Cetacean Quotes & Sayings

Newborns can be up to 20 percent of their mother's mass in the smaller cetacean species. This is extreme. Few, if any, large terrestrial mammals give birth to young that are more than 15 percent of their own weight.26 The minimum size for a newborn marine mammal seems to be about 0.6 meters long and five kilograms. — Hal Whitehead

The ocean, for me, is what LSD was to Timothy Leary. He claimed the hallucinogen is to reality what a microscope is to biology, affording a perception of reality that was not before accessible. Shamans and seekers eat mushrooms, drink potions, lick toads, inhale smoke, and snort snuff to transport their minds to realms they cannot normally experience. (Humans are not alone in this endeavor; species from elephants to monkeys purposely eat fermented fruit to get drunk; dolphins were recently discovered sharing a certain toxic puffer fish, gently passing it from one cetacean snout to another, as people would pass a joint, after which the dolphins seem to enter a trancelike state.) — Sy Montgomery

IN the sea, once upon a time, O my Best Beloved, there was a Whale, and he ate fishes. He ate the starfish and the garfish, and the crab and the dab, and the plaice and the dace, and the skate and his mate, and the mackereel and the pickereel, and the really truly twirly-whirly eel. All the fishes he could find in all the sea he ate with his mouth - so! Till at last there was only one small fish left in all the sea, and he was a small 'Stute Fish, and he swam a little behind the Whale's right ear, so as to be out of harm's way. Then the Whale stood up on his tail and said, 'I'm hungry.' And the small 'Stute Fish said in a small 'stute voice, 'Noble and generous Cetacean, have you ever tasted Man? — Rudyard Kipling

Naomi noted in closing that Britain had one of the "most staunchly conservation-oriented publics ... they are strongly antiwhaling ... they are an island nation who feel they must protect the marine environment." Yet there were zero cetacean displays left in the UK. "Clearly they are getting their marine education, their marine ethic, from some other source. — David Kirby