We don’t have the time to run the Savethewhales.com website. We therefore wish to sell it. It’s been fun.

We advice you only to bid - if you have a valid offer. You can submit your offer and email - as a comment to this post.

We got many questions on how you can help, and make a difference.

We found out that the most effective way to help - is to create awareness. If you are passionate about something special, then spread the word. Tell you friends about it and let them know how you feel. The best way to save the whales is to create awareness, informing people about the whales. We advice not to “adopt” whales or give money to greedy “non-profit” organisations. The solution is not your wallet but the ability to create awareness.

Save The Whales.

Norwegian whalers caught just over half their quota of 1,052 minke whales in 2007, a small rise from last year, but hunters and their opponents dispute whether regulations or dwindling demand cut back the catch.

Norway and Iceland are the only nations to allow “commercial” whale hunts despite a two-decade moratorium on whaling by the International Whaling Commission. Japan catches hundreds of minke whales but says it is for scientific purposes.

“A total of 592 whales have been caught in 2007,” Harald Dahl of Norway’s fishing association said. That is an increase of 47 whales from last year, when 545 whales were harpooned.

Rune Sroevik, a spokesman for the High North Alliance, which represents whalers’ interests, said this year’s catch had been limited by government rules imposed after the season started.

“If this had not happened, I would estimate that about 200 more whales could have been caught,” Sroevik said, adding that weather had been good for this year’s hunt, which ended on Friday.

Area quotas were imposed on whalers after 165 of the marine mammals were caught at the start of the season. The regulations are in line with recommendations made in the early 1990s by the 77-member International Whaling Commission (IWC), the Ministry of Fisheries and Coastal Affairs said.

Norwegian media reported on Friday that a whaling ship in the Lofoten isles of northern Norway had sunk, and that police did not rule out sabotage. Instructions in Norwegian on “How to sink a whale ship” can easily be found

DECLINING DEMAND

Environmental group Greenpeace, which condemns whaling, said declining demand explained why fewer whales had been caught than the quota set by the Norwegian government allowed.

“Whalers have been stopped by economic interest because there is no market for whale meat in Norway or elsewhere. Even if they could catch more … they chose not to,” said Truls Gulowsen, manager of Greenpeace Norway.

Though its whalers landed only half their quota for the second season in a row, Norway says minke whales are plentiful in the North Atlantic, unlike blue whales, which were hunted to the brink of extinction before the IWC’s 1986 moratorium.

“If we are to reach the target … we have to make sure we do not catch more than the quota in areas where availability has been quite good … to leave some for next year,” said Halvard Peter Johnasen, department director at the ministry.

Norway, which resumed commercial hunting of minke whales in 1993 despite the moratorium, angered many nations by raising its quota in 2006 to over 1,000, the highest in two decades.

The area restrictions mean extra travel time for whalers to get to waters further off the coast. Hunters did not catch a single whale of a quota of 152 around the North Atlantic island of Jan Mayen, halfway to Greenland.

Sroevik said that despite the regulations, 2007 had still proved to be a better season than 2006 for the whalers.

“Prices have increased, more volume has been caught. Weather conditions have been good compared to 2006,” he said.

“Last year, the weather played the whalers a trick. This year the weather and the market have played on their team, but political regulations have not,” he said.

Dahl said the average whale meat price per kilo rose to 31.86 Norwegian crowns ($5.48) from 30.11 crowns in 2006 and was likely to end up above 32 crowns.

“We are very glad to see baiji still exist in the world,” Wang was quoted as saying by Xinhua.

The news comes shortly after China’s leading expert on the baiji, Wang Ding, pronounced the species extinct following a fruitless 38-day search of the Yangtze by an international team of scientists.

At the time expedition members said that a few Baiji may still exist in the murky waters of the Yangtze but that the population is no longer viable and any stragglers will die out within a generation. In other words, the reprieve will likely be short-lived.

“We have to accept the fact, that the Baiji is functionally extinct. It is a tragedy, a loss not only for China, but for the entire world,” said August Pfluger, a noted Baiji expert and head of baiji.org, a group that seeks to protect the dolphin.

The Chinese government has said it will try to capture any remaining baiji for a captive breeding program.

The baiji’s demise

The ultimate demise of the Baiji was caused by pollution, overfishing, boat traffic, and obstructions like dams. Unusually, the dolphin’s decline was not tied to direct harvesting by humans.

When the Baiji is officially declared extinct by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature / World Conservation Union (IUCN) — 50 years after its last recorded sighting — it will be first large aquatic mammal to disappear since the Caribbean monk seal in the 1950s. Chinese rivers still support a population of freshwater cetaceans: the endemic Yangtze Finless Porpoise. However, the Baiji survey found less than 400.

“Their numbers are declining at an alarming rate. If we do not act soon they will become a second Baiji”, said Wang Ding, deputy director of the Institute of Hydrobiology of the Chinese Academy of Science in Wuhan.

“The loss of such a unique and charismatic species is a shocking tragedy. The Yangtze River dolphin was a remarkable mammal that separated from all other species over twenty million years ago. This extinction represents the disappearance of a complete branch of the evolutionary tree of life and emphasizes that we have yet to take full responsibility in our role as guardians of the planet,� said Dr Sam Turvey of the Zoological Society of London and a participant in the six-week search for baiji. “The baiji’s extinction also highlights the need for new conservation initiatives in China’s increasingly threatened Yangtze ecosystem, which is also home to endangered freshwater porpoises, seven-metre long fish, giant salamanders and white Siberian cranes.�

She’s got a sparkle in her eye and a distinctive dolphin grin.

But Winter, the year-old dolphin at the Clearwater Marine Aquarium in Florida, is missing a very significant part of her anatomy: a tail.

The young bottlenosed dolphin lost her tail and joint when she was caught in a crab trap near Indian River Lagoon, along Florida’s east coast. She was just a baby of three months.

The rope wrapped around her tail and cut off the blood supply. “It looked like paper,” said Dana Zucker, chief operating officer of the Clearwater Marine Aquarium. “Bit by bit over the weeks it just fell off.”

The lack of a tail did not slow the bright dolphin down, however. Instead, Winter simply learned how to swim without — using a startling combination of moves that resemble an alligator’s undulating swimming style and a shark’s side-to-side tail swipes.

Though flippers are normally employed for steering and braking, Winter uses them to work up momentum.

Despite her ingenuity, scientists searched for a possible solution to the missing tail - and they may just have found one.

A prosthetic specialist has invented a prosthetic tail for Winter, including a gel sleeve that will not irritate her sensitive skin.

It is the first for a dolphin, and it remains to be seen how successful it will be over the long-term.

In the meantime, however, Winter the tailless dolphin is making history.

Source:http://www.dailymail.co.uk

Undersea explorer Robert Ballard leans back and smiles at the screens arrayed above his desk. One displays a view of a remote operating vessel, another scans along a seafloor never before viewed by humans.

It’s the Black Sea, not far from Ukraine, a region long closed to outsiders and now yielding a treasure trove of Byzantine vessels that met their ends 1,000 or more years ago. For Ballard the archaeologist, those vessels and their contents are a delight. For Ballard the explorer, the modern technology he’s testing for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is pretty exciting, too.

Thanks to the massive speed of modern communications, talking to him from a desk in Silver Spring, Md., while he is aboard the research vessel Alliance in the Black Sea is almost as simple as talking to him in person. And that’s the idea.

Ballard is testing a system planned for use aboard NOAA’s new vessel Okeanos Explorer, scheduled to go to sea next year as the first U.S. government vessel dedicated to exploring unknown parts of the ocean.

“It’s mission, literally, is to go where no one has gone before on planet Earth,” Ballard said.

“That means that the exploration could encounter a biological discovery, a geological discovery, hopefully for many of us an archaeological discovery. So there is no way of knowing in advance what the discovery is going to be,” he said.

The plan is to have dozens or hundreds of scientists participate without ever having to leave their homes and universities.

The ship will be in high-speed communications with a center at the University of Rhode Island, and from there via Internet2 to universities and science centers across the country, calling on whatever expertise is needed.

Ballard likens it to a hospital emergency room.
“An emergency room has no idea what the ambulance is going to deliver at 3 o’clock Sunday morning,” he explained. “They don’t know if it’s going to be a head injury, a mother having a baby, a heart attack or whatever,” so the hospital has a system for doctors to be on call.

“Now we’re doing the same sort of thing in support of NOAA,” he said.
The center in Rhode Island will operate like the NASA space center in Houston, which is constantly in contact with the astronauts in outer space, just as Rhode Island will be with the aquanauts in inner space.

Above Ballard’s head, the underwater camera continues to move across the seafloor, passing mainly stones and sand and, suddenly, a series of straight lines and right angles.

Those most likely mark a wreck, the remains of some ancient vessel the explorers will turn and scan again.

Unlike other oceans, the deepest parts of the Black Sea contain no dissolved oxygen, so there are no sea worms to devour the wood of ancient vessels.

Off the coast of Turkey, Ballard said he has found a sunken Byzantine vessel so complete that even the 1,000-year-old masts still rise upward. Wreck sites are littered with containers once used for wine, oil, honey and other trade goods.

That’s the kind of thing he looks for, underwater archaeology.

But what if he finds some unknown new creature, or strange bit of geology beneath the sea?

That’s where the new communication system comes in.

“Scientifically, some of the remote expeditions would have benefited by having more experts on board and this is a way to get more experts,” said Steve Gittings, scientific coordinator for NOAA’s National Marine Sanctuary Program.

For example, he said, when researchers discovered hot-water vents deep in the ocean they had to mount additional trips to bring in experts to study the surprising worms and other life that existed in total darkness around the vents.

Now, with high speed communications, researchers would be called in to study high-definition images in real time.

Also, Gittings said, the system will be beneficial for education programs.

In the past, educational efforts were mounted after scientists returned, perhaps months after they completed a voyage. With the new system, students and teachers will be able to watch research as it happens.

Source:http://www.examiner.com

Thus far this year, there hasn’t been a decline in gray whales but this is the scrawniest they have been since malnourishment and disease claimed a third of

their population in 1999 and 2000, the Los Angeles Times reported.

Scientists suspect the same thing may be happening now that triggered the die-off then: rapid warming of Arctic waters where the whales feed.

Whales depend on fat-rich crustaceans to gain enough weight for their long southerly migration. As Arctic ice recedes, there are fewer crustaceans on the floor of the Bering Sea.

In the hunt for food, some gray whales are extending their 5,000-mile northerly migration beyond the Bering Strait into the Chukchi and Beaufort seas north of Alaska, said Steven Swartz of the National Marine Fisheries Service.

“They need to find new places to feed, because the ocean is changing on them,”

Swartz said. “I hope we are watching a transition rather than a serious problem.”

Source: http://www.physorg.com

LOS MAITENES, Chile (Reuters) - Chilean teenagers on a field trip have found what experts say could be a treasure trove of fossils from whales which died millions of years ago.

Teenagers from a school in Concon, a town on the Pacific coast, found the fossils last month in the hills near the village of Los Maitenes, nearly four miles from the sea and 100 miles from the capital Santiago.

They found fossilized jawbones, backbones and ribs of four whales which scientists say likely died 5 million years ago.

Chilean teenagers find trove of whale fossils  A general view of the area where students found fossils in Los Maitenes town, about 160 km (99 miles)

northwest of Santiago, June 26, 2007. In the Town of Los Maitenes, in the central coast of Chile, a group of secondary students discovered some fossil

remains of what could be a prehistoric whale cemetery during a workshop of paleontology.

When it comes to catching squid, which have a keen sense of smell, very good eyesight, and can squirt dark ink to hide their escape, humans could learn a lot from whales, but whales aren’t talking.

The numbers of squid that are eaten by sperm whales far exceed those harvested by men for food on a worldwide basis,” said squid-expert Roger Hanlon of the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts.

But how whales manage to find and devour skiddish squid remains a mystery. One hypothesis, proposed more than 20 years ago, speculated the whales used powerful ultrasound shrieks to knock their squid prey senseless before gulping them down. Like bats and dolphins, some whales use ultrasonic clicks to find prey and navigate.

A new study by Hanlon and his colleagues reveals squid cannot be paralyzed by whale ultrasound. In fact, they are not even aware they are being targeted. The team’s findings are detailed in the July 7 issue of the journal Biology Letters.

The researchers played recorded ultrasound whale clicks to several long-finned squid ‘’Loligo pealeii'’ swimming in a water tank. This species of squid grows to about a foot long and is commonly found off the coast of the northeastern United States.

The ultrasound clicks were broadcast at up to 226 decibels, which is about the most intense whale echolocation click a squid would be exposed to in the wild. Not only were the squid not knocked senseless, they did not react at all to the ultrasound bursts, and actually swam in front of the speaker as if nothing were happening.

“That’s like a Bose commercial where you’re sitting there and your hair is straight back because the sound is blasting out,” Hanlon said. “That to us was a stunning result. We did the experiment several times over because we could hardly believe it ourselves.”

So if whales don’t use sound waves to knock out squid, how do they catch them?

“Why can’t ‘’squids'’ see some aspects of this big whale heading down on them at a zillion miles an hour? That’s a big mystery,”

When a confused whale swam up the Thames to its death last year, marine biologists blamed seismic surveying for sending it off course.

Now a listening system that searches for whales and dolphins could help save hundreds of such creatures.

The equipment, developed by scientists at the University of Plymouth, scans for calls and songs to pinpoint their exact location beneath the waves.

Conservationists think that underwater explosions used by the oil industry and geologists to examine the sea bed disorientate nearby marine mammals and cause many beach strandings.

About 800 whales, dolphins and porpoises are stranded on British shores every year - a figure that has doubled in a decade. Over the same period, a big rise has been reported in the amount of underwater noise generated by people.

The new system, which will go on trial on a survey ship this summer, involves picking up the series of high-pitched clicks and whistles from the animals on a network of underwater microphones. The data is used to calculate their positions so that undersea blasts are not set off near them.

“Whales and dolphins vocalise in their everyday lives to communicate, navigate and find food,” said Ross Compton, the research project’s leader. “Until now, there has been no reliable way of using these calls to locate the animals.

“They spend 80 per cent of their time under water, so visual searches are not terribly useful.”

More than 100 seismic surveys are carried out in British waters every year, each involving dozens of daily blasts. The sound waves bounce off undersea rocks and are used to map the ocean floor and search for oil below it.

Seismic surveying in the North Sea is thought to have disorientated a young northern bottle-nosed whale last year, diverting it from its migratory route and sending it on a fatal journey into London.

At close range, loud noises are also thought to damage the hearing of whales and dolphins, making it harder for them to navigate and find food.

Recent research has also suggested that underwater noise from military sonar and seismic surveys may be responsible for mass strandings of marine mammals by producing the equivalent of the “bends” suffered by divers.

It is thought the acoustic pulses frighten the animals into surfacing too quickly, resulting in bubbles in the blood and tissues that produce decompression sickness and leave them disorientated. Under British law, survey ships must have observers on deck to confirm there are no marine mammals in the area before such work begins but, as the animals spend much of their time under water, they can be difficult to spot, particularly in bad weather.

In most areas, whales and dolphins must be more than half a mile from a survey, but in some conservation areas the distance increases to almost three miles. Mr Compton, who is working with the seismic survey company Westland GeoProjects, is using microphones towed behind a ship to pick up calls from the animals to help survey teams locate them.

Mark Simmonds, of the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society, said: “Noise underwater is something we don’t understand very well. Whales and dolphins use sound for a range of things crucial for survival. By introducing new loud noises into that environment, the effects can range from physical harm to displacing them and interfering with their navigation.”

Rob Williams, of the sea mammal research unit at the University of St Andrews in Fife, studies the effects of human disturbance on whales. He said: “Anything that tells us that there are animals in a given location is very useful.

“My only concern is that silence should not be used to infer the absence of animals. Not all species are vocal and even the vocal species, like killer whales, may be silent for hours on end. These methods may reduce the risk of harm, but will not eliminate it.”

Source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk