Creature Feature: Pakicetus.

Yeah, no "They Actually Eat That" today. That's for tomorrow, when everybody in America will be bloated on the disgustingly-fattening food served on Thanksgiving, including corn. You're welcome.

For now, please have something far more pleasant: Fossil Fighters's answer to Vaporeon:

Except...wait, this is Fossil Fighters. Does this mean that Vaporeon were once real?

Ahaha, no. Paki up there is a Pakicetus, a prehistoric mammal that is considered a direct link between mesonychids (badass carnivorous ungulates). It was found in Pakistan (hence the name) with a number of other whale fossils and whale relatives, and lived around 50 million years ago in the Eocene. As one might expect, it was a piscivore. The creature was first identified as a whale relative by its earbones, in case you were wondering.

The first mysterious thing about this creature is where it was found. Pakistan, a place that is largely desert, has an abundance of ancient whale skeletons. The simple answer to why: Land shifts. The land evolved, and so did the life on it. Pakistan was once coastal. This led to a bunch of well-preserved whale skeletons as whales evolved from carnivorous ungulates. Neat.

Pakicetus is the first obvious transition animal between whales and land-bound mammals. The eyes are located on top of the skull, making it look almost like a crocodile. It lived on a coastal region in its time, leading to a theory that it may have first hunted in tide pools. There are a million different speculations about how Pakicetus lived - largely related to exactly how water-bound this whale of a mammal was.

There are debates over how aquatic Pakicetus was. The heavy bones suggest that it was at least partially-aquatic. The ears are more favored for hearing in air, but that didn't stop paleontologists from placing it near whales on the Tree of Life. Others have called it "no more aquatic than a tapir." Whatever the case, we're pretty sure it didn't have a tail fluke...although that would be awesome.

Newsflash: A White Humpback Whale?!

Well, here's something refreshing. This blog rarely covers whales and dolphins, so when a friend showed me this, I had to show it to you all:


"Mariners who spend lots of time at sea are witness to all sorts of amazing sights, but very rarely does one get to witness the almost mythical white whale. Dan Fisher has seen and documented this animal. While crewing aboard the three-masted SV Antigua in August, in the waters of Norway's Svalbard Archipelago, Fisher made the sighting of what looks to be a pure white humpback whale from high on the mast. (For whatever reason, Fisher waited until recently to release his footage and share his story. These are his images, Wildlife Extra. 

The whale first appeared as a white hump on the horizon, and was swimming with other humpbacks.

"As I realized it was a white whale, I was amazed," Fisher told the Daily Mail. "I quickly climbed the mast to get a good vantage point and captured these pictures. Afterwards we were all talking and decided to dub him Willow the white whale."

News of the sighting began circulating on the Internet this week.

White whales are rare and the most famous among them, of course, is Moby Dick, a fictional sperm whale in the 1851 Herman Melville classic novel of the same name.

More recently, a white humpback known as Migaloo has been spotted sporadically off Queensland, Australia. A white humpback calf also has been seen off Queensland. According to Wildlife Extra there have been reports of white killer whales off Alaska and Russia (possibly the same animal), white right whale calves off South Australia and an albino dolphin off Louisiana.

The white humpback spotted by Fisher, who is Welsh, is either an albino or its coloration could be the result of a condition known as leucism, in which pigmentation cells fail to properly develop. Albinos are totally white and usually have red or pink eyes.

Fisher, 32, who for the past 10 years has worked as a maritime engineer, referred to the sighting as a "once-in-a-lifetime spot" and added: "I saw lots of humpbacks this year, but nothing as spectacular as this one."" ~ From GrindTV.com


Just to clarify: there is a good chance that these white humpback whales are leucistic, not albino. There are several differences between the two, including eye color (albinos have pink eyes, sometimes blue) and vulnerability to UV rays. Similar result, but not the same thing. Don't call a whale albino unless you're looking it in the eye.

Either case of suddenly abundant white whales speaks to a potential problem: a shrinking gene pool. Whaling in the old days made huge dents in whale populations.  Modern-day pollution can't be good for them, either. When creatures as large as whales are vanishing, the ecosystem in general and the cetacean gene pool are both adversely affected. Could the rise in white humpback whales be due to a shortage of breeding partners?

Mind, white whales have been around for quite a while. The story Moby Dick detailed one man's constant pursuit of a white sperm whale; since it's conception, the term "white whale" has come to mean something elusive to the point of being irritating. Still, to find a real white whale is very rare indeed. Let's hope it stays that way, no matter how awesome these white whales look.

Creature Feature: Indus River Dolphin.

Is there anything happier than a dolphin? Really, name one creature that lights up a room more than a giggling, clicking, smiling dolphin. As Cracked put it, "no animal is more closely associated with Day-Glo rainbows."

Then we get into river dolphins. River dolphins are Flipper turned nightmarish. I won't go into a more thorough description than that. Just...

...that. Just that. You would not want that to save you while drowning. (Well, maybe Bogleech would.) This dolphin warps our perception of dolphin so well it's awesome.

"That," in this case, is an Indus River dolphin (Platanista minor). The Indus and Ganges River dolphins are technically the same species, although how scientists decided this is anybody's guess (how would you breed these two?). It eats shrimp, carp, and catfish, among any other small seafood unfortunate enough to get caught in those teeth. It is native to the Indus River in Pakistan, joining leopard geckos and sand cats on the "cool animals that can be found in war-torn areas" list.

When it comes to river dolphins, all things that make dolphins cute go downstream. That goofy smile is replaced with an elongated grin full of teeth that show even when the jaw is closed. There are no sympathetic eyes to look into.  Instead of being sleek and grey, this dolphin looks like a mottled pink dolphin corpse sent to float down the Ganges.

All dolphins echolocate, but the Indus River dolphin is entirely dependent on sonar. Its eyes are almost nonexistent; the most they can do is detect light and shadow, if that. It doesn't even have a lens in those rudimentary eyes. It is one of the rare mammals that is completely blind. Yeah, we're pretty sure this has to have some mythological relative - maybe the makara. A legless, scaleless makara.

An animal THIS weird MUST be a messenger of the gods! 

Like all river dolphins, the Indus River dolphin is highly endangered. Dams, industrial runoff, and irrigation have all hurt these creatures. Aside from habitat fragmentation, they are also hunted, and not because they look like creatures out of H.P. Lovecraft. Apparently some people are well-aware that dolphins are really horny bastards; the meat and oil can be used as an aphrodisiac. They can also be used as catfish bait - take your pick. Even if they freak us out, that doesn't mean we should kill them. They have enough problems.

"They Actually Eat That:" Dolphin.

Japanese schools used to have a fine diet plan: "Something from the mountains and something from the sea." Japan does "something from the sea" wayyyy too well for its own good. If it is from the sea, they have tried to eat it. We've already covered fugu and eel, probably the weirdest things that Japan is known for eating...





Oh, right. Totally forgot about dolphin. Yes, there are some people in Japan that treat the stars of "So Long and Thanks For All the Fish" as yet another thing from the seas to be eaten. Just to be fair, Peru and the Solomon Islands also hunt dolphin. Dolphins can be either netted by accident or driven onto beaches by boats. Either way is pretty sick, so feel free to use your imagination on this one...although the latter is more common for systematic slaughter. 

The good news: The practice of eating dolphin is not widespread in Japan. Only a few poor fishing regions eat dolphin on a regular basis. Even then, dolphin is not cuisine by any means. It is certainly not shark fin soup. It is really only popular in one place, but people outside of that place love dolphins so much that pics like the one below are all over.



Exactly one town, Taiji, is enthusiastic about hunting dolphins to the point where they tried to popularize it. There were a number of reasons that they failed, the least of which is that dolphins are the most adorable rapists ever. Eating cetaceans is such a big thing for them that they have dolphin sashimi and humpback whale bacon. The kids in Taiji grow up with favorite dolphin and whale meats. They see dolphins as swimming beef, basically, and are irked by foreigners who do not respect the traditional Taiji diet. Most other people in Japan are horrified at what goes on in Taiji - assuming they learn about it at all.

However.

Some seafood companies, likely netting a few unfortunate dolphins by accident, figured out that  dolphin meat could be passed off as a cheap substitute for whale meat, which is more frequently consumed and quite expensive. This is probably as low as such companies can get. Oh, and consuming dolphin or whale meat is potentially dangerous.

Yep, screw humanity.

Cute factor aside, dolphin meat is not even safe to consume. Not only is the sea around East Asia horribly polluted, but dolphins have a lethal amount of mercury in their bodies thanks to bio-accumulation. (We do not know how the Taiji people are still living; they had 6 times the amount of mercury in their systems as the average Japanese person.) DDT, the same pesticide that pushed raptors to the brink of extinction, has also been found in dolphin and whale meat. Karma? You tell me.

Creature Feature: Wholphin.

Sometimes, we just have to wonder what science has done. We make freaks almost solely because we can. Even if we say we are making mice glow green to cure Parkinson's, c'mon. Scientists just want to make stuff glow in the dark, just like paleontologists get a kick out of posing dinosaur skeletons in battle postures.

Well, this freak is not quite the result of science. All we had to do for this one was put two animals in the same tank; the freakish offspring was an accident. The following is the result of two different species of toothed whales loving each other very, very much:



This Uncanny Valley-ish creature is called a "wholphin" (or "wolphin").  It is the hybrid of a bottlenose dolphin (Turisops truncatus) and a lesser known cetacean called a false killer whale (Pseudorca crassidens). Although there have been some reports of wild wholphins, they have only been confirmed to occur in captivity.

At first glance, you might not see what is wrong with the dolphin in that video. Unlike ligers, where the public is very well aware of both hybrid species, not many people know about false killer whales. All you, the readers, really need to know is that they eat other marine mammals like orca whales and are a lot bigger than regular dolphins. To give you an idea of how different the two species are, here they are, side by side, in Enoshima, Japan:

Perhaps, in Japan, another wholphin will be born. I fear for its life.

A lot of the rules that can be applied to ligers can be applied to wholphins as well. Wholphins, like ligers, are bigger than their parents. They grow faster and have been described (by eyewitnesses) as "giant dolphins." They have teeth smack dab between those of dolphins and false killer whales: dolphins have 88, FKW's have 44, and wholphins have 66. Like many hybrids, they have fertility issues; the first wholphin did not have a stable calf until 2004, when she yielded a baby with a bottlenose sire. The young wholphin reached the size of a year-old bottlenose within a few months.

From Pinhole's flickr. :)

 

Unfortunately - or fortunately, depending on where you stand on hybrids - there are currently only two wholphins in existence. They are both at Sea Life Park, Hawaii, which is one of the last places you would expect an exotic animal hybridization to take place. Keikaimalu, the original female, still performs at Sea Life Park. Hey, at least she's in Hawaii.

The question now is this: When will scientists really get cracking and make a wolf-dolphin hybrid? Or a gryphon? Hey, if we're going to make abominations, we may as well make awesome ones. Whatever you believe about hybrids, so long, and thanks for all the fish!

Creature Feature: Baiji (Yangtze River Dolphin)

Speaking of Chinese animals in danger...

Yes, that is a dolphin. Didn't know that China had dolphins, did you? These are not the same dolphins that you see in aquarium and zoo shows; Yangtze River Dolphins (Lipotes vexillifer), AKA Baiji or "Goddess of the Yangtze," are native only to the Yangtze River in China.

Or, well, they were.

The Yangtze River Dolphin is the most recent marine mammal extinction to date: the Japanese Sea Lion went extinct in the 1950's and this dolphin went extinct in 2006. The last recorded living specimen died in 2002, and no new wild specimens have been confirmed. Not only is the Baiji one of the most recent mammals to go extinct, it is the first well-recorded cetacean to ever go extinct.



How the hell did that happen? Chinese medicine? Well, no, but the dolphin has a story in Chinese mythology. The legend goes that the Baiji is the reincarnation of a woman who refused her arranged marriage and was drowned because of it; the Baiji has been considered prosperous ever since. It was only eaten after the tradition of calling the dolphin a goddess wore off. Somewhere, a tiger is jealous.

The communist movement called the Great Leap Forward (1958-61) spurred China to not only abandon their traditions in favor of communism, but also encouraged anything in the name of modernization. The dolphin's river habitat was polluted and electric fishing was encouraged. Ship engines interfered with the dolphin's sonar (which was even more necessary than for other dolphins; the Baiji was almost blind). The Three Gorges Dam, a dam spanning the Yangtze River, was the final nail in the coffin. There are still some unconfirmed sightings, but by and large, this dolphin is considered dead, dead, dead.


Fail indeed. For once, traditional beliefs were PROTECTING an animal.

See? Communism does not work. Communists killed a dolphin.

Creature Feature: Narwhal.

Pretend that you're a person in medieval times. You're just headin' down to port, getting ready to buy some fish. On the way to your favorite fisherman, a strange item catches your eye:

Isn't that a horn from one of those magical white horses that the England put on its coat of arms? Heeeyyyy, wait a second! Unicorns don't exist...or do they?

If they do, they look FREAKY.

Nah, they don't. That twisted horn - actually a giant, ivory tooth akin to an elephant's tusk - belongs to an ocean-dwelling mammal called a narwhal (Monodon monoceros - lit. "one tooth, one horn"). As the name might indicate, they are related to other whales (particularly the beluga whale) and live in the Arctic waters year-round. They eat various things farther down on the marine food chain, sometimes diving down over 1,500 meters to get their lunch. Like the polar bear, they are somewhat threatened by global warming. (They are not officially recognized as endangered, however.)

Oh, and hunting.



The male narwhal's tusk (yes, usually only one) was quite valuable way back in the day. A unicorn's horn was said to have magical properties, curing poison among them; a single narwhal tusk could be sold for a very high price. Not realizing that a real horn should not have been made out of ivory, many people bought narwhal teeth, including Queen Elizabeth I. Nowadays, people know better, but the twist of a narwhal's tooth has stuck in many a unicorn image.


En garde!

Nobody really knows why male narwhals have these huge (2-3 meter long) tusks.  The most common assumption is that they evolved, like a lion's mane, to show a male's fitness, They also have some role in regulating social order. Yeeaaah, guys, don't get any ideas; these narwhals will outdo you in every way. Their ways to attract ladies get preserved in museums, even though the whale had to die in the process. There are also some lucky males that are endowed with two tusks; feel free to let your mind wander.

Narwhal hunting is still legal in moderation. The Inuit people have been hunting these ceteans for centuries for food. They eat every part of the narwhal, just like Plains natives consumed every part of the buffalo. Narwhal meat (for whatever reason) is the Inuit people's main source of vitamin C. Yes, apparently whales with unicorn tusks have a similar nutritional value to oranges.


A good source of vitamin C?


They also have a song.You're welcome.