September 4, 2018 — Well, Happy Labor Day. We hope you are celebrating by lying in a hammock, dozing in the sun while listening to a ballgame on the radio, taking a swim and any and all activities completely separated from the concept of work. Take the day. You’ve earned it. Even if you haven’t, we won’t spill.
As an homage to the chill, we’re going to abridge the top of the column, providing another piece to your day that doesn’t require much intellectual or emotional heavy lifting. I’m telling you, this Labor Day thing is the cat’s whiskers.
To the items:
Whale of a story
It feels as if any time we write about whales, it’s with a certain hand-wringing about their imperiled status. But there is another side to the coin and that is that the great beasts have been a constant and immensely pleasurable presence near the Cape Ann coastline all summer.
Our waters have been filled with the largest mammals of the sea from mid-spring. There was an early appearance of a dozen or so northern right whales, followed by humpbacks, minke and fin whales. We even heard from one Rockport lobsterman, whose name is being withheld because of his continued ties to the radical Weather Underground, of pilot whales feeding on schools of pogeys in as little as 9 feet of water hereabouts.
Perhaps you saw the story in the pages of the Gloucester Daily Times and online at gloucestertimes.com, where our intrepid correspondent, along with photographer Paul Bilodeau, journeyed out aboard a whale watch boat to check out all the hubbub.
Now comes a different type of whale story: how the scientific community is mustering even more arguments for protecting whales because of the benefits of their, well, poop.
According to the piece in Scientific American, a 2010 study showed whale feces injects about 23,000 metric tons of nitrogen into Gulf of Maine waters each year and conceivably could help with climate change.