At the end

Hey Team,

So here I am, my second last day of my internship in Croatia. Unfortunately it wasn't the most exciting internship. On the water, our main job was to watch for dolphins, monitor dolphins during a sighting, and to take the waypoints every five minutes during the sighting. It was very similar to what I did in Florida here. In the office, it was a lot of little jobs here and there, some photo-ID, data entry, even trips to the post office and on one very long day, a lot of yard work and cleaning up an old military base where they are hoping to open a new centre (I was 95% sure I would find a dead body).

That being said, it was a lot of fun being in a totally new country where everything is different. This was the smallest village I've ever lived in, and it was a struggle, it being a tourist town it didn't really "open" until 3 weeks before I left. Just now, restaurants, bars and activity centres are opening... too little too late for me.

But it's given me a chance to watch a lot of TV and movies, pretend to learn more French (I do actually think I'm learning something) and I guess just RELAX! which is something I haven't done for this long in... forever. I usually get maybe a week or two without being too busy and too many commitments, but 3 months? I have never had that much down time, even with work every day.

I should have blogged more, I know, but without internet at the house, my only web time is at work, when I should be working... but there's enough time between assignments to do some blogging.

Anyways, now you know a little bit more of what I was doing here in Croatia at the Blue World Institute. Now I get to travel around in May, visiting with some friends and family in East North America. I have no idea what the plans are for the summer, until August when I head off to Mingan Island for (hopefully) my last internship. Once I'm home in June, hopefully I will have more time to update this thing.

Speak Loud!

Facts in a Bottle

Hey Team!

So keeping with a feature of this blog, here are 15 facts on most people's favourite cetacean, the bottlenose dolphin!

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1. Their scientific name is Tursiops truncatus, named for the shape of their teeth
2. They are one of the most well known cetacean species, due to their exposure in aquaria and in film
3. They live in groups called pods, with a "fission/fusion" social system.
4. The "fission/fusion" system describes one where there is a well defined population, but not all individuals will be see together at all times.
5. Small, more permanent groups can arise, like mom/calf pairs and male pairs.
6. Male pairs are affectionately called "bromances". Two or three adult males will be seen swimming and and acting together in call aspects of life. They can last for a few months up to a lifetime.
7. They have some strange... |mating rituals". A male pair (or trio) will approach a female, separate her from the group, mate with her (both of them), then return her to the group. This sometimes reminds us of inappropriate human behaviour, and we have nicknamed it such.
8. All cetaceans can be identified by individuals in a particular manner. Bottlenose dolphins, like other dolphins, can be identified easily by their dorsal fins.
9. Bottlenose dolphins can be somewhat violent towards each other in play, mating and aggressiveness. Therefore they can get a lots of scratches and scars.
10. These scars, scratches, nicks and notches are usually permanent, and on the dorsal fin can be used to identify dolphins as individuals.
11. Just like a human's fingerprint, no two dolphin fins are the same in size, shape and natural markings!
12. Like other small cetaceans (mostly toothed whales), bottlenose dolphins use echolocation to get around underwater.
13.  Echolocation deals with sound waves, so dolphins are able to "hear" the world around them, or even cooler... "see in sound". That's kind of cool.
14. Although their common name isn't "the common dolphin" (which does exist), they are the most well known dolphin, courtesy of movies and films like Flipper and Dolphin Tale.
15. not only are bottlenose dolphins intelligent enough to do flips and tricks on command, they are also intelligent enough to use tools for foraging! There are a lot of documented cases of dolphins using sea sponges to root around the ocean floor for food.

Enjoy your day!

There you go, a couple more facts for your cetacean knowledge!

Speak Loud!

Book in Review: The Story of B

An American priest crosses the ocean on the trail of a man known as “B”, with a singular mission: to hear the message that B is carrying and to see if he is what the Lutheran church has always feared – the Antichrist.

What JF discovers is that B’s message might be far greater than anything the church could have ever thought – the message on how to save the world.

From Amazon

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I should write the backs of books. Seriously. That took me like, 5 minutes and it’s been almost 3 months since I read the book.

The Story of B is a sort-of sequel to Ishmael – a sequel in that it is set more recently than Ishmael, and they mention Ishmael in the story. But other than that, it is essentially a book onto itself, though the backbone is the same: To save the world from its utter destruction, we must change the way we see humans in nature.

But, where Ishmael took more of a straight historical view, mixing in religion and biology where suitable, Story of B sort of does the opposite: It takes the religious and biological views, and mixes in history just to keep things clean.

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Personally, I liked and disliked this approach. I definitely liked Ishmael more, but then I still need to read Story of B at least two more times before I will pretend I actually understand it past the “big picture”. But, as someone who lives both in the scientific and religious world, it’s hard for me to sympathize with media that puts the two at odds – although I know that there is a history of it and in fanatical and extreme cases there still is.

Maybe it’s the moderate in me, but I always find it difficult when people blame religion for anything – even if it’s not my religion.

But what I did like about this book was all the biology in it! Ishmael had it, of course. You can’t talk about nature without talking about biology, it’s one of the other. But it was a lot more pronounced in Story of B, using terms and concepts straight out of my second year ecology class to explain how messed up we are in this world.

Now, I read a PDF version off of my laptop, as I am travelling and books are difficult to carry around (although how come every time I travel, determined not to bring books with me, I always come home with at least two?), and the way the PDF was set up was they put all the “lecture material” (AKA the nitty gritty details) at the very end, so you could get the overall premise and all the action from the book, then if your brain wasn’t complete mush, you could try to get through about 100 pages (actual pages, because it was a PDF) of all the details that make his argument valid.

I was so overwhelmed by the end of the actually book that I got through about half of the lecture material. I was also travelling, which made it difficult to find time to read on my laptop. So I sort of wish they had split it up in the book. But maybe they do in the print version. I don’t know. If someone does know, leave a comment!

So, in summary, Story of B is a great book that really makes you think, but I personally preferred Ishmael. All my atheist readers (you know who you are, even if I don’t), maybe you’ll like it more than I did, but I think anyone who reads it will get something awesome out of it.

I think I’ll end with a quote from the book, because it’s sort of the central principle, and it makes total and complete sense – and if it doesn’t, it means you need to read the book.

“If the world is saved, it will be saved by people with changed minds, people with a new vision. It will not be saved by people with old minds and new programs.”

Speak Loud!

Buy the book at Amazon

And at Chapters