Posted by Juliet Linderman

Hey there dick watchers and welcome to Friday, which lovingly holds hands with everyone’s favorite Moby Dick-related link list, Dick Watching. So welcome to it, and let’s get on with it!

1. A lady whale went the distance. 6, 200 miles, to be exact, from Brazil to Madagascar, off the coast of Africa. This is believed to be the longest trip ever taken by a mammal, excluding humanimals. Scientists are pretty jazzed right now–they think this voyage may be suggestive of an extreme instance of exploration. Or the lady whale may have just gotten lost. Read on, dick watchers:
...Humpbacks are careful commuters, taking the same trip from cold waters where they hunt plankton, fish and krill to warm waters where they mingle and mate “year after year after year,” he said. The location of their feeding and breeding spots sometimes varies, but their transoceanic commute doesn’t usually change much.
Swapping a breeding ground in Brazil for one in Madagascar was previously unheard of.
“That’s almost 90 degrees of longitude — so a quarter of the way around the globe,” Stevick said. “Not only is this an exception, but it’s a really remarkable exception at that.”

2. In other super awesome whale-ness/whale news a Killer Whale named Katina gave birth to a seven-foot-long, 350 pound calf the other day at SeaWorld in Orlando, Florida and the whole thing is caught on camera. I mean, not the whole thing, but the cool parts. Plus, it’s so refreshing to finally hear something nice about Orcas after that whole, brutally killing the trainer thing.

Hold on, hold on everyone. Breaking News!

3. Whale poop rules, apparently. According to a scientist who artfully described whale excrement as “Very liquidy, a flocculent plume…” (yes flocculent. It means fluffy), whale waste floats on the surface of the sea rather than sinking to the ocean floor, and is an integral element in the process of transferring the nutrients found in deep waters to those who dwell in the shallows. It’s all very simple really: The whale eats delicious and nutritious things from the deep, poops them out and, in turn, helps to fertilize plankton. Amazing? Amazing!

4. Amy Poehler is a distant relative of Herman Melville’s? Sweet!

5. Dudes! We should definitely all read The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival, because Edward Lewine compared it to our beloved Moby Dick over in the New York Times Book Review. This book actually does sound really cool: It’s by John Vaillant, and tells the story of a village tracking a particularly hard-to-find tiger. Did you guys know there is an “animal pursuit subgenre”? Yeah, well, there is, you philistines.