieces.
Meanwhile the skeljungur (shellwhale) sits in the path of boats and lets them get wrecked on its shelly hide…
… while the sverdhvalur (swordwhale) slices through boats with its dorsal fin.
The katthveli (catwhale) is relatively harmless though. It meows.
The same can’t be said of the lyngbakur (heatherback), a classic island fish that lets sailors get on its back and then dives, taking them to a watery grave.
The nauthveli (oxwhale) on the other hand specially targets cattle, attracting them into the sea with its bellow before tearing them apart.
How can you avoid all these murderous whales, like the taumafiskur (bridlefish) here? Any of a number of ways, including getting a steypireydur to help. There are substances, ranging from angelica to sheep dung and chopped fox testicles, that they find abhorrent. And you can distract them with loud noises and barrels.
For more, I assure you this link will answer all your questions.
[Image description: a retweet of Quad Finn’s tweet by misha fletcher. The original tweet says “Alder (A99) swims with a dead fish balanced on his head. Back in 1987, a K Pod orca started swimming everywhere with a dead salmon carefully balanced on the top of her head, and it soon became a popular Southern Resident fad as other orcas quickly started mimicking her behaviour.” The retweet says “WHALES HAVE MEMES?” Underneath the tweets is a picture of an orca with its head poking out of the water. A dead fish is balanced on his head.
The second image is the same picture of an orca as before, but it is captioned as “Greetings and salmonations”. End ID.]
Thank you, I always enjoy this post. My favorite thing about it is that this whale, A99 Alder, isn’t a Southern Resident, like the whales who originally started this fishy trend. Maybe it’s developing again? The joke is too good to stay confined to a single group of whales?
The original group of whales who did this actually stopped after a few weeks, and were rarely seen doing it again. Like human memes, whale memes seem to have a brief lifespan.
The island is so popular that it closed itself to tourists, except those who are willing to help repair and maintain the island. However, there is a darker side.
Almost 1,500 cetaceans (dolphins and whales) were killed last Sunday (with also pregnant whales)
“This is, we believe, the largest ever single hunt of dolphins or pilot whales in Faroese history — the next largest being 1,200 pilot whales back in 1940 — and is possibly the largest single hunt of cetaceans ever recorded worldwide.
Sea Shepherd
The Faroe Islands are formally part of the Kingdom of Denmark, but have significant autonomy.
EU law bans “deliberate capture or killing” of any dolphins or whales, but since the Faroe Islands are not part of the union they do not have to abide by the rules.
The barbaric fishing process involves boats heading out to find pods of whales and dolphins, and rounding them up into shallow waters. They struggled for breath on the beach until they are killed.
The Faroese insist that this meat is not sold, but every part of the whale is used and is shared amongst their community as a valuable source of meat for a region that has very little in terms of natural resources. The whole of that statement is a lie for four reasons:
Whale meat from the grinds is sold in supermarkets and restaurants in the Faroe Islands, so it is bringing in money for some of the people involved which makes it a commercial enterprise.
Every part of the whale killed is not used, not even every whale killed is used. The hunters have been documented discarding whole whale carcasses into the sea that they did not have time to process before dusk.
It is not a valuable source of meat, it is very dangerous due to the amount of toxins (high levels of mercury and PCBs) even Faroese doctors confirm it contains. The poisonous levels would not be legal in any other food approved for human consumption and the fact that children are being given this meat to eat by parents who should know better means that they are being poisoned. There is a high incident of disease on the island related to these pollutants.
The Faroe Islands have a thriving fishing industry including farmed salmon. They also have a large amount of sheep. They trade these commodities for all the benefits of a materialisic society and with this and their subsidies they enjoy one of the highest standards of living in the world.
In the background you can see two skeletons of whale ancestors hanging from the ceiling. Whales evolved over some 50 million years from small four-limbed and hoofed land-dwelling mammals to fully-aquatic baleen and toothed whales.
On the right is Maiacetus, that lived some 47 million years ago. It still has four legs and was amphibious: so it could swim, but also walk on land. And to the left of it is Dorudon, which hind legs are already extremely reduced, so it was already fully aquatic some 40 million years ago. Whale evolution is just one stunning science story to tell!
Want to know more? Watch our YT video in which our fossil whale specialist Olivier Lambert explains an important find in Peru illuminating whale evolution and dispersal some 43 million years ago – so in between Maiacetus and Dorudon.
New miniatures are in town! Part 2.! Here’s the Humpback Unicorn #humpbacks #humpbackwhales #whales #unicorn #wave #drawing #illustration #print #tanjamirkovicillustrations
New miniatures are in town! Here’s the gentle purple Humpback Unicorn #humpbacks #humpbackwhales #whales #unicorn #wave #drawing #illustration #print #tanjamirkovicillustrations
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![soupsane:Xi Zhang [Artstation]](https://64.media.tumblr.com/0b4153bab4643b211f2d9175f0b544b7/tumblr_pn6fpwJ99I1sk26fao1_1280.jpg "soupsane:Xi Zhang [Artstation]")
