WaterNotes

What can a 400 year old northern right whale bone tell you? Apparently, a heck of a lot.
New research published in the journal Conservation Genetics was written up by the BBC just today about northern right whales.  These are the highly endangered species that migrates off of Florida’s coastline at this time of year. Traditionally [...]

Marineland is celebrating their 10th season of the North Atlantic Right Whale Project with a brand new blog and fresh sightings of right whales off of Florida’s northeastern coastline. Seems that the recent blast of Arctic air may have helped encourage the whales further along their migration route; there have already been sightings along Indialantic [...]

Vancouver Aquarium welcomed a little female beluga to their pod back in June of this year and now they’re ready to name the toddler. In keeping with traditions at many marine centers and zoos, they’ve opened up a contest to their guests and supporters to come up with a great name. Although, in [...]

Its been a hard few weeks here in central Florida. The torrential rains made it hard to work, hard to drive, and especially hard to carry out cleanups. Thankfully the skies parted this morning and a joint cleanup, including data collection for the Ocean Conservancy, got off to a good start out on [...]

The moment of truth has arrived. Let’s see if my attempts to memorize and list all the ocean going dolphins, all the porpoises, and all the freshwater dolphins have actually paid off.
Family Delphinidae (the oceanic dolphins)
1.  Atlantic bottlenose
2.  Indopacific bottlenose
3.  Atlantic spotted
4.  Indopacific spotted
5.  Atlantic humpbacked dolphin
6.  Pacific humpbacked dolphin
7.  Northern right whale dolphin
8.  Southern [...]

For the last few months my personal challenge was to memorize and list all 32-36 species of oceanic dolphin, all five species of freshwater dolphin, and all six species of true porpoise.
But perhaps I should back up a few squares first and relate a bit about the dolphin family tree. There are roughly eighty known [...]

The Oceania Project has a haunting collection of humpback whale recordings posted to their channel on YouTube. While many are overlaid with a native american cedar flute (which I’m not the biggest fan of), the above video is pure Megaptera novaeangliae. Just beautiful.