SiTU MEMO 22

What's in a name? The “orca” is called the “killer-whale”. These enormous sea-mammals, orca's are not whales, but a type of dolphin, hunt in groups and devour seals and even young whales. On their migration-routs the young whales are hunted down till exhaustion. The orca can even grap a sea-lion resting on the beach. The killer-whale slides ashore and grap their prey. They are a main attraction of the amusement-parcs and zoos. “Free Willy” was a blockbuster. A collosal animal returning to his huntinggrounds.

In fact the orca is not a whale, but a dolphin. There are about 20 different types of dolphins and the orca is the biggest one. All dolphins eat sea-food, but we want to see dolphins as our pets and see them more and more as extremely intelligent and in some cases dolphins save humans! Dolphins communicate with sounds and there are scientists who say it is an complex language. The US-Navy trained “Flipper” to lay mines and attack enemy divers. These trained animals escaped during “Katrina”. Back to their huntinggrounds.

Whales and dolphins communicate. The whales “sing” and dolphins make rattling sounds. Scientists discovered key-sounds, which were used by all. In 1997 deep-sea recordings showed a remarcable sound, which was produced at about a depth of 3000 meters and below. The conclusion: an unknow species of enormous size and unknown to man. The animal was named “The Bloop”. Since then the soundpattern is recorded several times.

The same US Navy tests solarweapons, which produces enormous sound(shock)waves below the waves. They cause mass strandings of whales and dolphins. When this became known, the Navy said, they would stop the experiments. But in 2004 a mass-stranding happened in the state of Washington. All fifty whales had bleeding ears and their tissue had been under tremendous pressure. But their was more. Rumours say that an unknown sea-creature washed ashore and that had the characteristics of a “mermaid”! This fed a theory of human evolution, that states, that part of our ancestors, returned to the sea. Mermaids are found in folklore and fairy-tales all over the world and they are even portrayed on old Egyptian murals. Do they exist and are they the cause of “the Bloop”?