My Ongoing Obsession - Day 193 - Daily Haiku, touching on my deep and abiding love for whales and marine life

Mission Bay, San Diego, as seen from the tower at Sea World, summer 1975

Porpoises, dolphins
and whales were my obsession.
I miss them badly.

And a second, even more personal poem, recalling my childhood:

Visiting friends at the shore
sun sinking low in the west
I saw black shapes out to sea
asking them, what could they be?
watching the grey whales go by
California's sentinel
Eschrictius robustus

(One of my 7/7 poems; seven lines of seven syllables each).

My favorite scientific name for the grey whale, long obsolete, is Rhachianectes glaucus, also seven syllables, which translates literally to "grey swimmer along rocky shores." A lovely and poetic description.

Among the things that defined me most distinctly as a person was my decision, when entering college, to study marine biology, specifically whales, dolphins and porpoises.

And thus began one of the most rewarding, frustrating, and ultimately depressing, periods of my life.

Because for one who has loved whales all of my life, to study them closely is to realize the reality of our critical front line environmental issues; namely that we humans are, as a species, monumentally irresponsible in how we treat our home planet and other sentient beings, as we insistently fail to learn even the most blatantly obvious lessons as they present themselves. Frustrating indeed.

Which brings to mind a headline that I saw at work a few days ago, regarding an article in The Atlantic, regarding what the grieving of orcas teaches us.

As Americans, most of us view orcas as killer whales, as apex predators, preying mercilessly upon other marine mammals. But such is not always the case.

In fact, in the Canadian Arctic, three coastal dwelling orca pods in the Pacific Northwest are not the hunters of mammals at all, but instead prey almost exclusively upon salmon, mainly Chinook salmon.

As native Pacific salmon are becoming increasingly scarce, primarily due to overfishing, and to ecological degradation caused by humans, the southern resident orcas are suffering and have themselves become endangered.

When I first became familiar with them in the mid-1970s, there were several hundred members between the three pods.

Today, or at least at the time of writing of the above article, there are a mere seventy five members remaining, and they are not doing well.

As author Ed Yong recounts, "The group’s numbers are at a 30-year low, and old members are dying faster than new ones are being born. The community’s females should produce four to five calves a year, but no new calves have survived since 2015. Miscarriages are common. Around 75 percent of newborns die."

Recently, a twenty-year-old female named Tahlequah (J35) gave birth to a female calf that died within half an hour. In a profound display of grief, that captured the attention of the world, she carried her calf for seventeen days before finally relinquishing her body to the sea.

Researchers intimately connected to the whales grew increasingly concerned for her, fearing that carrying her baby was preventing her from feeding, and causing her to lag behind the rest of the pod, though at times other members of the pod were seen taking turns carrying the baby, and the southern residents are known to prey share.

Her display of grief ended on Friday, 13 August, the longest such display ever observed in orcas.

“'I have never seen that kind of grief,' said Ken Balcomb, of the Center for Whale Research. 'It’s a little bit of anthropomorphism, but I think she was letting everyone else know she was grieving,' he says. 'They’re very intelligent. They know people are out there: I’ve seen them look at boats hauling fish out in nets. I think they know that humans are somehow related to the scarcity of food. And I think they know that the scarcity of food is causing them physical distress, and also causing them to lose babies.'”

Orcas, dolphins and other whales have been spotted carrying their dead calves many times in the past, but typically only for a day or two. "Tahlequah’s recent loss was unusual only in its duration and visibility. 'Every time they leave in the winter and come back with fewer members, we know that they’ve gone through grief,' says Deborah Giles, the science-and-research director of the nonprofit Wild Orca. 'We just don’t see it.'"

And it is not only the southern resident orcas that are starving; great whales are starving in the open oceans, as humans continue to plunder dwindling stocks of fish with increasingly effective - and devastating - results.

As so eloquently put by Steven Wilson:

"One of the wonders of the world is going down
It's going down I know
One of the blunders of the world is no one cares
No one cares enough"

I will continue this post tomorrow.

The Sound of Muzak, by Porcupine Tree, with lyrics

This post, and all those from now until the end of 2018, I am dedicating to the work of #tarc and #yah, aka @rhondak's nonprofit dog rescue and @sircork's charity You Are Hope.

All SBDs earned from my posts will be even split between the two organizations.

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