My friends, do you have other activities to do beside sitting infront of your computer or laptop everyday? Internet is one of the most giant leap in human technology that can give you almost anything you want to see or read everyday.

From internet, you can get informations about anything and I hope today you can learn something new from this post. Since I was a little kid, I was being attracted to small square piece of paper that we usually use to send letters, postcards or small gifts to our friends, family or business partner. We call it stamp.

Although these days, we’re rare to send letters through post office because now in the modern way of living, we’re more often to use electronic mail (email). Collecting stamps is my hobby and still collect them until now. Since couple of years back, I decide to be more spesific with my hobby and only do thematic stamps collecting, and the theme that I choose is about whales and dolphins.

Why them? Because I think they’re the most amazing animal in the world. Why they’re amazing? Whales and dolphins have more than 50 millions history of adaptions from the land-dwelling amphibious mammals into their current world, in the water. Their major changes in body shape probably occured 50 to 35 millions years ago, from four-legged amphibious into its current oceanic forms.

Because of the massive whaling activities by us the human being since nearly 1,000 years ago, these amazing marine mammals are heading into the danger of extinction. Although precisely unrecorded, the first large-scale commercial whaling was started by the Basques from the coast of France and Spain, in the 1200′s they were hunting Right Whales in the bay of Biscay.

And in the beginning of 17th century, Britain, Holland and other nations realized the whaling’s potential and busy competing. The American whaling industry began soon in the 1640′s when early colonists ventured the green shores of New England.

One of the most endangered species among all whales and dolphins (cetaceans) is the Yangtze River dolphin, or Baiji. This amazing fresh water dolphin, Baiji (Lipotes Vexillifer) was declared a National Treasure of China and has been protected since 1975. Its genus name Lipotes comes from the Greek meaning to be ‘left behind’ because of their very limited range and may yet prove to be its epitaph.

Other interesting fact about cetaceans, there are six whales that should be called dolphins. One example of it is the Killer Whale who is actually member of the dolphin family, Delphinidae. Most of the experts prefer to call them as the Orca, because they are not deserves to be called “killer” at all.

Orca (Orcinus Orca) is the largest of all dolphins, the top predator of the sea, they’re found in all the oceans from equator to the polar ice. Its “Killer” name comes from 18th centruty whalers who saw them feeding another whales and dolphins.

But, there’s no known evidence or recorded case of a wild Orca ever killing a human as described in a 1977 movie “Orca”. The tagline of the movie describe this great species as the only animal other than man who kills for revenge. The closest fact of an Orca in a movie is more to a “Free Willy” rather than “Orca”.

Orca is easy to identify at sea by its tall dorsal fin. It’s also easy to differentiate between male and female orca by the shape of the dorsal fin. Female orca has a broad and more rounded dorsal fin than its male as you can see on the picture above.

Well my friends, now you know why I said your hobby is another window of knowledge? And if you’re also in the stamps collecting field, I’d be glad to know you and we can shares about our hobby, contact me or post a comment. In October this year, I will participate in Asia Pacific International stamps exhibition here in Jakarta, Indonesia. I will post more about this later.

Source: Whales, Dolphins and Porpoises

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 3rd, 2008 at 1:10 am and is filed under Animal World. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.