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Footage from the BBC's new nature series "Parenthood" shows orcas practicing an important blue whale-hunting technique on each other.Orca moms teach their young how to pretend-drown each other, first-of-its-kind footage shows. The brutal training session teaches orcas the skills needed to kill the largest animal that has ever lived. In the video, a young orca (Orcinus orca) pretends to be prey, letting the rest of the pod surround it and submerge its blowhole to prevent it from breathing. Members of the pod practice holding the young orca's head under the water for a while before releasing it. Later in...

Whales, as the largest mammals on Earth, have long been an important resource for human societies, whether it be for food, oil, or other materials. According to a report by Popular Science, hunter-gatherers in present-day Spain and France have been crafting essential tools from whale bones for much longer than previously thought. A new study analyzed 83 bone tools found at sites along the Bay of Biscay and 90 additional bones from the Santa Catalina cave in Spain. The investigation relied on mass spectrometry and radiocarbon dating to determine that humans living in the region have been making whale-bone tools,...

Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute study finds communication is key to the species’ survivalWith hearts the size of a small car and arteries wide enough to swim through, blue whales are the largest animals in history. They’re also one of the noisiest. Some of their booming vocalizations, louder than jet planes, travel for hundreds of miles in the water. Scientists use this noise to observe these marine giants and their ocean ecosystems. In two recent studies, researchers combined acoustic recordings from Monterey Bay with environmental and behavioral data to learn more about the decisions blue whales make while hunting and...

Before Christmas, we asked GWPF readers to send us nominations for our search to find the tallest climate tale of 2018. It’s fair to say that there was a lot of competition, with the catastrophe mongers across the media clearly working hard to ensure that they were in the running for this much sought-after accolade. We particularly enjoyed L. Robertson’s ‘Climate change, weather and road deaths’, a paper in the journal Injury Prevention, which declared that rising concentrations of greenhouse gases was going to cause a rising death toll on the roads unless governments put in ‘major mitigating countermeasure’. We...

Part of the problem is that the people who decide national policy are headquartered in Washington, D.C., where large plots of private property are rare. Those of us who live in urban or suburban areas imagine endangered species protection to be as simple as being kind to blue whales, grizzly bears and bald eagles. We don’t stop to consider the dilemmas facing people thousands of miles away from us. Bill Snape, Chairman of the Endangered Species Coalition, is an example of one who lives in either ignorance or denial. “There just aren’t private landowners that I can identify where the...