Digitial Release of Bjork, Dirty Projectors Collaberation to Benefit Nat Geo’s Ocean Initiatives

Bjork and the Dirty Projectors (a band that’s garnered some buzz  last year with their release Bitter Orca) have re-released a recent collaborative effort of theirs in digital form, this time to benefit Nat Geo’s Ocean Initiatives.

The original work, dubbed Mount Wittenberg Orca, was originally composed and preformed to benefit the homeless and an AIDS advocacy group.It’s fitting however, that the songs are being re-released to provide further assistance to a slightly different cause. According to the nat-geo article on this recent news item, the work was actually inspired by the ocean:

“Together they wrote and performed a new suite of songs called “Mount Wittenberg Orca,” which was inspired by Dirty Projectors’ Amber Coffman sighting of a family of Orcas on the California coast, and features Björk singing the part of the mom whale.”

Purchase and download the EP here.

The Whale That Ate Jaws

Nat Geo clip:

The Farallon islands are a group of jagged islands off the coast of California. They’ve become an area of great interest to shark researchers as great whites choose to spend time aggregating there. Author Susan Casey wrote a book about this called Devil’s Teeth: A True Story of Obsession and Survival Among America’s Great White Sharks (the book is well worth a read but take heed that the story is just as much about the author as about the sharks). Peter Pyle, a shark biologist on the islands, is referenced in the book as well as the clip.

I find this incident interesting on a couple different levels. First, we don’t often think of great whites succumbing to other predators, which seems to have fed into our fear of this creature.

Also, if you watch an associated clip: http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/series/wild/4669/Overview#tab-Videos/07504_00, it appears the orca may have exploited the phenomenon of tonic immobility, which I wrote a blog entry on previously. I’ve also written on the differing hunting behavior of orcas. Nature likes to keep us guessing….

An Orca is an orca is an orca… or is it?

This is one story I had heard about in college and find really fascinating. Killer whales, more formally known as Orcas, have subdivisions of their species that behave in drastically different ways .

Apparently, the title of whale is often considered a misnomer as these guys are supposedly genetically dolphins (as they are in the Delphinidae family). However, this leaves me a little confused as all dolphins are part of the larger classification, the suborder Odontoceti, or toothed whales. Apparently there is not total agreement as to whether dolphins are really just toothed whales. But I digress…

At any rate. They’ve (you know… the disembodied “they”? Guess I should change this to a more appropiate but no less vauge “researchers”) found that orcas have several different ecotypes. This means basically that there are subgroups of orcas that are adapted to different living conditions. There are three described killer whale ecotypes which include offshore, transient, and resident orcas.

The least studied ecotype is the offshore Orcas. They are a fairly recent discover. These dolphins (whales?) are found further from the coast than the other two types, and appear to be genetically and phenologically distinct.You might describe them as orcas gone rogue =).

Both resident and transient orcas will often be found closer inland. Resident populations tend to be the social butterflies of the species. They form larger pods and tend to be more tightly knit. They are piscivorous (fish) feeders.

Transient pods are smaller, usually no larger than six individuals. They are stealthier hunters, focusing their attention on marine mammals as prey. Transient orcas also had an interesting role in the disappearance of Alaskan sea otters. Sea otters  were considered keystone species in the local foodweb and their disappearance led to a proliferation in sea urchins which in turn led to the decline of kelp beds that provide invaluable habitat for other organisms.