Note: this topic is from 6/12/2007. Thanks 11th_VA for the topic and thanks Theoria for the link in the 500 year old shark topic!
Posted on 06/12/2007 3:38:41 PM PDT by 11th_VA
BOSTON - A 50-ton bowhead whale caught off the Alaskan coast last month had a weapon fragment embedded in its neck that showed it survived a similar hunt — more than a century ago. Embedded deep under its blubber was a 3 1/2-inch arrow-shaped projectile that has given researchers insight into the whale's age, estimated between 115 and 130 years old.
"No other finding has been this precise," said John Bockstoce, an adjunct curator of the New Bedford Whaling Museum.
Calculating a whale's age can be difficult, and is usually gauged by amino acids in the eye lenses. It's rare to find one that has lived more than a century, but experts say the oldest were close to 200 years old.
The bomb lance fragment, lodged a bone between the whale's neck and shoulder blade, was likely manufactured in New Bedford, on the southeast coast of Massachusetts, a major whaling center at that time, Bockstoce said.
It was probably shot at the whale from a heavy shoulder gun around 1890. The small metal cylinder was filled with explosives fitted with a time-delay fuse so it would explode seconds after it was shot into the whale. The bomb lance was meant to kill the whale immediately and prevent it from escaping.
The device exploded and probably injured the whale, Bockstoce said.
"It probably hurt the whale, or annoyed him, but it hit him in a non-lethal place," he said. "He couldn't have been that bothered if he lived for another 100 years."
The whale harkens back to far different era. If 130 years old, it would have been born in 1877, the year Rutherford B. Hayes was sworn in as president, when federal Reconstruction troops withdrew from the South and when Thomas Edison unveiled his newest invention, the phonograph.
The 49-foot male whale died when it was shot with a similar projectile last month, and the older device was found buried beneath its blubber as hunters carved it with a chain saw for harvesting.
"It's unusual to find old things like that in whales, and I knew immediately that it was quite old by its shape," said Craig George, a wildlife biologist for the North Slope Borough Department of Wildlife Management, who was called down to the site soon after it was found.
The revelation led George to return to a similar piece found in a whale hunted near St. Lawrence Island in 1980, which he sent to Bockstoce to compare.
"We didn't make anything of it at the time, and no one had any idea about their lifespan, or speculated that a bowhead could be that old," George said.
Bockstoce said he was impressed by notches carved into the head of the arrow used in the 19th century hunt, a traditional way for the Alaskan hunters to indicate ownership of the whale.
Whaling has always been a prominent source of food for Alaskans, and is monitored by the International Whaling Commission. A hunting quota for the Alaska Eskimo Whaling Commission was recently renewed, allowing 255 whales to be harvested by 10 Alaskan villages over five years.
After it is analyzed, the fragment will be displayed at the Inupiat Heritage Center in Barrow, Alaska.
There is absolutely no reason for whales to be hunted today. 'Course, if the whale was killed by a bunch of Japs instead of the indigenous peoples of the Eskimo, I bet the AP story would have read a little differently.
Why is anyone hunting whales anymore in the first place?
"Consider all this; and then turn to this green, gentle, and most docile earth ...
Then consider how nature preys on us and our structures: heavy rains, ice storms, flooding/flash floods, Lightning, Derechos, Tornados and Hurricanes.
Note: this topic is from 6/12/2007. Thanks 11th_VA for the topic and thanks Theoria for the link in the 500 year old shark topic!
Whales Weep Not!
D. H. Lawrence, 1885 - 1930
They say the sea is cold, but the sea contains
the hottest blood of all, and the wildest, the most urgent.
All the whales in the wider deeps, hot are they, as they urge
on and on, and dive beneath the icebergs.
The right whales, the sperm-whales, the hammer-heads, the killers
there they blow, there they blow, hot wild white breath out of
the sea!
And they rock, and they rock, through the sensual ageless ages
on the depths of the seven seas,
and through the salt they reel with drunk delight
and in the tropics tremble they with love
and roll with massive, strong desire, like gods.
Then the great bull lies up against his bride
in the blue deep bed of the sea,
as mountain pressing on mountain, in the zest of life:
and out of the inward roaring of the inner red ocean of whale-blood
the long tip reaches strong, intense, like the maelstrom-tip, and
comes to rest
in the clasp and the soft, wild clutch of a she-whale’s
fathomless body.
And over the bridge of the whale’s strong phallus, linking the
wonder of whales
the burning archangels under the sea keep passing, back and
forth,
keep passing, archangels of bliss
from him to her, from her to him, great Cherubim
that wait on whales in mid-ocean, suspended in the waves of the
sea
great heaven of whales in the waters, old hierarchies.
And enormous mother whales lie dreaming suckling their whale-
tender young
and dreaming with strange whale eyes wide open in the waters of
the beginning and the end.
And bull-whales gather their women and whale-calves in a ring
when danger threatens, on the surface of the ceaseless flood
and range themselves like great fierce Seraphim facing the threat
encircling their huddled monsters of love.
And all this happens in the sea, in the salt
where God is also love, but without words:
and Aphrodite is the wife of whales
most happy, happy she!
and Venus among the fishes skips and is a she-dolphin
she is the gay, delighted porpoise sporting with love and the sea
she is the female tunny-fish, round and happy among the males
and dense with happy blood, dark rainbow bliss in the sea.
Ancient LIVING shark born in 1500s is world's OLDEST vertebrate and could be 512 years old
This is one of my favorites:
250 Million-Year-Old Bacteria Found
Now for a real holy-moly, wowee....
50 Billion Neutrinos Pass Through Your Body Every Second
(No wonder I get so tired)
Okay one more:
Mountain. Nantucket Sleighride
Ha! Ten year old topic! And I even put the notice in the ping msg. Nyuk, nyuk, nyuk. ;^)
If the neutrinos originated in the Big Bang, wouldn’t they be Oldtrinos?
http://i.pinimg.com/originals/24/72/45/2472456cac8a638f00fcf9afaf1ab959.jpg
When I see those these days, I think of Eastwood.
“If I were an Alaskan native I might think you implied that I’m not a modern man but some sort of caveman.”
I have a vague memory of a show where it had the Indians in a huge canoe, and paddling to go out on a whale hunt - hand-thrown harpoons and everything. One of the guys later said something like “Yeah - that’s just for the ceremony for when we start the season. But for the actual hunt we use a regular boat and harpoons. You’d be crazy trying to do it in a canoe!”
Shut up.
No, there's not anything wrong with that...
We just watched a documentary on the Essex whaling expedition that gave Melville the idea to write Moby Duck. There was quite a bit of late 19th century whaling film in it, too. The Essex was wrecked by a sperm whale in 1820. 8 men survived to tell the tale. They lived by cannibalizing the men who died while lost at sea in the lifeboat.
I posted this in 2007 ? (10 years ago?) and you’re just getting around to reading it? Wait til you learn who becomes President Jan 20, 2009 ;)
Exactly my thought.
When I saw the title, I thought that someone had attacked Amy Schumer.
Yeah, well, wait til YOU learn who becomes President Jan 20, 2017!
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