Paul Ritter Ecology Class

One of a dozen dead sperm whales beached on Auckland's west coast has been butchered for its jawbone despite a 24-hour security operation to deter poachers. Department of Conservation (DOC) officer Karl McLeod said teeth from the jawbone could be worth up to $200 each.  "It's pretty disappointing, especially because we had security at both ends of the beach," he said.  But DOC was allowing a team of specialists to remove jawbones from the rest of the animals.  The whales, stranded over a 5km stretch of west coast beach between Karaka and Whatipu at the mouth of Manukau Harbor, drew a crowd of about 1500 people today but spectators were being told to "look and not touch". It is not known why the pod, thought to be mostly females with one young calf, became marooned on the beach but it was "a significant stranding event" of sperm whales, the like of which hadn't been seen for some 20 to 30 years, Mr McLeod said. Professor Scott Baker of Auckland University, who has taken DNA samples to carry out genetic testing on the animals, said the theory of whale stranding was that one animal, possibly a herd leader, got into trouble and the rest followed. "Sperm whales are deepwater animals rarely seen close to the coast but once a family member gets distressed they seem to follow the herd leader," he said, adding their weight meant they were often crushed to death on land. "Once they are on the beach, it's all over," he said. Mr McCallum said cutting out the jawbones could take up to three days and burial another two.  The animals, some around 10m long and weighing up to 12 tones, would be buried in the dunes using a digger and bulldozer.

      Reduce Reuse Recycle                

"The most beautiful object I have ever seen in a photograph in all my life, is the planet earth from the distance of the moon, hanging in space obviously alive. Although it seem at first glance to be made up of innumerable separate species of living things, working parts, including us, it is interdependently connected to all the other working parts. It is, to put it one way, the only truly closed ecosystem any of us know about."

This poem is by Lewis Thomas

Road Side Clean Up On 116    

Ecology Course Outline: What it takes to take an Ecology Course.

Ecology Objectives

Ecology Syllabus

If you want to play a fun game click here: http://www.funbrain.com/cgi-bin/shtml.cgi?A1=../recycle/index.html 

   This is a picture of Pontiac IL from outer space. Click on this picture to make it larger.

Oil Problems

    A black smudge covered the water and much of the sand when it hit Goree Island on Saturday, where some two million African slaves had a last glimpse of their homeland before being shipped across the Atlantic to a lifetime of servitude.  "The pollution is quite worrying because the beach at Goree is covered by oil which is quite thinly spread but very visible," Blandine Melis, a marine biologist monitoring ocean life at Senegal's Oceania diving center, told Reuters.  Melis said she could not identify the specific source of the pollution, but said it was likely to have been dumped at sea by ships washing out their tanks, a frequent source of oil slicks off the coast of Senegal.  U.S. President George W. Bush visited Goree Island as part of an African tour in July, where he described slavery as one of history's greatest crimes.

 Developed By

Paul Ritter and Tricia Landstrom