Whales are among the largest and most remarkable animals on Earth. These marine mammals live in oceans around the world, from warm tropical waters to the cold seas surrounding the poles.
Life Beneath the Surface
Although whales spend their lives in water, they breathe air through blowholes located on top of their heads. They must regularly return to the surface to breathe before diving again in search of food or traveling through the ocean.
Whales are warm-blooded, give birth to live young, and nurse their calves with milk. A thick layer of fat called blubber helps protect them from cold water and stores energy during long migrations.
Two Main Groups
Whales are generally divided into baleen whales and toothed whales. Baleen whales filter small animals from the water using flexible plates inside their mouths. This group includes blue whales, humpback whales, and gray whales.
Toothed whales use teeth to catch fish, squid, and other prey. Many of them also use echolocation, producing sounds and listening for returning echoes to understand their surroundings. Sperm whales, belugas, and orcas belong to this group.
The Blue Whale
The blue whale is the largest known animal to have ever lived. An adult can grow longer than a city bus and weigh well over one hundred tonnes. Despite its enormous size, it feeds mainly on tiny crustaceans called krill.
Communication and Migration
Whales communicate using clicks, whistles, pulses, and complex songs. Some sounds can travel across great distances underwater. Humpback whales are especially famous for their long, patterned songs.
Many species migrate thousands of kilometres each year. They often feed in cold, nutrient-rich waters before traveling to warmer regions where they mate and give birth.
Protecting Whales
Commercial hunting once caused severe declines in many whale populations. Today, whales also face threats from fishing gear, ship collisions, underwater noise, pollution, and changes to ocean ecosystems.
Conservation programs, safer fishing practices, protected habitats, and international cooperation can help whale populations recover. Protecting whales also supports healthier oceans because these animals play an important role in marine food webs and nutrient cycles.
It’s April now. Somehow it feels like it’s been months and months since mid-March when things really turned serious (or at least, became serious to people in North America), though it’s been less than 3 weeks. It feels like nearly a year since things otherwise turned upside-down in mid February.
There are more people back at work this week, many having taken a 14-day self-isolation period, or are continuing to work from home. It was getting pretty lonely, but I’m not sure I want to be around any more people than I already am.
I’ve been reading social media posts about people in quarantine, and it still all seems so surreal.
PPE and hand sanitizer is still in short supply. Hospitals are asking for donations of real PPE (eg N95 masks, and water-resistant gowns), though there is a growing social movement to produce DIY “PPE”, such as cloth masks. I’m not yet sure how I feel about that.
Most of them will be poorly made, in the sense that cloths masks are not a great barrier to begin with, especially not to droplets and viruses, and the less informed people will make crappy masks (even by handmade PPE standards), simply because they don’t know any better (eg making ill-fitting, single-layer masks, or unwashable masks made out of paper towels or something, rather than multi-layer fitted masks). Plus I suppose there’s potential risk of people slapping on a DIY cotton mask and then feeling safer than they really are, and thus taking more risks than they otherwise would. That said, if someone if going to be an idiot in public, to be honest I would rather have a thin cotton level of protection from them than no protection from them, so I don’t know. ?♀️
Shopping is different. I wonder how much it will change shopping habits in general, once this is all over? No stores approve of anyone just wandering around to kill time (though it still happens in larger stores like grocery stores, I think). In many places, you need to know exactly what you want ahead of time, because an employee will go collect it for you. I went to Pet Valu last week. Only two people were allowed into the store at a time, one at the register being checked out, and one waiting behind a line of tape for an employee to fetch the items you want to the front. Of course, me being me, I basically shop by sight. I know what the item I want looks like, but unless it’s something new I’m trying, I’ve long since forgotten the brand name. Cool, awesome. At least I could describe exactly where the brand of cat food I wanted was on the shelf, so the guy was able to grab the exact one I wanted.
Luke went out to get groceries today. Bulk Barn only let in one person at a time, and he was given a “personal shopper” who was the one to actually scoop out anything from the bins, then escorted him directly to the checkout. The cashier was behind a plexiglass barrier. I still haven’t been out shopping anywhere larger than the tiny pet food store, so I have not seen these yet. He was able to buy toilet paper, though! Only one 12-pack per person, but still. Yay! (the things I cheer about now)
Gas is currently $0.759, holy crap. It’s still higher here in Tourist Town than other places in Ontario, where it apparently averages $0.659. I don’t think I’ve seen it that low as an adult. Maybe the early 2000s??
Nobody is making April Fool’s Day jokes this year. Nobody dares. It would be refreshing and nice, if it wasn’t for these reasons.
My workplace is essential, apparently. I suppose that makes sense – people need anything that can help them stay calm these days. Honestly, it’s quite a relief to find out one way or another. My anxiety has been through the roof these past few days, hearing rumours of closures. My brain is happy to have a firm decision, even if it means no quarantine for me. I don’t like ambiguity, and I hate it even more when everything is moving so fast lately, and everything is ambiguous. With a firm direction I can just accept things and make it work. The unknown bothers me much more than the known, even if the known is crappy. I can adapt.
I am grateful to still be employed, when I know so many who have lost their jobs.
Ontario has declared a state of emergency. We’ve extended March Break by two weeks, so schools have been ordered to remain closed until April 5th. Honestly, I kinda doubt they will re-open at that time. They’ve extended the tax filing deadline to June 1 (from April 30). That says to me they’re expecting this to take longer than 2 weeks to fix, especially with other news reports from around the world. We’ll see, though. Some people seem overly optimistic.
From ontario.ca: As a result of this declaration and its associated orders, the following establishments are legally required to close immediately:
All facilities providing indoor recreational programs;
All public libraries;
All private schools as defined in the Education Act;
All licensed child care centres;
All bars and restaurants, except to the extent that such facilities provide takeout food and delivery;
All theatres including those offering live performances of music, dance, and other art forms, as well as cinemas that show movies; and
Concert venues.
Further, all organized public events of over fifty people are also prohibited, including parades and events and communal services within places of worship. These orders were approved by the Lieutenant Governor in Council and will remain in place until March 31, 2020, at which point they will be reassessed and considered for extension, unless this order is terminated earlier.
There’s chatter of maybe we should close most things and keep open only “essential services”, but I’m not fully sure what that includes. For now, social distancing measures have been implemented at work, but people are restless and scared and worried. People are working from home if they can. My job is 80% computer, 20% immediately hands-on and time sensitive, so I’m still going in. There’s news of some companies laying off employees so they can apply for EI, rather than just not being paid for a few weeks (or however long this lasts), but fortunately that hasn’t happened at my company.
It’s been in the news for a while now, but people have only really been paying attention for the past few weeks. Now it’s serious, and people are forced to pay attention.
Most of us at work have been distracted by Black Tuesday, but now this dominates much of the conversation.
Gas prices are sitting around $1.09.9/L People are hoarding toilet paper, of all things. It’s sold out everywhere within hours of here. Every scrap of toilet paper is gone from stores, as have Lysol wipes. We still have a big pack left, but we just opened it last week, which is our normal signal to watch closely for a tp sale and stock up (to normal levels of “stocked up”, not crazy apocalypse stocking up). Maybe we should buy a bidet.
I miss LiveJournal. Not necessarily LJ itself, but the culture of it. The precursor to full-on blogging, it was blogging for our friends, but with a community attached. Friends could follow you, and you had the option of creating filters so that only a subset of your followers could see certain posts. You could join interest groups. Everything was chronological because back in the day, it hadn’t occurred to anyone to mess with this.
The next step was individual personal blogs. A lot of my friends had one, but a lot did not. There was an awkward split between bloggers and LJers, which resulted in crossposting from my LJ to my actual blog, in the hopes that my entire intended audience (my ACTUAL FRIENDS) would see it, regardless of which platform they used. Blogging also had the disadvantage of having everything be publicly available to anyone. Sure, you could lock down your blog and require your friends to create an account and log in to read it, but let’s face it, that’s a pain in the ass for all concerned, especially in the time of “account fatigue” where people are loath to create yet another account on yet another site, even for a friend. Believe me, I tried. ? It was the early days of blogging and people were still afraid of posting too much personal info online, so I tried to friends-lock this blog, but what actually happened was that I’m pretty sure only about 3 of my friends had the time/energy/mental bandwidth to actually create an account in the first place. This ALSO blocked my feed from the handy-dandy RSS readers most people used so no one was alerted if I made a new post unless they actually went to my blog and logged in. Ain’t nobody got time for that, so I can’t blame ’em.
I miss Google Reader. All the blogs I followed, both personal and “professional”, in one place for easy reading from any device, in chronological order. It was easier for me, psychologically speaking, to go to a single site and read all my blogs within it, rather than opening up a bookmark folder and clicking on each one individually. It’s definitely a chicken-and-egg scenario, but at the same time as we lost the tools for easy personal blogging and blog reading, there was a big shift from long-form blog posts to short Facebook posts and shares.
Facebook is pretty much the only contact I have with some people these days. Like many of you, I am trapped there. Facebook has SOME of the features of all of the above formats. You can filter posts so they are only seen by a select few, you can join interest groups, and it’s a single feed of all your friends in one place. But our posts are slaves to the algorithm. Filtered or “friends only” posts are given less importance than public posts, it seems, so that even your friends who are ON that list might not see them. Or if they do see them, it could be served up days later instead of in a chronological timeline. (But don’t worry, they liked that meme I shared, which shows we were both on FB, but only being shown what the algorithm thought was most important at the time). Following groups or pages is no guarantee you’ll see any of their content at all, unless you force the algorithm by immediately interacting with several of their existing posts to “tell” it that you want to see that content. (because joining a group isn’t enough to let it know you want to see posts from the group, apparently).
What’s the solution? Who knows.
Writing a long-form post has been made fairly unattractive, by way of getting little to no feedback when your friends don’t even see it, don’t see it for days, or simply because it appears lower in their feed than a quick post that’s short enough to have a pretty, colourful background. (Don’t get me wrong, I actually love those backgrounds. But they provide a very real pressure to keep posts short and easily digestible both because a) only short posts get to have one and b) I swear posts with background get a slight advantage in the algorithm). Often, because of our ever more busy culture, people might see your long post, but feel like they “don’t have time” to commit to it right now, especially since the post is snipped for length. People can’t even make an informed decision about whether they have time or not when they can’t see how long the post might be, and expanding it to see feels like committing, so they scroll past without expanding it. Often intending to come back later to read it, but we all know that’s not what usually happens in the fast-paced world of social media. (People genuinely forget, and also FB assumes that since you’ve already “seen” it, it both doesn’t have to show you again AND it thinks you were uninterested in that sort of content because you didn’t interact with it.)
What’s the solution? Who knows. I’ve seen this discussion go round and round for years. No one has found a viable solution yet. New social media platforms tend to fizzle out before a critical mass migration occurs (either because the platform itself sucks, has some scandal, or just because it’s so hard to break into the niche that Facebook occupies), and it’s so hard to pry people off of it. I could leave Facebook for another platform at any time I wanted. We all could. As long as I was ok with mostly speaking to myself, since only a tiny percentage of my friends would see what I post there. Facebook, for all its flaws and reasons for me to leave, still serves the purpose of actually connecting me with my friends. In order for any of us to move, we have to convince all the people we care about to move along with us. Even this whole long post is just a venting of vague frustration.
I’m switching cell providers again, and hop on one of those new “limited time” 10GB for $60 everyone is offering now. Actually I’ll be going with $40 for 10GB for the next 10 months at Freedom Mobile, as they offered it at $50 to undercut the Big 3, plus there was a limited-time $10/mo credit for bringing your own phone. Public Mobile has been great (cheap, and the Telus network worked anywhere), but I was paying $40 for 4GB, which was still over and above what any other carrier was offering until recently. PM is also the discount-discount-discount carrier. They don’t even have a support number to call; if something goes wrong you need to sign up for their online forums and message a moderator (their support agents). I normally don’t mind low-end customer service, because I so rarely ever need to call customer service, though I’ve had two issues with PM so far, which is more than usual for me, and wonky service plus low-end customer support isn’t worth the cost for me anymore.
Luke’s number ported over just fine from PM, but mine got “stuck” somehow, ? so now I’ve had to go to the forums and DM a mod to see how to get my number unstuck. Yes, there’s no contract and yes my phone was unlocked, it’s just a quirk somewhere in the porting system.
Everyone’s system has been slammed these past few days with nearly every carrier offering some version of this new plan, and people swapping plans and carriers all over the place. I don’t mind, as long as it works out correctly eventually.
I’m also hoping Freedom has improved a bit since the old Wind days. I never had any actual problems with them, but it was not ideal back in the early days. I worked in a concrete bunker of a building in Guelph, so service was kinda spotty, and it also had troubles with the tall buildings in the TO downtown core. It still seemed like the best option for me now though, so I’m going to give it a shot. 🙂
About a month ago, I accidentally picked up a second job. Another startup across the hall asked me to help out with Office Manager-y stuff part-time after my regular work hours. I’d already known them for a year, since they used to be in a room in our office until they grew big enough to have their own space, so they know my skills and that we can work together. They checked with my boss and everything, first, so it’s all good.
Extra money? Doing the thing I already do all day? Without even needing to go anywhere? Works for me!
Except now two days a week I’m essentially at work for 12+ hours a day. For some reason it’s a lot rougher to get home at 9pm after doing the same thing twice than for staying late to work on a rush project. Plus just this weekend, I started a new project that’ll get its own post.
I’m exhausted a lot.
Not my cat, but looks like him and I had to wipe my phone and lost a bunch of cat pics, so close enough. Photo by Traci Lawson via Flickr
