Day 37

24th November 2021

The Magnificent

Super, super intelligent life, and you can tell right? Just look at her. Spectacular!

Yep, you guessed it.

Today at Ocean School we learnt all about whales!

First, we learnt the different parts of a humpback whale.

Whales have ears!

Ok, so here’s the lowdown.

Whales are divided into 2 groups:

Baleen whales & toothed whales.

It never occurred to me that some whales have two blowholes. 🤔 The paired blowhole looks just like a human nose!

See!!!

Baleen Whales

Baleen whales take big gulps of food, & then strain out the water leaving only the krill.

There are over 10 types of baleen whales.

The only ones I had heard of were the blue whale, the humpback & the grey whale.

There are LOTS & LOTS of whales. I had no idea there were so many!

Baleen plates look like this.

Pass the floss!

Toothed Whales

The most well-known of the toothed whales must be the orca whale or killer whale.

But there are tonnes more!

The sperm whale, pilot whale, narwhal, beluga & even dolphins.

Dolphins are whales?!

Huh? Am I the last person on earth to know that? 🤔

Orcas in the wild, where they belong.

Humpback Whale Songs

We learnt that humpback’s have the most complex songs of all the whales & call out their song for several hours at a time.

The same song, over and over and over, and no one really knows what it means.

Different groups have signature songs, and they change their song every year!

When we got home, we had to have a listen. I’m pretty sure the only reference the kids have for whale sounds is Dory from Finding Nemo.

So, I thought we better fix that.

Watch Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDqP7kcr-sc

No, we didn’t go the full 8 hours! 😂

Shamu

When we were looking at whales on YouTube, we came across orca wales and the kids called out ‘Shamu! Shamu!’

Nice work SeaWorld.

The kids have a giant stuffed orca whale that used to be mine when I was young. I bought it from San Diego SeaWorld when we took a big family trip to the US.

At the time, Shamu the whale in the show had just had a baby. There were lots of celebrations about this at the time. (I just learnt today that they name ALL their whales Shamu. They even trademarked the name. The original Shamu died in 1971 😮😮😮 I’m feeling totally jilted about it. Grrrr).

So anyway, we went to the orca show.

It was mesmerising.

I had never seen anything more impressive in my life.

The show was packed. The mood was electric.

Watching the orca leap out of the water with a diver standing in its mouth was unbelievable!

They surfed on the whales, they cuddled them & at the end of the show the orca did the signature wave to the crowd followed by an epic breach that saturated the first 15 rows.

We got wet. We were that close!

It was amazing.

So, I get it. People want to see the orca’s.

I walked right out of that show and bought an enormous plush toy of Shamu for $40 USD. (I know!!)

I can remember because my mum thought I had won it! 😂 She was disappointed when she found out how much I paid for it. (Oops! I really wanted it!!)

Our discussion led to the film Blackfish, which announced to the world that SeaWorld had not been honest with its visitors and that the whales were actually living in misery.

So much so, they had become aggressive towards their trainers and even attacked & killed some of them.

We chatted for a while and then I asked them if they wanted to watch Blackfish. They said yes, but I really didn’t think they would last more than 10 minutes.

Wrong!

They sat transfixed for almost an hour before it was bedtime.

They were so interested.

As a parent you’re never too sure how much of the real world to unravel for your kids.

I’m still not sure I made the right decision. Some parts were a bit gruesome. I kind of distracted them at some points.

We really want them to question the world & why we do things.

I felt sad that I had contributed to the SeaWorld misery.

As a child I was so enthralled by it.

As an adult I am horrified. 😭😭😭

If you haven’t seen Blackfish, check out the trailer below. Available for rent on YouTube.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLOeH-Oq_1Y

The Dive

After our talk about whales. It was dive time.

We had talked about different whale behaviours and so they practiced flipper slapping, spy hopping (where the whale pokes his head up like a meer cat, has a quick look around, then disappears again), breaching and tail slapping.

They had to see if they could dive straight down, keep their flippers together & slowly descend into the water without making a splash, like a whale.

From the shore, there was lots of thrashing and splashing and diving. 😂😂😂