To put it most simply, this book is about whales - but it's so much more than that. The writing is so lyrical and almost poetic that it feels like reading poetry sometime. Poetry with great whale information!
-There was a chapter at the end all about how in the last few years that scientists have opened up the stomachs of dead whales and the amount of plastic that they have found in them is STAGGERING. I immediately wanted wanted to get up and recycle everything that was nearby. There was one whale that had 88 plastic rice sacks (empty) in it's stomach. And so much fishing nets and fishing line. There are some seagulls in Australia that 8% of their bodyweight is made up of plastic. If that was a 137 pound human that would be 11 pounds of plastic in their stomach. It was heartbreaking.
- One of my favorite parts of the book was when they talked about the sounds that whales made. This was one of my favorite facts from the book: " Songs sung by humpbacks off Puerto Rico, for instance, would be heard by whales in waters near Newfoundland some 1615 miles away; the equivalent to a shout on the streets of Moscow being made-out, whisper quiet, by people in London". How is that even real life? I love it.
-Livestock (cows and pigs) make up 60% of the earth's mammals. (Not much room left for other things, like whales)
-You know how the Germans have a word for everything? (And sometimes it's 16 letters long?) I learned another one in this book "heiliger Schauer": the shiver of prey sensing a predator's gaze.
- You know that sometimes if you are threatening to beat the crap out of someone you can refer to it as "whaling on someone?" The reason that it's called that is because police batons used to be made of whalebone. Which is the part of the whales mouth that they use to strain krill.
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| Also, I love this font |
