Save the Whales....again.

When I did my course in pyrotechnics a few years ago now, one of the things that we were taught was that ballistics in air is a very different thing to ballistics in water. It is a very dangerous thing indeed to initiate a charge in a body of water that contains a diver, and it is relatively common knowledge that the shock wave from detonation will burst eardrums in water, where it is 'merely' a very loud noise in air. The issue is compressibility.
Yesterday, the girls and I made a 'diver in a bottle'. If you've never done this, what you do is attach a little modeling clay 'diver' to a pen cap via a paper clip. You need to get the amount of air in the cap to be just enough to float the assembly. When you put the lid on tightly, and squeeze the bottle, the diver sinks. When you release it, the diver surfaces. Its the air in the cap compressing. Its because the water doesn't compress relatively that the thing works.

How surprising is it then, that the US government are denying that there is a link between the use of 'active Sonar' and the beaching and death of Whales, Dolphins, and fish when they use it near to shore. On November 13th 2007, a US appeals court restored a ban on the US Navy's use of submarines sonar in upcoming training missions off Southern California, 'until it adopts better safeguards for Whales, Dolphins and other marine mammals'. This of course is not a five minute solution that they're talking about... and they do have a quiet sonar that listens only, and therefore presents no problems for the other inhabitants of our oceans... but it can't always hear everything, because the ship that uses it makes so much noise that it obfuscates the signal. (Submarines are better with it, cos they have silent convection pumps etc...) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_sonar#Active_sonar) In the meantime, they intend to continue using the sonar even though the implications are so severe to wildlife.
These sounds are SO loud, that they cause hemorrhaging from the Whales eyes and ears, hearing loss, and total disorientation! The US is refusing to allow international scientific pressure to change the way that they are behaving.



Remember, these are animals that are carrying incredibly sensitive audible signal sensors. They can hear the movements of other animals miles away, let alone the gross signals of active sonar.

There's a website that you can go to that I've put in the list on the right that tells you about what else is going on. The Japanese, the Norwegians and the Icelanders are all increasing their catches by 100% this year. Moreover, they're going for the vulnerable Humpback and the endangered Fin whale. Between them they intend to kill 3000 Whales, and 20,000 Dolphins and Porpoises THIS YEAR. The site is called 'Save the Whale Again'.....

There is a famous proverb in Japan; 'There's nothing to throw away from a whale except its voice'. Whilst the whale has always been a source of food to the Japanese, (as well as the bi products), it was the devastation of the second world war that prompted the widespread adoption of whale meat, so that by 1962 they were consuming 226,000 tons in a year. Depending on where I looked, I found that the claimed 'tradition' of eating whale meat varied quite substantially. Current demand for whale meat is very low in Japan, (not surprisingly since they don't get much of it perhaps), but some people are pushing it for the tradition of it. In Ayukawa in the north of Japan,

it has been served in classroom lunches to preserve the tradition. The town is famous for whaling, so perhaps you can see why. But the tradition here was originated it seems by the US post war administration!

Ah yes!.. It was the US, who encouraged the Japanese to hunt and eat whale meat in the post war years, and now they are 'telling them to stop' [apparently]. What the US seem to have overlooked is that the Japanese are a very proud nation, and according to Tetsu Sato, a professor of environmental science at Nagano University, it precisely because the issue attracts so much international attention that they can't afford to lose. Ayako Okubo, a researcher at the OPRF a private ocean policy foundation said that the cultural argument emerged in the late 1970's and was then enthusiastically taken up by politicians. 'It's not because Japanese want to eat whale meat' Ms Okubo said, 'it's because they don't like being told NOT to eat it by foreigners'. OH!!!! THAT'S WHY!!!

Anyway, look at the 'Save the Whale again' website... and please consider this issue. Perhaps even boycott Japanese products. For myself, I'm not going to wash my 'Mitsubishi' Ute in protest...at the very least. But what could we do to caution the US? I know, I'll switch off my comp*/#... -------------------------------------------------------