WILDLIFE CONNECTION

Humpback Whales Shown Disrupting Orca Pods Hunt in Amazing Footage The orca pod can be seen using their strategy to hunt a Weddell seal. After the seal was forced from the ice into the sea, the orca pod began pursuing it.

Asi ha sido nuestro verano, ven y disfruta tu tambien a los delfines en el tour de Delfines en Libertad
This has been our summer, come and enjoy the dolphins too in the Dolphins in the Wild tour
www.wildlifeconnection.com
Los creadores y pioneros en México del Nado Con Delfines Libres
Creators and Pioneers in Mexico of swimming with wild dolphins

Webcams de México on Twitter “¡Una escena increíble capturada en el mar! Un tiburón busca la ayuda de los humanos para salvar a una tortuga indefensa. 😍 Vía: . https://t.co/WSLqjBtJxI”

Cachalote con cría. ¿Sabías que la lactancia en esta especie dura aprox 2 años? incluso puede extenderse de modo intermitente.
📸 Christina Mittermeier

Today we are throwing it back to our most successful post of 2022!

Did you know that the flippers of cetaceans have great similarities with the bone structure of human hands?

As cetaceans evolved from terrestrial mammals with weight-bearing forelimbs to an aquatic world, their forelimbs turned into a flipper that is constructed of soft tissue. Having elongated and streamlined flippers in an aquatic environment helps with lift, breaking, turning and stabilising the animal while swimming.

In addition to soft tissue development, the bone morphology of most cetaceans changed to better support the changing flipper shape. Like most baleen whales, humpback whales for example only possess four digits, with their second digit being largely elongated. In contrast, toothed whales like killer whales, have five digits. Researchers are not in agreement what exactly causes the digit reduction, but hypotheses assume that narrow and longer flippers for most baleen whales could be associated with remaining stable when swimming at higher speeds for lunge feeding, while more broad flippers may offer a larger surface area for manoeuvring tight turns at lower speed and shallower lagoons.

Read the full study on the ‘Evolution of hyperphalangy and digit reduction in the cetacean manus’ by Cooper et al. (2007) here: https://anatomypubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ar.20532

To learn more about cetaceans in NAMMCO’s management area, follow this link: https://nammco.no/whales-dolphins-and-porpoises/

We at Happywhale are excited to announce a *MAJOR MILESTONE* in our conservation science technology! Today we identified, for our first time, a humpback whale using machine learning AI image recognition by the whale's dorsal fin. 😱 We've been building this for some time, and once fully implemented, we'll be able to identify almost any cetacean species by a dorsal fin or lateral view. The algorithm here was trained on 25 species, and my oh my we are so fired up for the possibilities this opens up. Given that we have quite thin funding right now, it will take us a while to get this all working so please don't start flooding Happywhale with dorsal fin photos -- we will tell you when this is ready! 🤩 Yay whales!