
Spying on Whales
The Past, Present, and Future of Earth's Most Awesome Creatures
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Narrated by:
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Nick Pyenson
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By:
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Nick Pyenson
About this listen
“A palaeontological howdunnit...[Spying on Whales] captures the excitement of...seeking answers to deep questions in cetacean science.” (Nature)
Called “the best of science writing” (Edward O. Wilson) and named a best book by Popular Science, a dive into the secret lives of whales, from their four-legged past to their perilous present. Whales are among the largest, most intelligent, deepest diving species to have ever lived on our planet. They evolved from land-roaming, dog-size creatures into animals that move like fish, breathe like us, can grow to 300,000 pounds, live 200 years, and travel entire ocean basins.
Whales fill us with terror, awe, and affection - yet there is still so much we don't know about them. Why did it take whales over 50 million years to evolve to such big sizes, and how do they eat enough to stay that big? How did their ancestors return from land to the sea - and what can their lives tell us about evolution as a whole? Importantly, in the sweepstakes of human-driven habitat and climate change, will whales survive?
Nick Pyenson's research has given us the answers to some of our biggest questions about whales. He takes us deep inside the Smithsonian's unparalleled fossil collections, to frigid Antarctic waters, and to the arid desert in Chile, where scientists race against time to document the largest fossil whale site ever found. Full of rich storytelling and scientific discovery, Spying on Whales spans the ancient past to an uncertain future - all to better understand the most enigmatic creatures on Earth.
©2018 Nick Pyenson (P)2018 Penguin AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
“A palaeontological howdunnit embedded in a travelogue devoted to chasing living and extinct whales...[Spying on Whales] captures the excitement of suction-cup tagging of humpback whales, and of digs in Panama, seeking answers to deep questions in cetacean science.” (Nature)
“Spying on Whales represents the best of science writing. The subject is inherently fascinating, the author is an authentic scientist by virtue of his personal research on the subject, and the text reads like the epic it truly is.” (Edward O. Wilson, Pulitzer Prize-winner and New York Times best-selling author of The Origin of Creativity and The Meaning of Human Existence)
"Pyenson sheds light on the mystery of life below the seas without dimming its majesty.” (Library Journal, starred)
"Contagiously enthusiastic.... A fascinating and entertaining look at whales and the scientists who study them." (Publishers Weekly)
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Story
Drawing on interviews, official records, private archives, and his own family history, Jason M. Colby tells the exhilarating and often heartbreaking story of how people came to love the ocean's greatest predator.
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Gives you lots of information on whale events and people in the cetacean world.
- By Eric & Lexi on 09-21-24
By: Jason M. Colby
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Not on My Watch
- How a Renegade Whale Biologist Took on Governments and Industry to Save Wild Salmon
- By: Alexandra Morton
- Narrated by: Katie Ryerson
- Length: 12 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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Alexandra Morton has been called "the Jane Goodall of Canada" because of her passionate thirty-year fight to save British Columbia's wild salmon. Her account of that fight is both inspiring in its own right and a roadmap of resistance.
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A must read**
- By Jonica H. on 11-30-22
By: Alexandra Morton
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The Blue Machine
- How the Ocean Works
- By: Helen Czerski
- Narrated by: Helen Czerski
- Length: 14 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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All of Earth’s oceans, from the equator to the poles, are a single engine powered by sunlight, driving huge flows of energy, water, life, and raw materials. In The Blue Machine, physicist and oceanographer Helen Czerski illustrates the mechanisms behind this defining feature of our planet, voyaging from the depths of the ocean floor to tropical coral reefs, estuaries that feed into shallow coastal seas, and Arctic ice floes. Timely, elegant, and passionately argued, The Blue Machine presents a fresh perspective on what it means to be a citizen of an ocean planet.
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Pay to be lectured at
- By J. Luvmour on 10-12-23
By: Helen Czerski
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How to Speak Whale
- A Voyage into the Future of Animal Communication
- By: Tom Mustill
- Narrated by: Tom Mustill
- Length: 9 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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What if animals and humans could speak to one another? Tom Mustill—the nature documentarian who went viral when a thirty-ton humpback whale breached onto his kayak—asks this question in his thrilling investigation into whale science and animal communication.
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For all lovers of living beings
- By E. Nelson on 02-16-23
By: Tom Mustill
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Billion Dollar Whale
- By: Bradley Hope, Tom Wright
- Narrated by: Will Collyer
- Length: 12 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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Now a number-one international best seller, Billion Dollar Whale is "an epic tale of white-collar crime on a global scale" (Publishers Weekly), revealing how a young social climber from Malaysia pulled off one of the biggest heists in history. In 2009, a chubby, mild-mannered graduate of the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business named Jho Low set in motion a fraud of unprecedented gall and magnitude—one that would come to symbolize the next great threat to the global financial system.
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Couldn’t stop listening!
- By N Lane on 10-05-18
By: Bradley Hope, and others
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Marine Biology
- A Very Short Introduction
- By: Philip V. Mladenov
- Narrated by: Shaun Grindell
- Length: 5 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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In this Very Short Introduction audiobook, marine biologist Philip Mladenov provides an accessible and up-to-date overview of marine biology, offering a tour of marine life and marine processes that ranges from the unimaginably abundant microscopic organisms that drive the oceans' food web to the apex predators that we exploit for food; from polar ocean ecosystems to tropical coral reefs; and from the luxurious kelp beds of the coastal ocean to deep-ocean hydrothermal vents where life exists without the energy of the sun.
Fabulous
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Beautiful, fascinating and interesting.
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A side of cetaceans you don’t think about every day!
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Was hoping for more history
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Interesting
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Didem
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It fostered the depths of my understanding and my connection to how much magnificence there is as well as fragility for whales. It’s also a very good testimony about how science works and can work to help us understand the world we share with cetaceans💕🐋
Moving narrative with nerdy detail
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Feeling clarity and intrigued by cetacean science
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But what else to we really know about them. Dr. Pyenson's book tells us that whales have been studied extensively and a lot is known about them. But, for every fact uncovered there seems to be 10 or more questions that arise that require further research.
Dr. Pyenson obviously is fascinated with whales and has the skill to explain them to just about anyone. This book has been written to be understood by laymen. If you like whales, you should read/listen to this book as you will probably find it just as fascinating as I did.
A couple of parts that I found particularly interesting are:
The research that took place to determine whether a baleen whale controls the flow of water into its throat when feeding or is the throat expanded due to shear volume without any control of the water by the whale. Doesn't sound to significant until you realize that the amount of water taken in during each jaw opening is the equivalent volume of a nominal living room in a house and that from opening to closing of the jaw takes place in less than 15 seconds. Amazing! Btw, the research calculated that the whale must control the flow as the forces are so significant that if they didn't control it the back of their throat would blow out.
The second item was about a whale graveyard found in South America. Just before reading "Spying on Whales", I had finished "This Is Your Brain on Parasites", which identifies just how much impact micro-organisms can have in our world in the past, presently and in the future. Regarding the whale graveyard, this impact was in the past.
The whale graveyard is unique in that there are several layers of whale fossils/bones in this graveyard. Each event that caused the whales to die (referred to as a whale fall) are thousands of years apart. The quality and quantity of the whale remains indicates that the cause of death was quite rapid. The theory is that the weather pattern had changed and caused substantial rain in the mountains which caused a micro-organism that inhabited the mountains to be washed out to the ocean shore. Much like a red tide is today, the micro-organism quantity proved to be substantial enough to cause the water that the whales were swimming in to become toxic. It is amazing that one of the smallest living organisms can kill one of the largest living creatures on the planet.
There are plenty of other things to learn about whales in this book. I thoroughly enjoyed the book and highly recommend it to anyone who has an interest in whales. I listened to the audio version and recommend it to those that like listening to a very good story.
A Whale of a Story About Whales
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Interesting & Thoughtful
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