Peter Corkeron

Well said Rosaleen

For at least one of those big NGOs, the “Non” part of NGO seems - interesting?

Farewell Tony Thulborn

He taught vertebrate biology when I was an undergraduate. He was kind.

Golden, lobstermen call on Congress to extend right whale regulatory moratorium until 2035 A moratorium on new regulations intended to protect critically endangered North Atlantic right whales is set to expire at the end of 2028. Lobster fishing groups and Rep. Jared Golden are asking Congr...

Well this is unfortunate - extend the pause on regulations on #lobster fishing to protect #rightwhales until 2035?

""Lobstermen will have insufficient time to work in a good faith way to plan for new regulations, and may well find themselves unable to comply," Golden said Tuesday"
🐳🌍🦑

Good to see an NGO making this point
Finally

Scientists reportedly hiding AI text prompts in academic papers to receive positive peer reviews Research papers found carrying hidden white text giving instructions not to highlight negatives as concern grows over use of large language models for peer review

And finding good (or any) reviewers is hard enough...
@theguardian.com piece by @joshtaylor.bsky.social

Seems from the final paragraph that someone at @theguardian.com is a @vizcomic.bsky.social fan?
🧪

Top one's a bitza. Aftermarket frame, swingarm, bodywork & more.

From the figure legend: Figure 4. Conditional inference tree (Ctree) showing the partitioning effect of the presence of certain species (number of days per month) across 10 sites in the North Atlantic. Each Ctree node was restricted to a minimum sum of 60 weights and exceedance of a 0.95 test statistic. The size of the Ctree (depth) was not restricted, but the minimum sum of weights for each terminal node (numbered 1−9) was limited to 15. Each colour-coded site is labelled in the legend and ordered from north to south in order to latitude with a spectrum of colours from cool (blue) to warm (red). Beaked whale species represented all inner nodes except for one fourth tier node, which was sperm whales.

New paper
Exploring the biodiversity of cetacean communities along the western North Atlantic Ocean shelf-break
led by Samara Haver.

One finding:
"beaked whale species [were] the most significant driver of differences among cetacean communities"
🐳🌍🦑🧪
royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...

Canada to take steps to protect vanishing North Atlantic right whales from ships The Canadian government says it is taking steps this summer to protect a vanishing species of whale from lethal collisions with ships in its waters.

Canadian government taking steps to protect North Atlantic #rightwhales this year:
Patrick Whittle for @apnews.com
"Canada is enforcing mandatory protection measures for the whale this summer... All vessels of 42.7 feet (13 meters) in length or more must comply with speed restrictions"
🐳🌍🦑

Thanks

But will any media outlet present this perspective?
Yeah right.

Without political pressure to change the way that the US fishing industry works, North Atlantic right whales will continue to struggle, at best.

It's a social and political problem. The chances of solving it in the USA at present are very poor. Obviously

How Alaskan whaling rights secured Trump’s ‘big, beautiful bill’ Concessions had to be made for Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski to support the president’s flagship legislation

And finally - on "what can you do" - there's nothing about targeted political pressure.

Tax cuts for 150 Alaskan whaling captains made the difference ensuring the US Senate passed a bill to destroy the healthcare for millions of other Americans?

4/

"Their lifespan has taken a hit, too. Southern right whales can live past 70. For North Atlantic right whales, the median is now just 22 years."

This misrepresents the paper linked in the sentence. The median SRW lifespan is ~70. That's the comparison.
3/

"It took us nearly five years to figure out they went to the Gulf of St. Lawrence"

The passive acoustic data demonstrating that they were there earlier than detected had been collected by DFO scientists. it didn't get worked up until later.
2/

Experts baffled by unprecedented behavior of critically endangered whale species: 'How do you explain that?' North Atlantic right whales are critically endangered. Now, they're unexpectedly showing up in the Gulf of St. Lawrence.

So much of what's wrong with #rightwhale science for conservation in one short article:

"These whales used to follow a fairly steady path."
When we started using passive #acoustics to monitor whales they invariably turned up in unexpected places. It became a rule of thumb
1/n
🐳🌍🦑

Also, linked below
"the Budget proposes to merge the National Marine Fisheries Service’s Office of Protected Resources and associated ESA and Marine Mammal Protection Act implementation responsibilities into FWS"

Yet the DOI doc suggests a request for ~25% funding reduction for FWS for 2026

The media contact listed is Mark Herr
From his website:
"Mark led or helped lead the communications efforts of three iconic financial services companies, Merrill Lynch, AIG and SAC Capital / Point72 Asset Management."
and he
"wrote the 1988 Keynote Address to the Republican National Convention"
🤔

Green Oceans and Three Tribes Petition NOAA to Revoke Offshore Wind Companies’ Authorizations That Harm 61% of the Critically Endangered North Atlantic Right Whales While Building their Projects Three Native American tribes, the Shinnecock Nation, the Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head/Aquinnah, the Narragansett Tribe, ACK for Whales, and Green Oceans have ...

Interesting development in the whales-and-wind saga. Someone's playing this one very smart.

Repeating - anyone who tries to shut down offshore wind for right whale conservation and does nothing about entanglements is either a fool or has a motive other than whale conservation.
🐳🌍🦑
1/2

Have a listen to the podcast linked in my pinned post - it includes the story of how the Tangalooma feeding station started. The story told by the folks who run it is a little economical with the facts

No one does. The dolphins of Moreton Bay have the most interesting stories but they're mostly unknown. Those of us who've studied them all had to move on to other things to stay employed.

A shame but typical of Australian science

Dolphins at Tangalooma give gifts to people, have done so for years. It's a feeding station so the context is different, but the principle's the same.

Historically, dolphins in the same bay cooperatively fished with the Quandamooka people, also included gifting fish

Thanks

Interesting.
Is there a link to show this connection? I see the show's executive producers were NatGeo; Arksen & 10% For The Ocean, Minderoo Pictures, Pristine Seas, Dynamic Planet & Revive Our Ocean,Don Quixote Foundation,
The Prince Albert II of Monaco Foundation.
Thanks in advance

And there are so many humpbacks off east Oz that it's a wildlife management / animal welfare issue, not a species conservation issue.

Important distinction.

Whales still aren’t ‘eating all the fish’ (commentary) In a world full of bad news, there’s been good news in whale conservation. Many of the great whales are coming back. In fact, some populations have been recovering faster than anyone imagined they cou...

I just published something that might be of interest...

Sure

The point of the article is that (a) we know even more than we did 20 years ago, when this nonsense was first refuted, and (b) to counter this we need to frame it as Trumpist, deliberate disinformation.
And NGOs need to grasp (b)

Whales still aren’t ‘eating all the fish’ (commentary) In a world full of bad news, there’s been good news in whale conservation. Many of the great whales are coming back. In fact, some populations have been recovering faster than anyone imagined they cou...

New piece out in @mongabay.com on #whaling - the zombie idea that whales need culling for fisheries management is coming back.

"a cartoonish oversimplification of complex ecological processes".

It's "disinformation, disseminated by vested interests intent upon reviving commercial whaling"
🐳🌍🦑

"Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end.
But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning."

As someone once said

Multiyear Baleen Endocrine Profiles Suggest a Longer Estimated Gestation in Southern Right Whales (Eubalaena australis) Multiyear profiles of progesterone and estrogen in the baleen of adult female southern right whales indicate progesterone elevations lasting on average between 20 and 25 months, indicative of pregnan....

Fascinating paper, led by Loraine Shuttleworth.
Gestation in female Southern #rightwhales is far longer than thought. Follows previous work showing similar for North Atlantic right whales and bowheads.

We don't understand these #whales as well as we think. We have their basic biology wrong.
🐳🌍🦑

And a lot of the Park is inter-reef areas, which almost no-one gets either. Everyone thinks of coral

GBRMP is >340K km^2: almost as big as Germany / bigger than Finland.
In US terms - it'd be the fifth-biggest US state, after Montana