The Lost Whale Pdf Free Download
Crista Wilbers
When he makes a friend he starts to find California an exciting place and wants to stay. With his friend he meets White Beak, a whale, whom his mother had known when she was a child. Leo and White Beak form a connection that helps him to feel closer to his absent mother.
The extraordinary sighting of a grey whale this month in the Mediterranean Sea, six months before the COP26 Climate change summit is to be held in Glasgow, is a stark reminder of the fact that climate change drives ocean change.
Grey whales live in the Pacific Ocean. They observe a long annual migration route between Baja California, Mexico where females give birth to their calves in the winter season, to the Bering Sea between Alaska and Russia where they find their feeding grounds in the summer before they return to the warm waters of Baja. That makes a round trip of about 12,000 miles along the coasts of Mexico, the US, Canada and Alaska. But as extensive as that journey is, they normally never venture into the Atlantic and even less so into the Mediterranean.
According to historic records there was once an Atlantic grey whale population too, but it went extinct in the 17th or 18th century due to hunting, lost forever as a result of human carelessness. So we can safely say that the young grey whale now wandering between the coasts of Morocco, Italy, France and Spain this month is not native to this sea and lost its way due to climate change.
Humphrey the Whale is a humpback whale that twice deviated from his Mexico to Alaska migration by entering San Francisco Bay.[1][2] This behavior is unusual for a humpback whale, and Humphrey attracted wide media attention when entering the bay in both 1985 and 1990. Both of his bay incursions resulted in rescue by the Marine Mammal Center, based in Marin County, California, assisted by the United States Coast Guard and hundreds of other volunteers.
Humpback whales have a stocky body with well-defined humps and black upper elements. The head and lower jaw are covered with knobs called tubercles, which are actually hair follicles and are characteristic of the species. The tail flukes, which are lifted high in the dive sequence, have wavy rear edges.
In 1985, a 40-foot-long (12-meter) humpback entered San Francisco Bay and was followed closely on the evening news by Bay Area television stations.[5] After a few days in the bay, the whale, nicknamed Humphrey,[6] swam up the Sacramento River into a freshwater habitat. The whale, first spotted at Oakland's Outer Harbor October 10, 1985,[6] swam up the Carquinez Strait, the Sacramento River and under the Rio Vista Bridge to a dead-end slough 69 miles (111 kilometers) from the ocean.[7][8]
Numerous attempts to coax him back to the ocean failed. One initial attempt involved playing sounds of orcas to frighten Humphrey into leaving.[9] Another attempt was made using a "sound net" in which people in a flotilla of boats made unpleasant noises behind the whale by banging on steel pipes, a Japanese fishing technique known as "oikomi".[7] Several weeks of being trapped in the fresh water of the Sacramento Delta brought signs of physical stress in the whale. His skin was graying[9] and he was becoming more and more listless. None of the traditional herding techniques were working, and Humphrey appeared to be dying.
As a last-ditch effort to save the whale, Dr. Louis Herman, a researcher of dolphins and humpback whales, postulated that it would be possible to lure it out by playing acoustic recordings of whale social and feeding sounds. Dr. Diana Reiss, a dolphin researcher and a member of the rescue team was appointed to head the playback operation. [9]The actual recordings used were of Humpback whales feeding in Alaskan waters and were obtained from Dr. Scott Baker. Bernie Krause, an acoustician, offered to loop the recordings of humpback whale feeding songs. [6] However, to get the sounds into the water required a powerful speaker and amplification system that only the Navy was likely to have. Krause contacted Greg Pless who was in charge of the underwater acoustics research laboratory for the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, where one of the few high-power J-11 underwater transducers existed in the country. Pless and his colleague Dale Galarowicz quickly gained Navy permission and rushed the equipment to Rio Vista where Humphrey was last seen.
Early the next morning, the equipment was loaded onto the private yacht, Boot Legger, donated by its owner for the rescue effort. Directed to the location in the slough where Humphrey was last seen, the speaker was lowered over the side of the boat, the sounds were played, and Humphrey emerged from the water at the bow of the ship. The captain quickly started down the river with Humphrey close in tow. With the assistance of numerous fish and wildlife agencies, including the Army's 481st Transportation Company (Heavy Boat), the crew led him the many miles back down the Sacramento river, alternately playing and not playing the whale songs to keep his interest. Large numbers of spectators lined the banks of the river.
As they approached the San Francisco Bay and the water gained in salinity, Humphrey became visibly excited and began sounding. Though the crew lost sight of him that night, they picked him back up in the morning and led him out through the Golden Gate bridge into the Pacific Ocean on November 4, 1985, at 4:36 p.m.[9] The town of Rio Vista later erected a commemorative granite marker at City Hall at the east end of Main Street.[7][10] A restaurant in Antioch was named Humphrey's in the whale's honor. The restaurant has since been remodeled and its name changed to 'Smith's Landing Seafood Grill'.[11]
This time, he was successfully guided back to the Pacific Ocean using a combination of "oikomi" simultaneously with the broadcast of attractive sounds of humpback whales preparing to feed from a boat headed towards the open ocean. Researchers Louis Herman and Bernie Krause led a team of scientists who used sound recordings of natural whale feeding vocalizations to guide Humphrey back to safety. These sounds were produced for a swimming trajectory of 50 miles (80 km) until Humphrey reached the Pacific Ocean, sometimes attaining speeds of 30 miles per hour (48 km/h).[13]
A beluga whale that became a French celebrity after a wrong turn took it up the Seine River had to be euthanized Wednesday after experiencing health complications during an urgent rescue operation, authorities said.
Fearing the malnourished creature would not survive in the Seine much longer, a wildlife conservation group and veterinarians planned to move the lost whale to a saltwater port in Normandy, from where they hoped to return it to the open sea.
The group and veterinarians noted the whale had responded to a cocktail of antibiotics and vitamins over the last few days, making them hopeful it would recover once it was back in a saltwater environment.
The sad end to a saga that gripped France in recent days came after experts determined the whale "was too weakened to be put back into water," Guillaume Lericolais, the sub-prefect of France's Calvados region, said.
The 17 million-year-old fossil of a beaked whale was originally found in 1964, 740 kilometres inland from the Kenyan coast, and 620 metres above sea level, according to a paper published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.
"At the time when the whale stranded, it was assumed that there was a pan-African rainforest across the entire area," says lead author and geoscientist Dr Henry Wichura from the University of Potsdam, Germany.
The original expedition's field notes made no reference to a whale fossil, so it was only when Wichura discovered a footnote in the original catalogue (see image above) explaining that the turtle was in fact a whale that the last piece of the puzzle fell into place.
The location was critical, because the fossil was unearthed just below a layer of basalt that could be accurately dated as being 17 million years old, proving that the whale's stranding must have happened before that time, and the uplift after it.
Scientists are thinking about different ways of using sound to get the whale to turn around. One option is to play sounds of hunting orcas (killer whales) to trick the whale into turning around. Another is to play sounds of humpback whales to attract it.
Rio has been sent to live with a grandmother he barely knows in California, while his mum is in hospital back home. Alone and adrift, the only thing that makes him smile is joining his new friend Marina on her dad's whale watching trips. That is until an incredible encounter with White Beak, a gentle giant of the sea changes everything. But when White Beak goes missing, Rio must set out on a desperate quest to find his whale and somehow save his mum.
Interest Piqued, Rio makes friends with Marina whose dad runs a whale watching tour and finds himself on the open sea searching for whales. What he is to find out there will change him beyond recognition and what starts out as a mission to make his mum happy turns into a lesson in finding your own purpose in life and listening to the what the world is trying to tell you.
Rio has been sent to live with a grandmother he barely knows in California, while his mum is in hospital. All Rio wants is for Mum to get better so he can return home. But everything changes when he joins a whale-watching trip and meets White Beak, a gentle giant of the sea. Rio forms an instant bond with the whale, and for the first time in ages he feels a spark of hope. Then White Beak goes missing and Rio may be the only person who can help.
SHOW: Look at the picture of people working through the night to help the whale. Talk about how they felt about Humphrey getting through that bridge. Do the people on the bridge and shore seem to know each other? Why are they there?
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