1 New and Upcoming
We at Interspecies have begun the slow process of completely overhauling our website. This significant investment in time and expense, reflects our committment to the web as our main outreach. The completed upgrade will include one or two surprises that will provide dynamic visuals. More importantly, the overhaul will provide both better navigation and better internal consistency to our very large website. Look for the transformation in May.
We are especially excited to add a multimedia site feature. This will include:
- Documentary film excerpts. Our communication work with cetaceans and other species has been filmed for 30 years by the likes of National Geographic, ABC news, Smithsonian World, 60 Minutes, as well as dozens of production and news companies from around the world. We have access to some of this film, and we have acquired the digital expertise to whittle down a one hour film to a five minute excerpt.
- Slide shows. Interspecies director, Jim Nollman is continually developing powerpoint presentations for conferences. Later this month, for example, he will present at several venues in Europe, including the International Animal Welfare Conference in Barcelona. These presentations often focus on whale language and interspecies communication. A hybrid presentation/performance is cast in a lighter vein, to demonstrate the step-by-step process of creating ambient techno music from whale, dolphin, seal, fish, lobster, wind, and water sound samples. It's easy to convert powerpoint to self-timed web slide shows. What Interspecies.com has lacked until now, is the server space, and the web technology to make the viewing process quick and easy for visitors.
- In-house music videos. For just one example, Interspecies.com co-produced the much-praised Belly of the Whale music program. The main result was a commercial CD featuring compositions by digital composers from 10 countries. Six of our composers also collaborated with film makers to produce music videos of their compositions. These short films have never been shown in one place, and we plan to change that over the next few months.
The streaming video that opens this newsletter, incorporates all three of these multimedia elements. It is basically a music video, showcasing the realtime audio of one of our best all-time human/orca musical interactions, that occurred in 1989 off the northeast coast of Vancouver Island, and recorded with hydrophones, underwater. The visual footage includes out-takes from an orca film about our work produced by a French production company, Saint Thomas Productions, and subseuqently broadcast all over the world. Added in are parts of an Interspecies slide show. As this humble video collage makes amply clear, we do audio very well, but we're still learning how best to balance visual quality against size. It will get better very quickly.
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| Nothing is new. Everything has been done before. The frog species, Ranitas Coro, painted by an unknown Balinese artist. Listen to Ranitas, and several 100 other frog, bird, and whales at the internet's best nature audio library: the Fonozoo. |
Everything is new. Nothing has been done before. This circular wavelet by artist Mark Fischer, is of a humpback whale call. |
2 Interspecies Lifesaving
Dolphin guides stranded whales
Sydney (Australia) Morning Herald, March 12, 2008 - 5:39PM (sent in by Donna Kassewitz)
A playful dolphin used to swimming round humans has amazed conservation workers by guiding two distressed whales back to sea away from likely death on a beach."The dolphin led the two pygmy sperm whales along the beach and through a channel to the open sea", New Zealand Department of Conservation worker Malcolm Smith said today.The two whales, a mother and her young calf, were found stranded on Mahia Beach, on North Island's east coast on Monday morning, Smith said. "We worked for over an hour to try to get them back out to sea ... but they kept getting disorientated and stranding again after swimming into a large sandbar just off the shore. They obviously couldn't find their way back past it to the sea."
Four attempts by volunteers to refloat the pair failed and it was becoming highly likely they would have to be euthanised, he said. Then the dolphin, named Moko by residents, swam up. "It was looking like it was going to be a bad outcome for the whales which was very disappointing and then Moko just came along and fixed it." Smith said it was quite possible Moko had heard the whales calling. "The whales were ... quite distressed. They had arched their backs and were calling to one another, but as soon as the dolphin turned up they submerged into the water and followed her," he said.
"She obviously gave them guidance to leave the area because we haven't seen them since," Smith said. "The things that happen in nature never cease to amaze me." Moko returned to the beach shortly afterward.The playful dolphin swam straight back close to shore and joined in water games with residents, he added.
3 The Sonar Chase
Even as the Navy funds hopeful new technology to protect whales during sonar exercises, Navy lawyers and PR officers sound increasingly political in their shrill denials of responsibility to alter the deadly equation of cetaceans and sonar testing. At a recent hearing, Dr. Hal Whitehead, Professor of Cetacean Research at Dalhousie University offered a striking metaphor about whale deaths, and why proponents are always going to see just what they need to see. Speaking to the U.S. Commission on Ocean Policy, Whitehead compared whales stranding after sonar exposure to tribal people chasing a herd of buffalo to the edge of a cliff. He asked the commission to consider what might be the cause of death for the stampeding buffalo. Necropsy results would show that these buffalo had died of crushed skulls and collapsed lungs due to a sudden impact. Necropsy results, he contended, would not show what caused the buffalo to run off the edge of a cliff in the first place. Dr. Whitehead compared this example of the buffalo to the cetacean population — suggesting that strandings were best understood in context with the human influence which drives the animal towards that final outcome. Did sonar kill the whales? Or did the whales die due to a sudden collision with a rocky shore resulting in bleeding eyes and collapsed lungs? In other words, what a necropsy reveals is limited and not altogether conclusive. (sent in by Bill Rossiter)
4 Luna the Orca
Recently, a young man burned himself horribly while attempting to sabotage the high voltage line that provides power to my small island county in Puget Sound. When he was found at the site, a local deputy asked him what in the world he was protesting. He answered, "the death of Luna". Its difficult to comprehend the thought processes that could prompt somebody to cut off local electricity as the most appropriate response to the death of an orca that once swam among these islands. Perhaps the best understanding will be found by viewing the new, multiple-award-winning film entitled: Saving Luna.
Nearly two years after the death of this wayward orca known as Luna, documentary filmmakers Suzanne Chisholm and Michael Parfit bring the gregarious whale to the big screen in a thought-provoking, first-person account likely to stir debate. From the opening montage of watery coves and misty hillsides that establishes the remote setting of Nootka Sound on the west coast of Vancouver Island, "Saving Luna" sets out to transport audiences beneath the surface of this compelling story.
Widely reported at the time, the 2-year-old orca had mysteriously appeared, alone, in the waters of Nootka Sound in July 2001. One of the endangered southern resident orcas of Puget Sound, Luna was 200 miles from his pod's primary territory. Killer whales are among the most social of mammals and, having no other orcas with which to socialize, the young Luna sought to make a kind of surrogate pod with people and boats. This put the orca at risk and created a heart-wrenching battle over his fate.
On assignment from Smithsonian Magazine, Chisholm and Parfit, who are married, initially arrived in Gold River, British Columbia, in the spring of 2004 to cover Luna's attempted capture by Canada's Department of Fisheries and Oceans. They wound up living in that inlet town for almost three years, documenting an iconic relationship between people and nature that broke all rules.
In a story rife with human conflict, politics and finger pointing, "Saving Luna" treads lightly on that contentious ground. Nor does it dwell on the tale's heartbreaking conclusion, when we learn of the whale's death in a freak accident with a tugboat. Instead, the film succeeds by focusing on the life of Luna. "Those of us on Nootka Sound who looked into Luna's eye," the naration goes, "went far out into the unknown when we tried to be friends to a whale." (review excerpted from SFGate)
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Pink bottlenose dolphin photographed by Capt. Erik Rue of Calcasieu Charter Service on June 24th, 2007, during a charter fishing trip on Calcasieu Lake south of Lake Charles, LA. (used with permission, sent in by Pearl Schurman)
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5 Moose Antennae
At five years of age, I believed deer watched TV. The proof was in the antlers which I assumed, at the time, served them as built-in TV antennas. Just as my Dad rotated our aerial to focus reception, so every deer focused their own programs by simply turning around. The programs would then clarify directly onto the mind's eye of the animal. I also suspected that deer did not watch the same shows I did. Just as humans possessed human channels, so every horned, tusked, and antlered creature had its own channels: moose shows customized for reception by moose antlers. Narwhal shows for narwhals. Cow and goat shows. You get the idea.
At age 5, cartoons were my own favorite TV shows. Every Saturday morning I received new proof that the animals were not just of a particular species, but were individuals, each with a distinct name and personality. They conversed articulately in English. The pigs, the frogs, the whales, hippos, the big bad wolves all comprehended my vocabulary, my grammar. These animals had their leaders as well as their kings, plumbers, villains, legendary beauties, bumbling sidekicks. They could be scrupulous or corruptible, compassionate, cloying, priggish, Christ-like, Machiavellian. They were just like us, the best and worst.
I easily invented a logical reason to explain the otherwise tricky matter of why I couldn't for the life of me, understand the songs of flesh and blood birds which were, of course, the only animal utterances I ever heard with any regularity. I concluded that it was a secret code, like the "pig Latin" we kids spoke to one another. And what did the birds converse about in their bird Latin? I guessed they talked about the same things we all talk about.
I was rfeminded of these childlike ruminations last week, when I read a remarkable explanation of why moose have evolved some of the most extravagant headgear in the animal kingdom. As I once knew, but then, over time, somehow, forgot, moose's antlers are not just for show. Scientists now believe they act as elaborate hearing aids that help males locate calling females.
A new study has found that the antlers' sound-gathering qualities boost the hearing of the animals by 19%. Moose are well-known for their impressive hearing. Their ears are more than 60 times larger than those of a human, and their calls can travel nearly two miles. Scientists had previously suspected the antlers helped with locating mates because males with them were found to be better able to locate females than those without. George Bubenik, of the University of Guelph, Ontario, and his son Peter, of Cleveland State University in Ohio, decided to test the antler amplifier hypothesis by using a moose skull and a fake ear made by a TV special effects team. If I have your interest, you will want to read the entire article.
- In her inimitable fashion, New York Times environment columnist, Natalie Angier, depicts the widest possible context to be drawn from the pathetic Eliot Spitzer scandal. Space permits but one quote from her essay "In Most Species, Faithfulness is a Fantasy". Her writing alone makes it worth your time to sign up for a free online NYT subscription.
"It’s all been done before, every snickering bit of it, and not just by powerful “risk-taking” alpha men who may or may not be enriched for the hormone testosterone. It’s been done by many other creatures, tens of thousands of other species, by male and female representatives of every taxonomic twig on the great tree of life. Sexual promiscuity is rampant throughout nature, and true faithfulness a fond fantasy. Oh, there are plenty of animals in which males and females team up to raise young, as we do, that form “pair bonds” of impressive endurance and apparent mutual affection, spending hours reaffirming their partnership by snuggling together like prairie voles or singing hooty, doo-wop love songs like gibbons, or dancing goofily like blue-footed boobies."
- Alaska is the only state in the nation where trophy hunters can legally shoot wolves from airplanes or chase wolves to exhaustion and then shoot them from the ground. Alaskans have voted twice to end the state's brutal program, but state officials continue to let it happen through a loophole in federal law. This year's hunting season has already begun, and hundreds of wolves could be killed yet again.
Please sign this petition to urge Congress to close the loopholes and end aerial hunting of wolves: http://go.care2.com/PAW_Act. (sent in by Jane Bedrick)
- The Ojai Valley Whale Society was founded soon after Aaron Plunkett discovered the 25 million year old fossil remains of an ancient whale species at nearby Lake Casitas. Today, the Society publishes a newsletter, which offers much whale info, and reports news about whale culture, science, and preservation around the world.
- David Rothenberg is the author/producer of several well-received book/CDs that explore the human aesthetic interface with nature. His latest is a book entitled Thousand Mile Song: Whale Music in a Sea of Sound, plus a CD called Whale Music, which is now available at CDBaby and iTunes store. The book includes a chapter about the ongoing orca research of interspecies.com. This note, from the promo:
David Rothenberg traveled from Hawaii to Russia to Canada to make music together with belugas, orcas, and the greatest of all animal musicians, the humpbacks. Here are live interspecies jams unlike anything you’ve ever heard. Studio pieces complement these with orcfa and beluga beats, thrumming sperm whale clicks, subsonic fin whale beats and Rothenberg’s own rich bass clarinet tones, plus the contributions of violinists Nils Økland and Michelle Makarski. There’s even a never-before recorded legendary Pete Seeger song, “The World’s Last Whale.” This is a record that will change the way you listen to the sea, and lead you to appreciate beautiful and little-known sounds that come from the world’s watery depths.
- Last month's New Scientist devotes most of its entire issue to answering the musical question, Are Animals Naturally Musical?. The quick answer is...well...sometimes yes!!!! and sometimes no!!!!. Individual essays include "Music Can Change the Way You Think" and our own favorite "Don't believe Everything You Hear". Unfortunately, you need to spend $5 to subscribe. Which begs another question. Do these people really need to charge us 5 bucks for such stuff? (sent in by Mickey Remann)
- The Oceania Project has recently photo ID'd its 3000th individual humpback whale in and around Hervey Bay, Australia. Read more about this IFAW sponsoround through mechanisms inside their throat. ed project, and its devoted founders Trish and Wally Franklin. (sent in by Wally Franklin).
- You may have heard Tuvan singers, who produce 2 simultaneous notes inside their throats. Now meet the Cuvier's beaked whales who actually hear sound through a mechanism inside their throat. It has long been believed that noise vibrations travel through the thin bony walls of a whales' lower jaw and then into the fat body attached to the ear complex. New research at San Diego State, shows however that the thin bony walls do not transmit the vibrations. In fact they enter through the throat and then pass to the bony ear complex via a unique fatty channel. Despite the Cuvier's beaked whale being a rare and little-known species, Dr Cranford and his team started this study because over recent years there have been instances when this type of whale has stranded after exposure to intense sound, making them an ideal starting point for research into underwater communication. The paper "Acoustic pathways revealed: Simulated sound transmission and reception in Cuvier's beaked whale" was published in Bioinspiration and Biomimetics 3, 1 (March 2008) 016001). (sent in by Mark Fischer)
The Interspecies newsletter is edited monthly by Jim Nollman and published by Interspecies.com. Almost all links are sent to us by subscribers. Please keep them coming. if you'd like to contribute with writing or images, email: Interspecies@rockisland.com.
Check out past issues in the Interspecies newsletter archive
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