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Good News Network

Sighting of Many Blue Whales Around the Seychelles is First in Decades – 'Phenomenal'

It's the first time they've been seen in these warm seas since 1966, and it's a wonderful milestone in a long and perhaps successful recover

"The Seychelles has become a major tourist destination for beachgoing and scuba diving, but it’s not only humans that are beginning to flock to this island.

In what marine biologists have described as a “phenomenal finding,” a survey of whales around the territorial waters of this archipelagic nation revealed the presence of blue whales—over a dozen.

It’s the first time they’ve been seen in these warm seas since 1966, and it’s a wonderful milestone in a long and increasingly successful recovery for the world’s largest animal.

The Seychelles are located in the Indian Ocean off the east coast of Africa, and they were historically a stopover point for Soviet whalers en route to Antarctica. The years 1963 to 1966 were particularly difficult for whales here, and many were taken before the International Convention on the Regulation of Whaling put an end to the practice of hunting baleen whales in 1973.

Since 1966, no dedicated investigation of whales in the Seychelles had been made until 2020, when a partnership of four universities conducted an acoustic survey over the period of two years.

They made five different sightings of groups of up to 10 animals.

“This was a phenomenal finding,” Jeremy Kiszka, a co-author of the paper from Florida International University, wrote in The Conversation. “We were prepared to not see any blue whales due to the high level of hunting that occurred fairly recently and absolutely no information was available since the last blue whale was killed in the region in 1964.” ...

The team behind the survey sent images taken of the whales’ dorsal sides to a database to see if any of them had been recorded before, and amid the reel, not a single one was a match with any other photographed whale.

This, the team suggests, means they have probably never been seen before, which for a species that big might seem strange, but along with there being only 5,000 to 15,000 on Earth, they migrate vast distances while diving deep, making recording their movements incredibly challenging.

The survey identified 23 whale species in total using hydroponic mics over 2 years with peak activity coming between December and April. This is a fascinating finding that suggests something about the seas around the Seychelles makes for excellent whale habitat."

-via Good News Network, April 30, 2024

Nita: I came out to find my pen and I'm honestly feeling so attacked right now.

your fave is problematic: diane duane

subsists on the tears of her fans

married to a guy who knows everything about everything

knows the ways of the force and wont share

creates delicious-looking food and uses the wrong measurement system. no one likes metric, diane. #1776

writes fanfic of her own characters

does the ff.net thing where she talks to her own characters in her fanfic of her own series

makes us wait forever for new books and has the nerve to make it worth it

has worked on all of your childhood faves. ALL OF THEM

I'm in Northern Michigan!

Map of cousins based on the directory. Some other cousins were added who have mentioned their whereabouts in conversation and i happened to remember but who are not listed. That said, consider this your invitation to update your directory listing if you so desire. There are several of you who are not in it who maybe want to be? (No pressure, of course!)

Orange dots are for people whose specific location was unclear, but i put them in the correct state/province (except that one in the middle of Canada, because all it said was ‘Canada’). Blue dots are close to the cities that were listed.

Some people have two dots, like me because i listed Cleveland and Boston, or like Erin because i know she’s moving soon.

Other locations listed were China, Japan, Asia, and i know there is at least one person in Germany.

"With!"

im re-reading. long time no see! :)

Still breathing hard from what she’d been through, Dairine turned away and walked back to the house, slowly, and went into her room and shut the door. And only then did she allow herself, somewhat later, the very smallest smile.

Scale of Universe Measured with 1-Percent Accuracy

An ultraprecise new galaxy map is shedding light on the properties of dark energy, the mysterious force thought to be responsible for the universe’s accelerating expansion.

Image: An artist’s concept of the latest, highly accurate measurement of the universe from the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey. The spheres show the current size of the “baryon acoustic oscillations” (BAOs) from the early universe, which have helped to set the distribution of galaxies that we see in the universe today. BAOs can be used as a “standard ruler” (white line) to measure the distances to all the galaxies in the universe. Credit: Zosia Rostomian, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

A team of researchers working with the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS) has determined the distances to galaxies more than 6 billion light-years away to within 1 percent accuracy — an unprecedented measurement.

"There are not many things in our daily lives that we know to 1-percent accuracy," David Schlegel, a physicist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the principal investigator of BOSS, said in a statement. "I now know the size of the universe better than I know the size of my house."