Wait until Emma Beddington learns that US military & former military sign off emails with
v/r
Abbreviation for Very Respectfully
Irony, lost?
I always responded to v/r with mvh, Norwegian abbreviation for med vennlig hilsen
No-one ever asked me what it meant
One more - a great paper by Mark Baumgartner from @whoi.edu that pulls together how to use passive acoustic monitoring to mitigate impacts of offshore wind development.
www.int-res.com/journals/esr...
Re the "your" bit - I'm Australian, first Australian to get a PhD on living cetaceans. Left the country when my wife got a postdoc in Europe.
Back in Oz now. US isn't a great place for an ex-whistleblower these days.
And yes it's a recurring pattern isn't it.
The comment is incorrect too, given Bec Dunlop & Mike Noad's work published last year.
I know of senior scientists who have led this work (more so than me) who would work in Australia in a heartbeat.
Little interest here in taking advantage of the science flight from the US.
Typical Oz.
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Then once we'd shown that it worked, the Navy money ran out. We could never get anyone in the USCG with the appropriate seniority to decide to keep the program going.
I shit you not.
The process has been picked up by the offshore wind industry for mitigation now.
Indeed.
The initial funding to get this work from bleeding edge to easily-usable was funded by the US Navy. We tested it on a local Coast Guard gunnery range. Showed that the cost of calling off one - 1! - gunnery exercise paid for the whole process for a year.
And...
And - as the piece is about whales off Australia - there's not much passive acoustic work happening off Australia's east coast, and none that's focused on addressing vessel strike. It could be done but no-one funds it.
And the NOAA program that continues this work lost almost all its money last year.
Thanks Cmdr Riker
Love your work on the Enterprise.
Well, after ending up a whistleblower in NOAA I'm now unemployed so there's not all that much that I can do.
Yeah shipping companies don't like slow zones. Big ships are the biggest problem for collisions.
I mean, compare this comment from the SMH - "A spokesperson for the NSW Department of Climate Change, Energy, Environment and Water said the impact of climate change on migration timings was not currently known." with this paper
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdfdirec...
5/🧵
We showed many years ago that using passive acoustics, whales turn up in places & at times that no-one expected. Even in the USA, where there's far more monitoring than in Australia.
Do Australians want this? It'd require putting support into Australia's science base and repairing academia.
4/🧵
The tech & processes to make near-real-time decisions to implement slow zones are well established and in place. We published multiple papers showing the how and why, and it's been enacted. Current US admin cut funding to the program in the US, but that's another story.
3/🧵
A monitoring program using passive acoustic recorders would easily, and fairly cheaply, answer the questions around migration timing, building on what the UQ team published last year.
Slow zones are a great initial step for reducing whale deaths and injuries from vessel collisions
2/🧵
Piece in the @sydmorningherald.bsky.social on whales off Sydney, and how to deal with vessel strike.
In 2018 when I led @fisheries.noaa.gov Northeast whale team, we won a US Public Sector Innovation Award for taking bleeding edge tech & making it simple to use for mitigating ship strike
🐳🌍🦑🧪
1/🧵
So reviving the Minerals Management Service huh
That worked so well before didn’t it
Hookers and blow back on the agenda I guess?
Neuralizer
Not just Trump, that’s the point. Imagine if every time you see “Rice’s whale “ you saw “American whale “.
Impact would be different wouldn’t it
Whaling hasn't driven a large whale species extinct, as far as we know. When it goes, this will be the first *whale* species to go extinct due to humans.
How long until the last American Whale?
end/🧵
And given that the current US administration wants the Gulf known as the Gulf of America, that also makes it the American Whale.
"Common" names for newly described species are social constructs that we all agree to. Calling B ricei the American Whale would be one small step for its conservation
🧵
B. ricei is the only species of large whale whose current known range is entirely inside the waters of one nation - the USA. Prior to Yankee whaling, it was also found in the waters off Mexico, but now there are so few of them their range is reduced to a small area in the US Gulf of Mexico
3/🧵
As a few friends and I argued a little while ago, an equally appropriate name to "Rice's whale" is "The Gulf of Mexico whale"
Free version of the piece in Marine Mammal Science linked below.
For me, this was pulling back from the name that seems most appropriate - the American Whale.
2/🧵
Many pieces appearing on the US decision to remove protections for Balaenoptera ricei, the whale endemic to the Gulf of Mexico.
All still call it Rice's Whale, the name given it by NOAA scientists. For example, this good piece by @tjwebber.bsky.social
Rice's whale? The American whale.
1/🧵
🐳🌍🦑🧪
Yet again, if only the idea that Balaenoptera ricei was “The American Whale” was accepted a few years ago…
🤷
So the answer to what really makes her special, @gardenandgun.com, is that her normal range, when not giving birth, is somewhere well away from the mismanagement of the waters off the east coast of North America.
That's why she's living to a more normal age for a @rightwhale.
🐳🌍🦑🧪
@fisheries.noaa.gov site quote: "Nearly all of her sightings since then have been in the Southeast with a calf. We do not know where else she spends her time."
She usually has 4-year calving intervals (2013 a missed calving?) and she's almost never seen in North American waters otherwise
2/🧵
Good article in @gardenandgun.com
@alaskaraven.bsky.social - “They should all be living this long and calving into their fifties, sixties, and seventies.”
"Ghost" has only ever had one entanglement. What really makes her rare is that she doesn't live off the east coast of North America
1/🧵
I still think if they’d been called the American whale they might have had a better chance
But oil interests didn’t Eve want to see Gulf of Mexico whale used
And everyone goes along with that
Indeed
Aren’t we silly not using it already
And everyone who’s ever been at sea knows that every ship always has eagle eyed alert crew on station watching for everything
What could possibly go wrong
I guess all 2.5 million viewers missed the point of the small drone attacks that shut the Omani ports of Duqm and Salalah.
