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Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 599.5248
EAN: 9780312383879
Edition: 1st
ISBN: 0312383878
Label: Thomas Dunne Books
Manufacturer: Thomas Dunne Books
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 336
Publication Date: October 14, 2008
Publisher: Thomas Dunne Books
Release Date: October 14, 2008
Studio: Thomas Dunne Books
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The blue whale holds the title of largest creature that has ever lived, and it may also be the most mysterious. The biggest blue whales can outweigh every player in Major League Baseball and the National Hockey League combined. Their mouths can gulp more than thirteen thousand gallons of seawater. A newborn can be over twenty feet long and gain nearly twenty tons in seven months—about eight pounds per hour. Blue whales emit more powerful sounds than any other animal on earth, though many of their vocalizations are beyond the range of human hearing.
Yet nearly everything that we have learned about blue whales has come after humans almost wiped them out from the oceans. A century ago, some three hundred thousand roamed the seas. But in the first decades of the twentieth century, humans hunted and killed 99.9% of them. Their numbers decimated, the species seemed destined for extinction. Only in recent years has the number slowly begun to increase, along with hope for the blue whale’s future.
Equal parts history and science, Wild Blue is the first comprehensive portrait of the blue whale. It draws upon new findings from scientists who have begun to identify individual blue whales and understand how they dive, how they feed, where they migrate, and why they emit their haunting, low-frequency calls. With deft, poignant writing, Dan Bortolotti gives us the most vibrant, breathtaking view to date of these magnificent creatures.
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Wild Blue is simply a great book in every way. It introduces us to a mammal we know surprisingly little about, despite said mammal's status as the largest creature ever to live on Earth. The author is outstanding at explaining cetacean biology, scientific principles, technology, and so on without ever losing his sense of wonder. He also introduces us to the key figures in blue whale research and lets us know what motivates them.
Wild Blue is scientifically exacting yet always accessible to the nonspecialist reader like myself. That's a very difficult tightrope for any author to walk, and Bortolotti never loses his balance. This will stand for a long time as the definitive work on its subject.
Matt Bille
author, Shadows of Existence: Discoveries and Speculations in Zoology (Hancock, 2006)
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Excellent book on the Blue Whale. That being said, there are very few books on the Blue Whale, so lets hope Wild Blue is just the beginning of many focusing on this magnificent whale. Great job Dan Bortolotti, thanks.
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ONE OF MY FIRST EXCURSIONS when I moved to Edinburgh in 1989 was to look in the University of Edinburgh Anatomy Department Library for Sir Robert Sibbald's manuscript and drawings of the first blue whale to be named and described by science in 1692. I was thrilled that "Sibbald's rorqual", as it was first called, had been found on the southern shore of the Firth of Forth, a short walk from our new home, and in the shadow of the blue whale jaw bones atop North Berwick Law.
Finding a good book on blue whales, however, has proved much more difficult, and indeed impossible up till now. The task was taken up by journalist Dan Bortolotti who was determined to tell the big story of the blue whale and to take the time and care to do it well. In Wild Blue, Bortolotti tells the story of Sibbald's 78-foot-long find and how it subsequently became one of the first four whale species to be entered by Linnaeus into his Systema Naturae.
Wild Blue proves to be a sweeping tour of all that is, was and hopefully will be, in centuries to come, the blue whale. No aspect is left uncovered, including whaling, management, genetics, acoustics. All are covered in a concise, engaging way. Yet most engaging are the field studies, e.g., splashing around with Richard Sears - the first person to crack the blue whale photo-ID code and the person who has spent more waking hours with living blue whales than anyone.
The key challenge to writing a good whale book is how to deal with the wealth of unpublished material. Whale science is still young and in process. Even scientific papers and reports can be sketchy and dated; thus much of what is known is carried around in the heads of frontline researchers such as Sears, John Calambokidis and others.
In the best journalistic tradition, Bortolotti investigates, weighs evidence, compares spoken and written accounts of these frontline researchers and emerges with a well written, entertaining result. Here we get the fine points, the rough edges of science. For example, Bortolotti doesn't simply say that blues live to age X but bring you in on the debate about how whales are aged - using ovaries, waxplugs, amino acid in the lens of the eye - and the merits and drawbacks of each method. In very few popular science books will you read a sum-up like this "Taken together, all this evidence means blue whales can certainly live to 37, can almost surely exceed 50, and may well [reach] a maximum lifespan of 90 to 100 years."
The blue whale remains an iconic animal. As Bortolotti hints, it has shades of a living dinosaur, but it is really so much more, bigger, endangered yes, but surprisingly alive and present just off our shores. Seeing one of the 28m skeletons in a national museum has been a rite of passage for many whale scientists, conservationists as well as natural history lovers, and long may it continue to be so. And yet we very nearly lost the blue forever due to human greed. Once there were up to 300,000; today there are more like 10,000 left. And it is only now and neatly summed up in Wild Blue, that we clearly see what we almost lost.
-- Erich Hoyt, Senior Research Fellow, WDCS, the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society; co-director, Far East Russia Orca Project; author of 16 books including Orca: The Whale Called Killer, Insect Lives and Creatures of the Deep.
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