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Let’s say you walk into a club, and the place is hopping. You’ve got just the right timing to grab some bar space and make that quick gesture to the tender, he responds with his face he’ll be right over, you reply with an expression that doesn’t want him to rush. Once you’ve got a frosty cocktail, shaken not stirred, and you’re slipping it down, you do a 180 and that classic move where you lean up against the bar, balancing with your elbows. You survey the scene.
And there she is, out on the dance floor. It appears she’s all alone, and twisting and contorting along with the thumping house beat like she was getting paid for it. She’s poetry in motion, a siren calling you out from a cliffside. She’s even made eye contact with you, and occasionally pursing her lips and batting her eyelashes. And you’re all “Me? Really?” You check to see if other men may be the target of this longdistance body language, but you’re not focused enough to tell. Maybe there are, maybe there ain’t.
Before your golden window is missed, you make a move and pounce. A B-line straight for her, but she’s dancing away from you, almost coyly. This excites you, but then you realize you’re not alone. A little over half a dozen other male suitors are on the prowl as well, and closing in fast. One elbows you not-so-accidentally in the ribs. Another trips his own best friend for a better chance to be near her. Your inner animal instincts flare to life over your psyche, the red mist of jealousy seeps in the corners of your eyes. This shit is getting real. You consider hurling your martini glass into your fellow man’s undeserving face. Welcome to the heat run, and you’ve got to step up your game in a serious way if you want the victory girl.
I’ve never been through this, and chances are you haven’t either, but we all know the competition, especially in the realm of courting a mate. Once the temperature and testosterone are on the rise, rationality and common sense fall to the wayside. Women are the leading cause of stabbing your best friend, or worse, a stranger, in the back. And it is no different in nature’s kingdom, particularly the kingdom of Animalia, Phylum of Mammalia, in the Order of Cetacea. For the first time, marine biologists have filmed the humpback whales’ incredible and titanic mating ritual.
I could foray and foment into my near-obsessive infatuation with the overwhelming love and respect I have for the species, but that’s unnecessary. Just watch these giants of the sea chasing some tail (pun totally intended) and maybe you’ll feel a little of the awe as well.
The humpback sow makes the bulls WORK for it, am I right? Talk about playing hard to get. Survival of the fittest be damned. And I thought there was somebody out there for everybody. I guess the unlucky bulls just got to find themselves a slower sow. Man. Have a happy Thanksgiving everybody.
OMFG that thing is so F-ing enormous.
The Big Daddy of the Deep Blue Sea. The Mother of All Whale Chords. Balaenoptera musculus. The Largest Living Mammals on Earth.
The Blue Whale.
Scientists predict there’s still close to 10,000 blue whales in the ocean due to aggressive hunting in the early 1900′s. The thing is, we rarely see them. There’s actually a lot we don’t know about the blue whale. They’re the largest living things on the planet, excluding Aspen tree root structures, colonies of fungus and the Great Barrier Reef if you can count it. Yet, despite their mass, we have no idea where these beautiful swimmers mate, or even give birth! It’s only hypothesized through migration patterns to occur in the Antarctic Circle where all oceans meet and go the deepest. But pods of blue whales travel all over the world, even being sited up in the Gulf of Maine. Here’s a recent photo of a team following one off Costa Rica:
It's hard to believe but it is quite far away from the diver.
If the diver were right next to the whale, he’d barely be as long as it’s right flipper. For some relative comparison, it’s tail flukes are as big as a regulation soccer goal. The whale’s body is longer than a regulation length basketball court.
Check this out for some other comparisons in stature.
Personally, I’d soil my wetsuit just watching something that massive swim past. These guys had the gall to chase the whales down and tag them for scientific research. Using approximation on rings in the blubber around their ears, they’ve determined the blue whale is one of the oldest living species of animal, averaging about 80 years, the oldest found to be 120 years. And this is just guessing. They don’t even have science or medicine to help them out and they live longer than most humans.
They can also communicate up to 1,000 miles, making the ocean seem a whole lot smaller when they sing their songs to each other. It also boggles my tiny simple brain that the largest creatures on Earth get by on a diet of krill, tiny shrimplike critters only ONE centimeter long. Given, the whales consume up to FOUR METRIC TONS of krill a day.
Just some food for thought, next time you think you’re all big and bad with your puny monkey brain.
A Megaptera novaeangliae requests Marco Queral give him five.
This dude is perhaps one of the luckiest guys in the world right now. (Read this article.) I didn’t even know that I had a secret wish to chill with a humpback until reading this.
I now wish to get quite chill with a lady humpback, maybe ask her “‘sup?”
- Christian Anti-War activists play hide and go seek and halt a training exercise featuring 24,000 Australian and American troops.
- Two Uighur “lawbreakers” are shot by Chinese military in aftermath of rioting that claimed 180 lives in rural China.
- Tennessee forces it’s residents to reexamine that old chestnut, the 2nd Amendment, as it relaxes gun laws.
- This is just a really cool article about whales.
- Obama starts to investigate claims that hundreds/thousands of US captured Taliban fighters were executed or left to suffocate in shipping containers.
- Drunk badger disrupts traffic in Germany.
- Man turns Rome’s Spanish Steps into one of those ball pits at Chuck-E-Cheeze’s.
