The Industrial Production of Death

You know there's something wrong here when "the fish" are referred to in the singular, as if the moment they entered the boat the went from being animals to being food.  Surreal.

Via Gizmodo.

Pseudonyms

Antrhopo-denialists skeptics, meet your match: sperm whales, scientists argue, might have individualized names.  Wired reports.

the big bite

Introducing, L. melvillei, a newly described sperm whale named to honor Herman Melville. Even more bellicose than Moby Dick, L. melvillei was a hyper-carnivorous eater of other whales:

Klaas Post, honorary curator of fossil mammals at the Natural History Museum Rotterdam in the Netherlands, and his colleagues were traveling through a stretch of desert about 50 kilometers southwest of Ica, Peru, in 2008 when they spotted what at first looked like elephant tusks. But they turned out to be teeth from an even less-likely animal: a giant sperm whale.

Perhaps the discovery shouldn’t be a complete surprise. Fossils of the great shark, Carcharocles megalodon, have been found in the same region. Both animals would have lived about 12 million to 13 million years ago during the Miocene. And like megalodon (at 20 meters long, thought to be one of the biggest fish to have ever roamed the sea), L. melvillei is breaking a few records of its own. With jaws more than 5 meters wide, it had the biggest bite of any mammal to have ever lived.

But L. melvillei was quite different from modern sperm whales (hence scientists gave it a new genus name). Today, sperm whales (Physeter macrocephalus) have fairly small lower teeth and almost no teeth on the upper jaw. They primarily eat squid, which they pull in via suction. But L. melvillei had teeth as large as 12 centimeters wide and 36 centimeters long on both its upper and lower jaw, which would have afforded it a much different tactic for hunting: According to the paper published today in Nature, the researchers suspect that the aggressive whale grabbed prey with its teeth, living off of smaller baleen whales (whales with comb-like dental plates instead of teeth, such as the humpback).

Your Meat is Alive

This should make you not want to eat fish ever again: skinned and gutted dog fish wriggling around.

From BoingBoing.

Seahorses

Two things to know about seahorses:

One: They are thought to be the only species in the world to reproduce through "male pregnancy." (And it's an amazing sight.)

Two: They are endangered. From Wired. Yet another reason to strengthen CITES and the other international treaties on fishing.

What do you call that kind of roll?

Director of the recent Oscar-winning documentary, The Cove, helped bust an L.A. sushi restaurant for selling endangered Sei whale meat to customers. And, surprisingly, "illegally selling an endangered species product" is only a misdemeanor.

If you haven't seen The Cove yet, do so. It can be hard to watch in some parts, but it's very well done and a real eye-opener.