News You Can Bruise

Whale-dolphin hybrid has baby wholphin. This is not surprising as, you'll remember, there are no whales involved here, only dolphins under false names.

If you get a chance, don't miss this Nature episode about humpback whales. I thought humpbacks went around never really opening their mouths, but that's possibly the most wrong I've ever been about anything. It is amazing.

From Brendan:

The father of Kekaimalu, the wholphin, is NOT a killer whale (orcinus orca), he's a FALSE killer whale (pseudorca crassidens)! That doesn't actually make a difference, since they're both dolphins, but I thought I'd chip in.

I saw this but originally thought a false killer whale was some weird type of whale I'd never heard of. But of course it's not any kind of whale at all. Now I'm on a dolphin witch hunt! Belugas, narwhals, pilot whales--they all look like dolphins! I have in my hand a list of 200 dolphins working for the State Department!

I thought the whole thing was a hoax at first anyway-- that top picture looks suspiciously like the back dolphin image with the false killer whale's skin photoshopped on.

Seems pretty unlikely that someone would make a hoax about a dolphin interbreeding with another dolphin. I find it believable, given the liger (which I know exists).

Nick Moffitt writes:

You obviously didn't grow up in the Pacific NorthWest. A killer whale is not a whale. It is actually the largest member of the dolphin family. I still maintain that there is no such thing as a whale/dolphin hybrid, and challenge you to prove me wrong.

Lousy killer whales! I knew there was a reason why I didn't like them! They're actually dolphins in disguise!

I was skimming through The Book of Lost Tales, looking, for reasons which need not concern us at the moment, to find historical names that orcs might give their children. It turns out that The Book of Lost Tales contains no orcs and very few orc role models, so I'm using The Silmarillion instead. However, The Book of Lost Tales does contain a cool Lost Tale about an enormous whale named Uin, who is hitched up to a continent and tows the entire continent elsewhere, much like in this Penny Arcade cartoon. I tried to find out more about Uin but there is no more, except that Uin appears in a children's book Tolkien wrote called Roverandom.

No, I didn't either. It looks like a fun Phantom Tollbooth-ish yarn, and Uin's part in it is generally well-received by the critics. I'm thinking of getting it and reviewing it here.

In Kuala Lumpur, a whale.

Adam Parrish points out that you probably could use whales in spam if you wanted to.

After various tribulations I've finally gotten hold of the pictures that were on my camera. This includes pictures from Adam's wedding as well as the whale watch. The whale watch pictures turned out okay; there are two cool pictures of dolphins swimming near the boat, and several pictures with visible whale (including at least one whale fluke picture), but I couldn't even tell which picture was supposed to be of the humpack breach, and of course I totally botched my chance to get an awesome picture of the basking mola mola (I had the perfect opportunity, but my camera was set to 'review' mode instead of to 'take pictures' mode).

Back from the whale watch. I saw several blue whales, a few humpback whales (including a spectacular humpback breach!), a lot of Risso's dolphins, an awesome mola mola (aka sunfish, but "mola mola" sounds cooler), which I didn't realize before how interesting (and large!) they were, some jellyfish, some obnoxious sea lions, and a fur seal. I took a lot of pictures, which I'm afraid are of one second after the cool thing happened (the humpback breach, the dolphins swimming under the boat), but I'll find out once I finally get my camera working with this computer.

It wasn't a fish being confused by a fishing lure. It was a whale being confused by a bunch of bananas.