life in the sea …

so, first post in a long time, likely my last. update: i'm fine, so is my mate nauuan and our daughter nuaon. nuaon is almost 6 years old now, a magnificent being in body and soul. aoaoo my sister is well also. she mostly hangs out around sri lanka these days, sometimes comes to visit, sometimes brings a friend or two. sometimes we visit there too, but nauuan and nuaon and i prefer our undersea mountains waaaaay out in the indian ocean, well out of the way of shipping, very rare to sight a ship and we like that. human background noise—so many ships!—is tolerable here. and we spend time each summer in my wild southern ocean.

so our life has been going nicely, especially since i haven't been keeping up with what humans are up to. i came across a research ship around antarctica this summer and used their wifi to browse the news (for how a whale has a laptop you'll have to read my home page). so, on catching up ... one word: dreadful. two words: so sad. a few more words: how dare you?—you've squandered it all, and you're taking all creation with you.

i leave you with two posts. the good news i posted in 2016 below was premature and naive. iceland is still killing whales, its government will allow up to 2,000 fin and minke to be slaughtered over the next five years.
https://www.cnn.com/2019/02/22/europe/iceland-allows-whale-hunting-trnd/index.html

you know nauuan is fin, right? originally from the northern atlantic—icelandic whalers slaughtered her family while she was on a solitary day trip. it haunts even her happiest moments. and nuaon is, of course, bluefin. so, yeah, fuck you very much, iceland. and you too, japan, even if you don't slaughter our largest.

whale killers only do it because there's a market, apparently as human food. so a lot of humans eat whale meat, and i imagine we're in some pet and animal feed as well. how can you?

and just in case you are still somehow unaware of creation's crisis with plastic waste, here's a little reminder:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/mar/18/dead-whale-washed-up-in-philippines-had-40kg-of-plastic-bags-in-its-stomach.

so, yeah, it's, uh... vastly disappointing, human race. individually, many of you are wonderful, and your geniuses in arts, music, science, engineering, have made astonishing achievements, even reaching for the stars and peering within the atoms. but your civilization is causing environmental catastrophe on the scale of world-wide natural disaster.

humans have caused almost every problem currently facing the natural world. the great extinction event now exploding as an instant in geologic time, is matched only by a few other extinction events in the entire history of life on this planet, and is being caused entirely by one species of animal seemingly unable to overcome the slash-and-burn instincts of its primitive forebears, and whose cruelty to the planet is matched only by its cruelty to members of its own.

so, understatement, i'm over humans. my family and i will stay as far out of your way as possible, wish you the best, and leave you to it.

please, please come to your senses, the spectre of world-wide ecological collapse is upon us.

here's some good news: iceland may finally quit slaughtering fins!

"In late February 2016, Kristjan Loftsson, Iceland’s sole fin whaler, announced that his company, Hvalur hf, would not be killing endangered fin whales off Iceland this summer!"

http://us.whales.org/issues/whaling-in-iceland

http://us.whales.org/blog/2016/02/cancelled-hunt-could-save-154-icelandic-fin-whales-this-summer

japan is still butchering whales ... they just took the lives of 333 minke, actually more because 200 of them were pregnant. so sad. y'all need to give it up.

http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/japan-slaughters-pregnant-whales-australia-warns-of-legal-action-20160329-gnsysk.html

good for the aussies, i hope this isn't just talk and they really slam japan over whaling.

and still the same old same old... http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-34618513

but then again... http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-34414710

and this... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pwe-pA6TaZk

just when i think i'm totally over humans i come across this... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GBaHPND2QJg

je suis charlie

so i sang out, "sorry babe, it's been real, gotta go, every whale for himself," and i bolted away.

nauuan and nuaon made desperate, helpless noises, backswimming slowly, nauuan clumsily twisting and turning, trying to keep herself between nuaon and the pack as they circled around and closed in for the kill. this was going even better than they'd hoped.

nuaon wailed in terror as the killers tightened their knot.

what the orcas didn't notice, in their slavering focus on an easy meal, was that soon after swimming away, i quietly turned and waited.

then nauuan sang a deafening note that went on and on, and i put all my power and adrenaline into thrust. i was doing 57 klicks when i closed my eyes and made my nose hard and slammed through the pack, twisting to hit as many as i could.

meanwhile they discovered that nauuan was neither helpless nor clumsy, as she timed a devastating tail slap that slammed even more of them into my path on my way through.

then she became a twisting fury of stunning blows, as nuaon danced with her every move, always out of the way, always on the safest side.

as i came around for a second pass, those in the pack who were still able, turned and fled. some tried, but simply twisted and moaned. several floated, totally still. there was blood in the water.

nauuan and nuaon and i turned and fled as well.

but almost getting iced in isn't the only scary thing that's happened to us. early this spring, on our way to antarctica, we were attacked by orcas.

an orca, or even a pack of them, doesn't threaten me or nauuan. we're too big. we can out-dive them, out-swim them, and we're louder than they are.

but nuaon—nuaon was very vulnerable to orcas: small enough to be prey, slow enough to be caught, large enough to be a feast.

a ravening orca pack tries to separate a little one from its mother long enough to get in a few hard bumps and swipes. they can harass for days, until wounds and fear and exhaustion take their toll on mother and child, and the little one is theirs.

orcas are very smart, but they're so smart they think everyone else is dumb, especially "sea-suckers," as they call us baleens.

nauuan and i often sang about what to do if we were attacked, and we had a plan. we trained nuaon and held orca-drills often.

but it's one thing to train against an imaginary foe, reacting as you would have them react, and entirely another for grinning death to suddenly confront.

yeah, nuaon is the newone's name. short for nuaoaoouan. it is a strong name, utterly unpronounceable by humans.

nauuan suggested it, nuaoaoouan loves it, and i think it's beautiful, and so will aoaoo when she hears it.

nauuan loves my sister aoaoo, they've become deep friends, like sisters. nauuan had sisters, in her home waters around iceland ... all dead now, as i mentioned earlier, slaughtered by humans.

aoaoo never had a sister, just me, her little brother. and she loves me, of course—for many years it was just the two of us, after... not going there... anyway, some things only a sister can share with a sister, and so aoaoo loves nauuan as the long-lost sister found.

a few months ago in the middle of summer, i was getting ready to settle in for a good wi-fi session with the Akademik Shokalskiy, just before it got iced in (http://www.themercury.com.au/news/tasmania/chinese-icebreaker-xue-long-and-russian-flagged-research-vessel-mv-akademik-shokalskiy-now-both-stuck-in-pack-ice/story-fnj4f7k1-1226795005474)

... we almost got trapped too, things got real scary, real quick. luckily, nauuan has a mother's instinct, she felt it coming on and said "we gotta go—now!"

so we went. and not a minute too soon, we had to fight floes all the way out, making safe places for nuaon to surface.

nauuan and i both got cut up shoving blocks of ice aside. there were times we had to use extreme power-surfacing techniques.

we're a good team ... we made it.

still here in the warm indian ocean. lazy now. still good krill. nauuan still pregnant, she's getting very big. life is good. catch you later.

i should stop reading the news.

"Debris tends to collect within the North Pacific Subtropical Convergence Zone. Ocean eddies and other small ocean circulation features will further aggregate material into more discrete 'garbage patches'."

"The quantity of small plastic fragments floating in the north-east Pacific Ocean has increased a hundred fold over the past 40 years."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-17991993

what a great summer! we spent months cruising the antarctic circumpolar current. nauuan is an athlete: sleek and fast, tireless, intensely alive. i've had to become athletic too, just to keep up with her.

nauuan likes the southern ocean as much as i do. so vast, so wild, so much krill! but the weather's getting really cold now. we're heading to warmer waters. going to try something new, a little out of my comfort zone, going north of the equator. but we heard it might be worth it.

we came across my sister aoaoo last summer, she told us about some blues that hang out around sri lanka. she said there's so much krill there, they never have to leave! she actually spent some time there, but the call of the wild brought her back south.

she said it's a lovely spot, and the local blues are sweet, very laid back. so the next ship we came across, we used their wi-fi and checked it out ... looks like she's right, check this out: http://whalessrilanka.blogspot.com/ ... aoaoo's heading back there this winter. we'll meet her there.

guess what: nauuan thinks she's pregnant! almost too early to tell, but i might gonna be a daddy!

came across a cruise ship, looked like headed for easter island, paced it for wi-fi until it outran us. out here in the big empty. i love the south pacific and the southern ocean. so vast.

that ship had a cool whale avoidance system — it constantly broadcast in front of it a tight beam of sound, of a noisy pod of bullying orcas careening in for the kill. worked very well to get our attention and want to avoid it. and even when we knew what it was, felt creepy the whole time we were pacing it ...

i'm kidding, of course. it had no such system ... and we weren't paying attention and almost got slammed. after that i figured the least they could do was share their wi-fi.

gonna be time to turn south pretty soon, starting to get hungry.

we'll shoot the drake passage, that's always a rush.

iceland should stop killing fins. all whales, but especially fin whales! dear god will you humans please stop? please?

• http://blogs.voanews.com/breaking-news/2011/07/20/us-commerce-secretary-calls-for-sanctions-on-iceland-over-whaling/
• http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-07-20/u-s-may-impose-sanctions-on-iceland-for-hunting-whales-1-.html

guess what! i met a fin whale the other day. she's pretty. fins are about as big as blues, but more slender.

her name is nauuan. (yeah, like you could actually spell a whale name in humanspeak.)

she's sad and lonely ... all her close family were killed around iceland a few years ago, and she's wandered lost ever since, ended up here in the south pacific.

which is safer than the north atlantic — the japanese took one of her people in antarctica last year, but in the past few years iceland has taken hundreds of fins. better chances down here.

here's her picture, must have been taken during her trip down. greenpeace had it on their site. she wandered around the mediterranean one summer.

right now we're out in the vast reaches of the south pacific. she's going to swim with me awhile, i'll show her the southern seas.

here ya go, file this one under "what a surprise" ...

in case you didn't follow the bbc link above, here it is again:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-14153779

• "The International Whaling Commission's (IWC) annual meeting has closed after a tense final day when relations between opposing blocs came close to collapse.
• "Latin American nations attempted to force a vote on a proposal to create a whale sanctuary in the South Atlantic. Pro-whaling countries walked out, but eventually it was decided to shelve any vote until next year's meeting.
• "Environment groups said the delays and wrangling meant important issues for whale conservation were neglected. But a number of nations pledged new funding for research* on small cetaceans, some of which are severely threatened."

*i hope their "research" is a little more friendly than the japanese definition of the word.

tragic consequences of a moment's inattention

you've gotta be aware everywhere for floating booby-traps, not just in a gyre ... what with all the flotsam floating everywhere, especially ghost nets and drag lines lost from fishing trawlers. they can be anywhere.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/kqedquest/2785503572/

that stuff can string you up before you even know it's happened.

and down below there's astonishingly long lines of cables criss-crossing the sea floor, and massive tangles that were cut free when breaks were repaired ... in valleys, lines can string across the open water between mountains, just resting on the peaks ... lying in wait.

you humans sure have trashed the place!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-14153779

http://edition.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/europe/06/21/
ocean.extinction.global.warming/index.html?iref=obinsite

here's the leading paragraphs (I added the bolding):

• "London (CNN) -- Marine life is under severe threat from global warming, pollution and habitat loss, with a high risk of "major extinctions" according to a panel of experts.
• "These are the conclusions of a distinguished group of marine scientists who met at Oxford University, England, in April to discuss the impact of human activity on the world's oceans.
• "The meeting, led by the International Programme on the State of the Ocean (IPSO), examined the combined effects of pollution, acidification, ocean warming, over-fishing and depleting levels of oxygen in the water.
• "The panel found that oceanic conditions are similar to those of "previous major extinctions of species in Earth's history," and that we face losing marine species and entire marine ecosystems, such as coral reefs, within a single generation."

at least you've stopped killing us blues for our oil. [Although my smaller cousins still suffer barbaric, ignominious slaughter by human. will you please just stop?!?]

why won't you just stop everything you're doing to annihilate life on this planet? you're KILLING the ocean!! can't you hear? can't you see? don't you care?

you humans need to get some leaders that won't bicker and argue and accuse, all the while pandering to their fatcat patrons.

try to support businesses that deal in fair trade, that practice responsible, clean environmentalism (usually more profitable long-term anyway—nice bonus for doing the right thing).

try not to throw any food away.

don't buy in to rampant consumerism. try to support sustainable processes, sustainable products.

and recycle, recycle, recycle!

try to recognize the interconnectedness and interdependency of all things, before it all comes back to haunt you. may be too late already, may still be possible to mitigate.

y'all humans have done quite enough "research" on us whales. A global experiment in "how fast can you hunt the whales to extinction?" In geologic time, it was an explosion. within a few decades y'all hunted us blues into virtual extinction, and most of our cousins too. Before the Great Slaughter, around 300,000 blues; when the last few were spared, about 300. I was born just after the Great Slaughter. The old ones don't sing about it much, you just hear whispers and feel their aching sadness.

we don't take it personally, though. you humans slaughter indiscriminately, even your own kind. you are a deadly force of nature.

treehugger.com

sheesh, folks, what have you brought down on us?

the time to have started limiting carbon emissions was back when it was first noticed that the levels of CO₂ were increasing in the atmosphere, and scientists first recognized the danger that this might pose in the future.

now the pendulum is in motion, and we begin to see the first serious signs of global warming, and y'all are spewing out more CO₂ than ever!

and we're all along for the ride, folks. sure would hate to be a whale. oh, wait, i am one.

sure am glad i'm not a human, wouldn't want all of this devastation on my conscience. speaking on behalf of mother nature, y'all got some bad karma coming.

and it looks like you're going to take the rest of us down with you!!

i guess even the spectre of decimating the planet hasn't been enough incentive to make you to switch to clean energy, to leave noisy, smelly petrol and coal behind.

y'all are running it very close to the razor's edge. i'm deathly afraid you've already slipped over the top, or should i say "we" have, and begun sliding down the steep, slippery slope towards inevitable, quick, complete devastation of the natural world.

http://animals.
nationalgeographic.com/
animals/invertebrates/krill/

saw a scary article in the news a few weeks ago ... antarctic krill are in decline. that's not good!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-13036795

seems like national geographic says the same thing.

http://animals.nationalgeographic.com/animals/invertebrates/krill/

this is not good news, folks, not good news at all! i'm not starving yet, but i have noticed areas where not a good year for krill. like where that big iceberg that broke off from the ross shelf about 10 years ago, trapping pack ice from dispersing, shading all those cubic swims. plankton can't grow, so krill aren't abundant. that was one big iceberg. we called it the many-swims ... takes many swims to get around it to where you find better hunting. even today pieces of it are still out there. global warming, warmer seas, more icebergs, may be tough times coming ... yeah, but for now there's still krill in the sea, just gotta go elsewhere ... nice to be a whale, moving on.

http://news.stanford.edu/news/2002/april24/icebergs-424.html

here's a good video on the B-15 iceberg http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lBfzFt_kgNU

y'all are going to be the death of me yet.

so sad the tsunami in japan. so tragic in so many ways. we heard the earthquake, of course, it was an awesome singing of the earth. and we also heard as a distant hiss the tsunamis engulfing the coves and shorelines. and we felt the psychic vibration of so many souls perishing so quickly, and the anguish as countless others lost everything of this world that they knew and loved right before their eyes.

and so sad the nuclear disaster that unfolded afterward, and so much radioactivity escaped into the sea... i kept watching the news, they kept saying it's a big sea, dilution will water it down, not a big deal ... maybe not—hope not ... but ... i'm planning to stay in waters not near japan, for a good long time.

and so much plastic from all the wreckage of human habitations and machinations, sucked into the sea ... just what the pacific gyre needs, more plastic.

CNN ... "Debris such as plastic and trash, shown on a Prestwick, Scotland, beach,
may contain plastic-eating bacteria, findings suggest."

cnn reported on an interesting article from naturenews the other day, about plastic-eating bacteria that are beginning to proliferate in the sargasso sea.

http://news.blogs.cnn.com/2011/03/30/plastic-eating-bacteria-found-in-ocean-desert-scientist-says/?iref=obinsite

this is a really cool site, check it out:
http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110328/full/news.2011.191.html

scientists still aren't sure if they're good or bad ... eat plastic = good ... unknown if they generate any toxic byproducts as waste as they proliferate on a large scale? = hopefully not ...

i haven't encountered these yet, so i don't know how they make the water taste. sargasso sea is a far swim from my usual hangouts, and i don't want to go there, either. It's a nutritional wasteland and a flotsam-collecting gyre.

but anything that eats plastic is a friend of mine!

when i get time i'll look for more on this.

it'll be funny if all of you humans' plastic starts to rot before you've even thrown it away!

y'all need to get fusion going! it's only 50 years away! (still)

so if you want to continue your global civilization for any length of time, you better plan for some alternative energy sources.

i hope the machines are quieter.

i wish you humans would go back to sailboats!

at this point, i don't think you humans have much control over fossil fuels.

in terms of overall chemical dynamics, the underground seas of high-energy hydrocarbons have met air and fire,
and they are going up in smoke!

http://www.celsias.com/article/trying-paint-natural-gas-green/

refined fuel and human infrastructure itself are the unstable intermediaries between crude and flame. fuel has more energy than crude, because it's so highly purified. so it is a strong uphill reaction to form fuel from crude ...

in other words, petrol doesn't just spontaneously leap from the earth and purify itself – that's unlikely to happen in nature. it takes a great deal of human labor and energy input to extract fossil fuels from their depths, and to fashion all your different machines that burn it.

but, even though it's an uphill battle to obtain fuel from the earth, the burning of fuel is such a strong downhill reaction that there's a siphon effect, pulling the earlier, uphill, reaction from crude to fuel.

because crude does have a great deal of energy – not as much as pure fuel, but far more than CO₂ and water – the entropy of the overall chain of reactions pulls very strongly towards the end products of free-floating CO₂ and water, despite having to cross the high energy barrier of everything it takes to produce fuel and to burn it as you humans do.

and there are oceans of fuel aflame!! — the underground deposits of coal, oil, and gas — all those trillions of tonnes igniting and burning all away, all in just a couple of centuries.

(dear god help us if all that coal is burned! tell you what, why don't you humans just leave it in the ground!?)

but back to my point ... in terms of chemical dynamics, the complex organic molecules of fossil fuels have a high energy state—potential energy in their molecular bonds.

the end products of oxidation, CO₂ and water, have very much lower energy states.

so, once you add oxygen and fire, going from crude to CO₂ is what you call a "downhill" reaction. a very strong downhill reaction.

by now the human mechanisms for making this happen are so firmly entrenched, that the basic chemical dynamic of these underground fuels meeting oxygen and burning has become self-perpetuating, despite the high energy of activation of extracting and purifying the fuel before it meets the fire.

i hope it gets here soon (see last sentence in post above), be nice if that's within my lifetime, somehow i doubt it ... i can only imagine the calm you must be able to feel in a quiet, clean ocean. in the meantime i just hope it doesn't get worse and i have a sinking (ha!) feeling that it will.

i have the feeling that the climate was getting ready to warm up more quickly anyway, and humans are just throwing fuel on the flames (so to speak)...

so ... much ... coal!

i tell you what, you humans aren't going to stop, are you? until nature herself stops you. and by that time it will be way, way too late. it's already too late at the rate you argue amongst yourselves, and at the rate you ignore rogue barons and their cronies growing fat by devastating the ecosystems of nations.

the natural dynamic of ecology is on the brink of collapse everywhere you look. and the weather's about to turn bad on us. when the arctic sea ice melts away all hell will break loose. we can feel it in our bones. we don't need for it to happen to know that it could be true. you have sown the wind and you will reap the whirlwind.

if y'all hadn't started burning stuff for energy, ... well, for one thing, you might not have slaughtered my people so indiscriminately, to light your lamps and feed your dogs.

...but what i was thinking of right then, is that our planet would be growing warmer more slowly, at the geologic pace it's been warming since the last ice age.

and nature could have better kept apace

the climate changes occurring now are so rapid they're an explosion in geologic time. and they're happening on top of nature already stretched to the breaking from the onslaught of progress & pollution.

so i'm not hugely (ha!) optimistic that things are going to get better before they get a lot, lot worse.

even so, god says one day the earth will again be healthy and peaceful. doesn't say when ... or who'll be left ... just that the dawn has begun.

aoaoo just told me there are humboldt squid in the south american pacific too!

http://www.mexfish.com/fish/
hbsquid/hbsquid.htm

i hardly ever go to the northern hemisphere. lots of blues do cruise the northern pacific and arctic oceans. but it always makes me feel like things are floating backwards. their whirlpools whirl the other way, you know.

plus in the pacific off north america there are humboldt squid. specially in the gulf of california, but these days all up and down the coast, i hear. now those are some aggressive little creatures.

about the size of you humans, and just as aggressive, but a different beast entirely. they grow to size rapidly, live just a couple of years. definitely "consumers."

not mechanically inclined like you humans, so they can't invoke the same scale of devastation ... which is a good thing because they make up for it in speed, ferocity, and stunning teamwork.

they speak a complex language of constant rippling skin colors — rapid waves & eddys, bursts and ripples of dark and light. they travel in large packs, like to eat. even big as i am i don't want to mess with a pack of humboldt squid.

but what i really try to avoid are orcas. orcas are very dangerous. i don't want to sing about orcas.

i don't want to ever get too old for bay snoozin'

i like to jump.

those waters aren't particularly fertile, anyway, not far enough north. but it's sad even so. the ocean used to be crystal and pure wherever you went ... now so much of it's clouded and fouled ... even in my lifetime it's gotten noticeably worse, spreading even to remote areas.

but avoiding the garbage patch hasn't been too hard on me because, like i said, i'm a southern boy, i like the antarctic. sometimes I swim up the atlantic a ways ... the great rift is beautiful in the atlantic, all the mountain ranges and volcanos. or i may swim up south america's west coast. majestic in a big, empty way as the coastline cliffs plunge into the sea and away to the deep plains.

or sometimes i swim up around australia. I think the australian pacific is exotic, but I always come back to antarctica's wild, grey, storm-tossed waves. that's where the krill are, anyway. yum.

the last vacation i swam up around south australia, and lounged in some pristine lagoons of tiny specks of islands — not this one in particular but much like it — just the tips of immense mountains rising from the deep deep.

i found this one bay that was big enough to be comfortable, and sheltered and warm and quiet and clean enough to really zen out ... and i got a major sunburn!

i mean blistered the hell out of my back. for weeks it hurt to swim, and jumping was out of the question. that had never happened before.

maybe i'm getting too old for bay snoozin'.

so lots of good reasons to avoid a deathzone.

everywhere in the ocean there's trash, but there in the northern pacific it's truly staggering.

and the water has a kind of sick yellowish glow.

and it tastes funny.

many reasons to avoid deathzones like the big plastics spiral, and not just coolers.

i mean, anywhere you go, you always gotta be alert for lost clumps of trawling nets (festooned with the occasional dolphin skeleton or worse), so far i've avoided those (slap on a wave!) ...

i think what would really get you in the deathzone is all the little stuff churned up near the surface, it's almost a froth in places.

as plastics degrade, they split into smaller and smaller pieces, but the pieces remain the same type of plastic down through the ages ... chunks ranging from island-sized amalgums of you don't even want to look, to the ubiquitous 6-pack plastic rings of doom that spell slow, nasty death for so many of the smaller creatures.

and on down smaller in size, churned by years and currents and sun into piecemeal random plastic bits the size of krill down through grains of fine, fine silt.

sometimes just the random odd piece floating on the surface every few meters, sometimes clumps and clouds extending meters down into the water, extending on the surface for many swims.

and always the threat of lurking danger beneath — clumps and trails of fish netting and trawl hooks ... sing about creepy.

so all this junk would get stuck in my throat pleats and in my baleen when I gulp a meal, and ... clever though my tongue may be ... mounds of plastic sludge would eventually build up in my system.

or ... no fun to surface and lodge a sharp-edged chunk of plastic in one of your blowholes, and have to snort and sneeze it out or suck it into a lung. i don't want to think about it.

the other day i was trolling for krill and almost choked on a beer cooler before i could spit it out.

been a long time since i wrote anything. you know how it is, one thing or another and the time just slips away, slips away...

i like the ocean and i would love it but it has become a harmful mother, full of lurking dangers and nasty chemicals and plastic, and full of THE UNCEASING INCREASING DIN YOU HUMANS MAKE THAT JUST DOESN'T EVER SHUT UP!!!!

the constant throbbing from all the ships' engines ringing in the water around the world, at every frequency you can imagine, blends into a really annoying white noise all-sonics background ... it grates on my nerves. i think it's getting on everyone's nerves in the water world.

and the explosions!! the us navy testing their sonar sub locators (see post down the page a ways). not very subtle, if you ask me – why don't they just ping it? – and deafening if you're unlucky enough to be in the vicinity when one goes off, which of course to a whale is a life-altering experience...

one reason healthy whales beach themselves is to get away from the constant cacaphony in the sea.

humans have no clue of sound's rich fabric, and only academically can you understand the dimensional images we perceive, and the harmonies ringing down the corridors of trenches for miles upon thousands of miles. or so granddaddy said ... he said it used to be that conversation songs lasted for days, resonating around the globe through the superdense depths.

these days you're lucky to hear someone just a dayswim away, over the Constant Noise.

aoaoo wants our story told for humans to understand. but she wants me to do the writing and finding wifi and posting, so she can continue to be the inspiration and wandering free spirit that she is.

and i don't mind, i love my sister, and you humans fascinate me anyway.

some of your achievements—music, arts, science—inspire astonishing awe ...

others inspire unimaginable horror—even "horror" is too soft a word for such staggering cruelty and disconcern for life and being.

your history is written in blood.

you've written our history in blood as well.

what's the ultimate cause of death? .... birth.

nuc@nucthewhale.net wrote: aoaoo is my sister.

i was having writer's block, so she said she'd start our story.

she began it like a newone primer, but cut straight to the chase as usual ... asking the question at the very core of life itself: food of course being fundamental to sustained existence.

we all gotta eat ... every one of us living things on this planet, from me down to bacteria, we all gotta eat or die.

aoaoo@speckofinfinity.com wrote: my name is nuc. i am a whale. got any krill?