WHALES
★★★★★ (4 out of 5)
Hello, and welcome to my week-by-week review of everything in the world. Today I am reviewing whales.
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A lot of people say whales aren’t fish, they’re mammals. But there are those of us who believe whales are fish. It depends on how you define a mammal. I define a mammal as anything living on land that can’t fly. Science has its own definitions and I have mine. In the end, it’s really God who decides what’s what, and I believe God decided to make giant fish that are called whales.
If you’ve never heard of a whale before, you probably have and just don’t know it. Remember Willy, that giant fish from Free Willy? He was a whale. And that character from Moby Dick? Not the sea captain and not the guy with all the tattoos, but the one that lived in the water and was being hunted? He was a whale.
Whales have been part of the human consciousness for centuries and yet we know little about them. Unlike other fish, they don’t live in schools but they do sometimes swim together. There is one whale, however, that is the most mysterious one of all.
Discovery.com reports, “For decades now, scientists at the NOAA have been tracking a mysterious whale song that sounds like the ghostly howls of a drowned tuba player. The sounds have been identified as belonging to a single whale, who sings at a frequency unlike any other whale in the world.”
As a tuba player myself, I can’t think of a single, more depressing thing than a lone whale swimming around the oceans of the world, calling out and receiving no answer. My hope is that this is just some regular whale playing a practical joke on people. It would be a good joke, and it would make me feel much less sad about the whole situation.
It wouldn’t be a big surprise if this lonely whale decided to give up after a while. Sometimes they do that – whales will just give up and decide to swim onto land. This seems pretty clearly to me to be an act of suicide, and frankly, I don’t blame them. If I had to spend my whole life swimming and having barnacles grow on me, I would probably want to give up, too.
There’s one whale who I think would never give up. That’s the narwhal. It’s easily the coolest whale there is, known for its enormous horn which it uses to spear its prey. How it gets its prey off its horn once it’s pierced them is anyone’s guess. It may just swim around with a dead fish on its horn and offer the meat to other, less fortunate whales. Kind of like Robin Hood.
When whales aren’t hunting, they are often hunted for their blubber, meat, and blowholes. One of the reasons they are such a popular food is that their bones are so big it’s impossible to get them stuck in your teeth, unlike other fish.
If you ever see a narwhal in real life, run. Because if you’re running, that means you’re on land, and whales can’t really get you there.
Please join me next week when I’ll be reviewing Avatar II.
