Quotes & Sayings About Marine Mammals

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 slaughter of dolphins and other marine mammals is no more horrible than captive dolphins performing tricks because it's not just dolphins were talking about, it's also people. Especially children [...] The effect is devastatingly the same because millions of people every year who watch and cheer this spectacle of dominance are in some way also cheering every other form of environmental ravishment. If dolphin is a reference point in our relationship with nature, then when we teach people that it's okay to abuse dolphins, we're teaching them that it's also okay to abuse the rest of nature. — Richard O'Barry

The industrial way we fish for seafood is harming the marine habitats that all ocean life depends upon. Indiscriminate commercial fishing practices that include miles of driftnets, long lines with thousands of lethal hooks and bottom trawls are ruining ocean ecosystems by killing non-seafood species, including sea turtles and marine mammals. — Ted Danson

Around the world, about a thousand dolphins are held in captivity, while millions have been killed in purse seine tuna nets and drift nets. Tens of thousands of others have been "sacrificed" in the name of scientific research, some marine mammals merely to find out what they've been eating. — Richard O'Barry

People travel and hunt on the sea ice - in Alaska, they hunt in skin boats for bowhead whales; in Greenland, they hunt with dogsleds. The ice is their highway. The ice is also the ecosystem in which marine mammals and terrestrial animals such as polar bears exist. — Gretel Ehrlich

If we return abruptly to a Miocene-like climate, it's reasonable to think that we would experience a lot of extinctions, and maybe even a mass extinction in the long term. Would the life on Earth be radically different? Of course we can't say for sure, but I think a lot of it would look familiar. Like a lot of people, I worry a lot about whether marine mammals would survive, especially whales. Ocean acidification is one of the major killers in climate change events, and that makes the ocean a very inhospitable place. — Annalee Newitz

Since the experiment began, dead beaked whales have been discovered stranded on beaches of the Gulf of California by senior marine biologists at the National Marine Fisheries Services, including several experts in beaked whales, the impacts of noise on marine mammals, and the stranding of marine mammals. These scientists, and others who care about whales, wrote letters to the expedition's sponsors. Columbia University failed to meaningfully respond. The National Science Foundation's response was to write a letter stating, "There is no evidence that there is any connection between the operations of the Ewing and the reported [sic] beached whales. — Derrick Jensen