Guided Mis-Information

I was hiking at a local national park the other day. I had to hike past some groups of people bundled around the entrance trail to get to more reclusive paths. As I was passing a group I heard "There's two types of killer whales: meat eaters and vegetarians".

Wha? What?? Did I hear that right? I did. Not only that but the information was coming from a park interpretive ranger guiding the group. A park ranger who lives in a town where significant killer whale research goes on. Where he has access and has talked to biologists who study killer whales. Ack!

For those of you who don't know: There are two types of killer whales. In that the ranger was correct. Now I recently finished completing a lot of work on this orca ID Catalogue for Eastern Kamchatka, Russia. I'm not a main author but I am acknowledged and let's face it, I put in a lot of work on it. So I know a little bit about the subject. I know 500 plus Russian killer whales by name.

The two types of killer whales are the Residents & the Transients. These labels are totally mis-leading and are based on previous assumptions about orcas but somehow they've stuck. Resident Orcas are fish eating orcas and they tend to not to travel very far. Transient Orcas are mammal eaters and they have to travel farther for food. But both groups tend to be loyal to a certain territory. The interesting thing as that these two groups are distinct genetically, where ever you find orcas. That means that while the orcas here at the north pole are genetically distinct from the orcas at the south pole the fish eaters and the mammal eaters in both places are still distinct from each other. So this is not necessarily a learned behavior but an inherited one. (Can you hear it now though? Orca prejudices - daddy will never speak to you again little fish eater if you marry that mammal eater!).

I can only guess that the ranger has been exposed to the saying "I'm a vegetarian but I eat fish" too often. But come on, who is he fooling? These are predators? Have you ever taken a look at those teeth? There should be a park sign that says "Please don't feed the tourists mis-information".

Klyuchevoskoy Volcano (Ключевской сопка)

This volcano's (Koryaksky - Корякская сопка) neighbor (Klyuchevoskoy - Ключевской) is exploding right now and I bet most of you haven’t even heard about it. I only heard about it briefly and almost by accident because the ash plumes are affecting air traffic over the Aleutian islands of Alaska – all the way from Russia. Having heard the news I investigated what I could to find that entire villages and their economies have been wiped out from the mud and lava flows from this volcano. Hot spring spas that I soaked in after a grueling field season on the Commander Islands have washed away under a sea of mud. This picture is from Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky (PK), a city in Far Eastern Russian on the Kamchatka Penninsula. PK is a grim city in a gorgeous setting, mostly because it was almost entirely constructed during the Soviet era of which gray cinder block structures became almost a signature piece. I can imagine the soot filtering through this city making it even dustier. How is it that parts of world can be wiped out and the news of it can't compete with the gossip news?