shieldagentmaller:suckerforsciencefiction:imdoingthisforrmyho...

shieldagentmaller:

suckerforsciencefiction:

imdoingthisforrmyhorse:

healthyprettythings:

The Loneliest Whale in the World.

In 2004, The New York Times wrote an article about the loneliest whale in the world. Scientists have been tracking her since 1992 and they discovered the problem:

She isn’t like any other baleen whale. Unlike all other whales, she doesn’t have friends. She doesn’t have a family. She doesn’t belong to any tribe, pack or gang. She doesn’t have a lover. She never had one. Her songs come in groups of two to six calls, lasting for five to six seconds each. But her voice is unlike any other baleen whale. It is unique—while the rest of her kind communicate between 12 and 25hz, she sings at 52hz. You see, that’s precisely the problem. No other whales can hear her. Every one of her desperate calls to communicate remains unanswered. Each cry ignored. And, with every lonely song, she becomes sadder and more frustrated, her notes going deeper in despair as the years go by.

Just imagine that massive mammal, floating alone and singing—too big to connect with any of the beings it passes, feeling paradoxically small in the vast stretches of empty, open ocean.

“A cryptozoologist has suggested that the 52-Hertz whale could even be lonelier than we realize, a hybrid between two different species of whale, or the last survivor of an unidentified species, plying the oceans in a doomed search for another of its kind, singing its broken song.”

I thought I was lonely.

That is one of the saddest articles I have ever read in my life.

Yep, my heart just cracked in two.

I met my husband when I was very young, and a horrible thing had happened on the beach in the town where we lived.

14 whales had inexplicably beached themselves on the shore and refused to go back in the water. We tried pouring sea water on them, we tried pushing them back in the water, we tried everything. In the end, they all died right there in front of us.

Until reading THIS, I thought that was the saddest story I’d ever heard about whales.