Whales & things

The morning started with several books and magazines at the breakfast table. Ri was reading a book about Gila monsters, and we were talking about travelling and how cool it would be to see one in the wild one day. There was something -- can't remember exactly what now -- that connected to something in the National Geographic we had on the table, so he started looking through that. He came across some blue whale photographs that were really beautiful and got interested in the article that went with them. A picture of one researcher shooting a satellite tag and another shooting a biopsy dart brought up a lot of ethical pondering and questioning and considering. We also spent a lot of time looking at the chart on the page that you can see here in this photo. It shows the feeding pattern of whales diving & lunging for krill, which we were talking about having seen happen to Marvin and Dory in Finding Nemo.


We decided to make a little Krill & Whale experiment. We came up with oats to use as Krill and a big jar for a whale.


Seth was kind enough to let us intrude on his bath.

Some of the observers hanging out on the side of the tub:

Squidward



Penguins from the movie Happy Feet, which also happens to touch a bit on tagging/researching/human impact on wildlife. I just love it -- connections, connections everywhere, even on the side of our bathtub.

Some of our oatmeal krill sank to the bottom but other pieces floated. Here is the "whale" going after his food.

Before moving on to other things, Ri decided he wanted to work a sea life floor puzzle we've had for a long time. We talked about things from Finding Nemo, from our own trips to the ocean, from things we've read, and from visits to the Aquarium.

Pablo wondered why we were so interested in stinkin' sea creature puzzles when we have a perfectly cute puppy to shower with our undivided attention.

The joy of finally finding where that darn piece was supposed to go.

After the puzzle, Riley moved on to other things.

For future reference (or not), or for anyone else interested, I found some more cool stuff related to the National Geographic article on their website, here.