Posted by Juliet Linderman

Hey there Dick Watchers and welcome to the Wednesday edition of everyone’s favorite sea-tastic cetacean link list! Hop on the boat and let’s go!

There’s a sick whale swimming around the waters of Hawaii, and though this happens all the time, this poor guy is in such bad shape I thought I’d include it. His back is broken, making for a very strange looking impressionistic kind of creature. The big guy’s all melted, poor thing.

Crittercam alert! An apparatus invented 24 years ago will be given a test drive on wild belugas for the first time this summer. From the article, Tracy Romano, the senior vice president of research and zoological operations at Mystic Aquarium & Institute for Exploration: “Romano said the Crittercam will give researchers a look into the lives of the belugas that they’ve never had before. ‘For the past few years we’ve used satellite transmissions to track the animals. We know where they’re going. We’ve also found that they stay in one location for a period of time. We want to understand what they are doing in that area. Are they foraging? If they are, what are they feeding on. Now we can see what they are eating,’ she said.”

Is it just me, or are killer whales getting nastier and nastier? Scientists have discovered a pattern among Alaskian killer whales: bum rushing young gray whales, drowning them and storing their blubber and muscle in shallow water for later. Apparently this new trend is fucking up the ecosystem like nobody’s business. You should really just read this whole article because it’s awesome, but here’s an excerpt explaining the ripple effect of these unprecedented attacks: “The annual gathering of killer whales to ambush gray whales traveling along the Pacific Rim sends ripples through the local ecosystem — forcing gray whales to hug the coast, concentrating birds and scavengers, attracting enormous sleeper sharks from the abyss and drawing brown bears to beaches when hunks of reeking flesh wash up high and dry.”

Remember last week when we talked about how scientists were super excited because they figured out that if you sedate a whale you can untangle it easily and then everything will be great? Well, the whale they sedated washed up dead on the beach yesterday. So on second thought: don’t sedate any whales.