Amazing
A large mammal like that, obviously alive with a breeding population, and never seen alive before. It really says a lot about how urgently we need to explore the oceans ...
EXTREMELY RARE never-seen-alive WHALES found (briefly) alive
A pair of rare whales that boffins thought might be extinct has washed up on a New Zealand beach. A Grays beaked whale A Grays beaked, not a spade-toothed beaked, whale Marine biologists previously only knew the spade-toothed beaked whale (Mesoplodon traversii) from a few old bones: but then, not one but two of the rare …
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Tuesday 6th November 2012 14:41 GMT Phil Endecott
Re: Amazing
> trying to work out what could possibly have been worth the
> effort of clicking the thumbs down.
How about your suggestion that humans ought to go and interfere with pristine environments? Is your "thirst for knowledge" more important than the survival of these ecosystems?
Presumably you imagine that it's possible to explore without destroying. History doesn't support that idea.
(No, it wasn't me that downvoted you.)
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Tuesday 6th November 2012 17:07 GMT Steve Knox
Re: Amazing
@Phil Endecott,
How about your suggestion that humans ought to go and interfere with pristine environments? Is your "thirst for knowledge" more important than the survival of these ecosystems?
Bumpy Cat suggested no such thing -- only suggesting we need to explore, which can and has (albeit not as often as one would like) been done without significant interference to the environment.
The concept of interference was your inference, not Bumpy Cat's implication.
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Tuesday 6th November 2012 22:27 GMT Chet Mannly
Re: Amazing
"How about your suggestion that humans ought to go and interfere with pristine environments? Is your "thirst for knowledge" more important than the survival of these ecosystems?"
Did you think for 2 seconds that we need to understand the ecosystem in order to protect it?
eg are their food sources being overfished for but one example? Hard to know that and protect them if we don't know what they eat.
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Tuesday 6th November 2012 14:43 GMT Chris Miller
Random downvotes
I've had problems in the past - if you upvote a comment and then use the spacebar intending to page down through the comments, it acts as a downvote. I think that you can only vote once, so your previous upvote is removed. I now conscientiously return and upvote the comment again. This behaviour happens in both IE9 and Chrome.
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Tuesday 6th November 2012 12:55 GMT I Am Spartacus
Amazing how useless "Whaling Research" is
"Scientists are unsure why a whale like this hasn't been spotted before."
Especially with Japan still hunting (sorry, researching) whales, killing loads of them in the name of "science". Just shows that this "research" is totally useless and therefore should be stopped.
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Tuesday 6th November 2012 17:47 GMT jason 7
Re: Amazing how useless "Whaling Research" is
Yes, always amazed at the amounts of 'research' Japan still has to do by chopping up dead whales.
Plus when are they going to finally publish the results of this research so they can stop? Surely they have chopped enough up already?
Doesn't say a lot for Japanese scientists.
Or is there some other reason....hmmmmmmmmmmmm
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Tuesday 6th November 2012 14:21 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Hang on....
Probably lots of DNA tests: first one to check that it's the expected Gray's beaked whale. That comes back negative. That's probably an error, run a couple more. Still negative. Blimey! Dig out some DNA sequences from other things it could be. None of them match. Double blimey! Go fossicking through the archives to see anything it could be - find a likely-looking thing, almost never seen. Now dig out a DNA sequence from that specimen (possibly have to run one first if nobody has already done that research). Huzzah! a match! Now run it a few more times before shooting off mouth in public...and there's your two years (especially if you had to ask your PHB for the funding to pursue it)
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Thursday 8th November 2012 09:05 GMT Michael Dunn
Re: Hang on....
"Why is this news?" I think you'll find that the _news_ is actually the publication of a report in the biology journal, which presumably was noticed by Parnell or brought to his attention recently. You might not realise just how long it takes to publish peer-reviewed papers.
What I do not understand is how the NZ scientists managed to compare the DNA with that of the 'spade-toothed beaked' variety, when one of these has never been see alive previously - was there sufficient viable DNA in the specimen bones that were stored away?
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Tuesday 6th November 2012 22:35 GMT Chet Mannly
Re: "...that boffins thought might be extinct..."
"Jolly bad luck sir. It seems we are adding to our inventory of species rather more than we know to be losing."
And bizarrely conservationists turn that simple fact around to say "well that means species we haven't discovered have probably become extinct" no matter how fast the species list grows, humans are always wrong, so green groups need new laws and of course funding...
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Tuesday 6th November 2012 15:43 GMT Anonymous Coward
much more exciting
Two skeletons were identified as belonging to the species after a 17-foot whale and her calf beached themselves in New Zealand in 2010. Scientists hope the discovery will provide insights into the species and into ocean ecosystems.
It was almost a missed opportunity, however, since conservation workers misidentified the carcasses as a much more common type of whale and buried them.
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