Giant Transparent Raviolis

Happy World Wildlife Day! Today is an important day for world conservation and was created by the UN to raise awareness. I hope you’ve done your part today.

I am going to celebrate World Wildlife Day by talking about the Giant Manta Ray. These guys are incredibly cool and unfortunately on the Endangered Species list. But I’ll get to that later.

Look at these weird transparent raviolis!

Originally there was thought to be only one species of manta, but that has recently changed and they have been divided up into Giant Manta Rays (Manta birostris) and Reef Manta Rays (Manta alfredi). Today I’ll talk about the Giant ones. The ones that can get up to 29 feet in width and weight up to 3,500 pounds. They also have a lifespan of about 40 years.

The Giant Manta Ray lives…everywhere. Well, everywhere warm at least. These are fairly solitary creatures that range across the entire ocean from tropical to temperate waters. They come close to the coast at times for feeding, but also have been known to dive to depths of about 1 kilometer, which is pretty crazy.

These creatures are also pretty rude and eat with their mouths open. But seriously. They eat plankton and swim around with their mouths wide open, using two fins on their face to funnel the food in through their gill rakers. Interestingly, I found an article today that suggests that Giant Mantas may also feed on small to medium sized fish when they go diving in the deep. Unfortunately, since they are such solitary creatures and have seen a pretty big population drop thanks to commercial fishing, pollution, and humans in general, we don’t actually have that much information about this and there has been no visual evidence to back up the claims of them eating these larger animals. It’s amazing how little we know about the ocean and those that live there.

As stated before, these magnificent animals are listed as “Threatened” on the Endangered Species list. It’s hard to say how many are left in the wild as we have so little data on them, they live in such a vast area, and generally like to keep to themselves. However, we know their population has been greatly threatened by commercial fishing and also trade for their gill rakers. The gill rakers are used in traditional medicine and are in high demand.

Here are a couple of good links for Manta conservation if you’re interested!

https://www.mantatrust.org/

Manta Ray Conservation Efforts

Also, here’s the link to that article about feeding if you were interested:

https://gizmodo.com/giant-manta-rays-are-more-badass-than-we-realized-1789519585

Baaaaaabyy Beluga

Welcome to today’s blog! Today I’m going to talk about “the canaries of the sea”, the beluga!

The beluga is one of the smaller whales, about 13-20 feet long. Known for it’s beautiful white skin, the beluga lives in mostly in the Arctic Ocean, camouflaging with the ice above. They do travel south during the winter and sometimes even travel up rivers if the eatin’ is good. Belugas (Delphinapterus leucas) are carnivores and known as “toothed” whales.

One of my favorite things about them is that the iconic bulge on their head is called a melon. It is the key to their echolocation. It is flexible and can move around, giving the beluga an ability to make expressions as well as a diverse range of noises to communicate. Belugas are social creatures, almost never being alone. They usually live in pods of around 10, but during the summer they can be found in groups of several hundreds.

While belugas are doing okay, their habitat is being compromised through global warming. The ice that provides them protecting is rapidly melting in the arctic. Also, as belugas as such social creatures, they rely heavily on being able to hear each other. Noise pollution is a growing issue in the Arctic with an increase of international shipping.

The World Wildlife Fund is trying to raise awareness of the dangers of noise pollution and shipping in the arctic. The bottom of this website has a few great links if you want to get more involved. https://www.worldwildlife.org/species/beluga