Giants of the sea

After reading about the most amazing creature the Humpback Whale I was reminded that its song  could be heard by another humpback 4000 miles away! Really this is extraordinary but it brings a chill to my mind on how we know so little about the life under the waves.

There is quite simply another world under there, we are not respecting this and very quickly we are spoiling an environment we are still learning about, its so sad.

Humpback whales have a vertical throat roughly the size of a grapefruit. They cannot physically swallow anything larger than that but plastic bottles may well find their way in and that simply cannot be allowed surely! 

They are carnivores and primarily feed on small fish such as krill, juvenile salmon, and herring. They are also baleen whales, which means that they do not have teeth so they must be able to eat things that they can swallow whole. They have several vertical grooves running down the length of their body so that they can hold large volumes of water and fish at one time. They feed for up to twenty-two hours a day, taking in anywhere from 4,400-5,500 pounds of food per day. 

Looking at the song again can you imaging how far that song travels! It’s about 3000 miles between the USA and the Northern African mainland so a solitary whale swimming away slowly up the west coast of Africa gently singing away, what a life, can be heard by another whale just about anywhere in the Atlantic, truly amazing!

We humans really need to make the effort to clean up our act, its not only whales we are affecting it’s everything that lives in the truly rich waters of this planet, imagine how utterly disgusted we would be if it was the other way around? Typically for us lot, top of the food chain we would probably destroy them for doing much less than get in our precious way, well they simply cannot, probably don’t ever want to harm us … need we say more?