19th century whaling

Oh, Rats: Rodents Too Smart for Exterminators on Island visited by ‘Essex’ Castaways

by Kat LongCommentary April 25, 2016June 5, 20160 comments

A study published last week in the journal Royal Society Open Science described everyone’s worst nightmare: rats that appeared to be too smart to eat poison put out by exterminators on Henderson Island, a Pacific islet where survivors from the whaleship Essex landed in 1820. Researchers described a case report in which a project to eradicate invasive rats …

Southern Right Whale Recovery Could Take Decades, Study Finds

by Kat LongCommentary March 15, 2016March 16, 20160 comments

This week, whale watchers went bananas over sightings of about 250 northern right whales in the plankton-rich waters around Cape Cod. The pods represented half of the total population of these critically endangered cetaceans, one of the world’s rarest animals. Now, in the first assessment since the end of the 19th century whaling era, the British …