Author: timzimmermann

Young Norwegians Don’t Want To Go Whaling

Raymond Nilsen and his father, Eilert, butcher a minke whale aboard the Nordfangst—Norwegian for Northern Catch. Over a typical summer whaling season they catch 20 to 30 minkes. In winter they fish for cod. (Photograph by Marcus Bleasdale)

For once I am grateful for all the distractions of modern life, because they are diverting the next generation of Norwegian whalers from the industry:

It isn’t a scarcity of whales that is bringing down the curtain, or even the complicated politics of whaling. It’s something far more prosaic and inexorable: Norwegian kids, even those who grow up in the seafaring stronghold of Lofoten, simply don’t want to become whalers anymore. Nor do they want to brave storm-tossed winter seas to net fortunes in cod, as their forebears have done for centuries. Instead, they aspire to land safer, salaried jobs in distant cities or with the offshore oil industry, and they have been leaving their island communities in droves.

There is irony in this turn of events. For most of its history, Lofoten exerted a gravitational pull on the young and ambitious. In his 1921 coming-of-age classic The Last of the Vikings, Norwegian novelist Johan Bojer described the legendary island chain as “a land in the Arctic Ocean that all the boys along the coast dreamed of visiting some day, a land where exploits were performed, fortunes were made, and where fishermen sailed in a race with Death.”

Smart kids. Haunting photo gallery here.

Killer Whale Menopause: It’s All About The Kids

This is pretty fascinating. A paper in Science on killer whale menopause reveals some interesting parallels with menopause in humans, and adds to our understanding of the incredibly tight mother-offspring bonds in killer whale society.

Here’s a summary from the Center For Whale Research:

Dr. Emma Foster has provided a brief summery of her paper that recently came out in Science:
“Adaptive Prolonged Postreproductive Life Span in Killer Whales”

1.      The key finding: We have discovered that female killer whales have the longest menopause of any non-human species so they can care for their adult sons. Our research shows that, for a male over 30, the death of his mother means an almost 14-fold-increase in the likelihood of his death within the following year.

2.      The relevance/link to humans: Biologically-speaking, the menopause is a bizarre concept! Very few species have a prolonged period of their lifespan when they no longer reproduce. Like humans, female killer whales buck this trend and stop reproducing in their 30s-40s, but can survive into their 90s. The benefit of a menopause to both human and killer whale mothers is in spreading their genes. The different ways this has evolved reflects the different structure of human and killer whale societies. While it is believed that the menopause evolved in humans partly to allow women to focus on providing support for their grandchildren, our research shows that female killer whales act as lifelong carers for their own offspring, particularly their adult sons.
3.      Why this is important: The menopause remains one of nature’s great mysteries. This research, which involved studying 36 years-worth of data, is the first ever study of its kind and is an exciting breakthrough in our understanding of the evolution of the menopause.
I wonder if there is a species with a more important mother-son bond? It certainly exceeds the same human connection.
The more we learn about killer whales, the more complex and sophisticated their relationships and culture appears.

The Human Impact

A fascinating set of images, which show the impact humans have had over time reworking the surface of the Earth:

Since the 1970s, NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey have been amassing satellite images of every inch of our planet as part of the Landsat program. Over time, the images reveal a record of change: of cities expanding, lakes and forests disappearing, new islands emerging from the sea off the coast of rising Middle East metropolises like Dubai.

If you could thumb through these historic pictures as if in a flip book, they would show stunning change across the earth’s surface, in both our natural environments and our man-made ones. Now, the digital equivalent of that experience is possible – three decades of global change as GIF – in a project unveiled today between NASA, the USGS, TIME, Google, and the CREATE Lab at Carnegie Mellon University.

Landsat images taken between 1984 and 2012 have been converted into a seamless, navigable animation built from millions of satellite photos. As Google wrote this morning on its blog: “We believe this is the most comprehensive picture of our changing planet ever made available to the public.”

Sorry, this makes me think of locusts.

The Man Who Fell To Earth

This is awesome, if you haven’t seen it yet.

Commander Chris Hadfield–who has single-handedly restored America’s romance with space exploration–taps into his inner Bowie as he gets ready to depart the international space station. If this guy can make orbiting the Earth so interesting, imagine what he could do if we sent him to Mars.

Fact: that is his real voice.

Tilikum Back In The Day

A Tilikum “Splash” segment from the video archives of former SeaWorld trainer Jeffrey Ventre.

From the show producer: “Oh boy, where’s he going?”

Nowhere, it turns out. Tilikum has been doing this segment for almost three decades since this was shot. And a lot has happened over that period of time.

Earthist Music: Shark Fin Blues

How about a shark-revenge fantasy, courtesy of The Drones? Raw, angry, and mournful, with a touch of Lou Reed.

Perfect for a Friday sign-off. So crank it to 11.

Well you are all my brothers, and you have been kind 
But what were you expecting to find? 
Now your eyes turn inwards, countenance turns blank 
And I’m floating away on a barrel of pain 
It looks like nothing but the sea and sky remain 

I sing na na nana nananana na 
Na na nana nananana na 

A harpoon’s shaft is short and wide 
A grappling hook’s is cracked and dry 
I said, why don’t you get down in the sea 
Turn the water red like you want to be? 

Cause if I cry another tear I’ll be turned to dust 
No the sharks won’t get me they don’t feel loss 
Just keep one eye on the horizon man, you best not blink 
They’re coming fin by fin until the whole boat sinks 

Fin by fin 
Fin by fin 
Fin by fin by fin by fin

(Full lyrics here).

Welcome To The Era of 400-Plus

PPM of carbon in the atmosphere, that is.

Just passed it for the first time in human history. Stand by for 500?

Life Lessons: The Rewards Of Rejecting The Consumer/Debt Culture

Mr. Money Mustache (okay, that’s his pen name) retired at 30. How? he and his family don’t over-consume and aren’t wasteful. And they are happy:

To hundreds of thousands of devotees, he is Mister Money Mustache. And he is here to tell you that early retirement doesn’t only happen to Powerball winners and those who luck into a big inheritance. He and his wife retired from middle-income jobs before they had their son. Exasperated, as he puts it, by “a barrage of skeptical questions from high-income peers who could still use a debt advice service years after we were free from work,” he created a no-nonsense personal finance blog and started spilling his secrets. I was eager to know more. He is Pete (just Pete, for the sake of his family’s privacy). He lives in Longmont, Colo. He is ridiculously happy. And he’s sure his life could be yours.

Read the interview with Mr. Money Mustache (how could you resist advice from a guy who calls himself that?).

I know a guy who does oddjobs, plays bagpipes at Renaissance festivals, sleeps under his pickup, and lives on $10,000 a year. It can be done. The “American Dream” you see pitched on TV is all about getting you to buy lots of stuff. It is not the only path (and in fact it is a path with serious pitfalls).

More Loro Parque PR Porn

Yet another video about Morgan, and her life at Loro Parque.


Morgan sure looks like she is living the life, doesn’t she? Let’s read between the lines.

As former SeaWorld trainer Jeffrey Ventre notes:  “it DOES appear (although no audio confirmation) that a trainer is using a whistle to bridge Morgan at about he 54 second mark. This is contrary to claims that she is deaf.”

Loro Parque trainer Claudia Volhardt also mentions that Morgan is being taught how to pee into a cup, so her hormonal cycles can be monitored. That is a key procedure when it comes to trying to breed Morgan, and Morgan offers SeaWorld (which listed Morgan as a SeaWorld asset when it filed the papers for its recent IPO) extremely valuable wild DNA for its captive breeding program.

Finally, Volhardt takes the opportunity to mention the stranded orca that was shot in the head in Norway in April, contrasting its fate to that of Morgan. On the one hand, it is a fair point since Morgan was “rescued” rather than “euthanized.” On the other hand, topping a standard in which stranded orcas are shot in the head is setting the bar pretty low. And I am pretty sure that none of the release plans proposed for Morgan include a rifle.

All in all, a pretty sophisticated PR effort, aimed at making the public feel okay about Morgan being at Loro Parque.

Props To Europe: Norwegian Edition

Trash piled nine yards high is converted to heat and electricity at a waste-to-energy incinerator in Oslo. (Brian Cliff Olguin for The New York Times)

Is it possible to recycle too much? Apparently so. Or at least recycling too much can cause problems for other energy saving strategies. That is a good good dilemma, and I am having a hard time imagining Americans having the same problem:

Oslo, a recycling-friendly place where roughly half the city and most of its schools are heated by burning garbage — household trash, industrial waste, even toxic and dangerous waste from hospitals and drug arrests — has a problem: it has literally run out of garbage to burn.

The problem is not unique to Oslo, a city of 1.4 million people. Across Northern Europe, where the practice of burning garbage to generate heat and electricity has exploded in recent decades, demand for trash far outstrips supply. “Northern Europe has a huge generating capacity,” said Mr. Mikkelsen, 50, a mechanical engineer who for the last year has been the managing director of Oslo’s waste-to-energy agency.

Yet the fastidious population of Northern Europe produces only about 150 million tons of waste a year, he said, far too little to supply incinerating plants that can handle more than 700 million tons. “And the Swedes continue to build” more plants, he said, a look of exasperation on his face, “as do Austria and Germany.”

But it is easy to imagine Americans helping solve this problem, since we are very good at generating garbage, to the tune of 161 million tons a year (or 3 pounds per person, per day).