Daily Life

It is now Friday.  Today and tomorrow are the last two full days of the cruise left.  So why not get a little weird..

It was a fairly dull day outside.  The light was okay for photography, but there wasn’t much to see.  An old rubber float with a colony of sea life growing from it.  (There were a lot of these!)

A rare dolphin.  At least it was rare to be seen on this cruise!

A few interesting clouds.

A drifting volleyball with another growth of sea life.

A occasional hard to identify sea bird.

A drifting unidentified something…

…a what?  I wasn’t sure what these things were.

It looked like a headless shark tossed from a fishing boat, at first.

But that didn’t seem right.

There were a bunch of these.  I was able to photography six or so, with varying results.  A couple seemed to be floating with their nose sticking out of the water.  They were big!  Maybe 15 to 20 feet long or more from what I could see…

Mind you, I was eight floors above the ocean, and the ship was cruising along at 20 knots.  I had only a couple seconds to get any of them once I saw them.  I don’t know what might have been on the other side of the ship.

This was over about a twenty minute period.

I had no clue what these things were.  Later in the evening I took my laptop down to the Customer Service Desk to see if anyone there knew.

One young guy from the Phillipines staffing the desk was mystified from a few seconds, but then decided they were whale sharks.

He said they are very gentle and float with their nose out of the water, which is strange because they are Sharks, not Whales.  They seem to be endangered because they are so easy for the fisherman to catch.  They aren’t nearly as nice as they look in Wikipedia.  If they are whale sharks they are outside of their normal territory, which is mainly in tropical waters.

I don’t have any better idea, so they are Whale Sharks!

~Curtis, out at sea! {!-{>

Addendum:

The Dailylfe Daughter #2 had this reassuring comment:

“I was dubious about this identification but the picture on this site: http://www.sharks.org/species/whale-shark

Convinced me. Thank you google search for ‘lumpy head sharks’.”

So there you go.  {!-{>

Addendum #2:

I was curious as to why these Whale Sharks were so far out of the tropics, so I emailed the Shark Research Institute, where Dailylife Daughter #2 had found the photo that looked like whale sharks…

Hi Curtis,

Our webmaster forward your request to us. The images posted on
http://www.dailylife.barrowroad.com/?p=23419 are of an ocean sunfish, *Mola
mola.*

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_sunfish

They DO look like floating heads. We've seen them in the tropics and
occasionally here off New Jersey. Can't eat them tho; their flesh is
riddled with parasites.

Best regards,
Marie Levine
Shark Research Institute

Sure enough, I looked and one of the photos could taken by me on the Amsterdam.  So they are NOT whale sharks but are a kind of Sunfish.  They can go to over 2,000 pounds!!!  They look pretty close from the angle I had…

Pretty ugly looking, either way!

~Curtis in /\/\onTana! {!-{>