radioactive moss

the closest thing to real soulmates you can find

we fought in the same trenches and have a warrior's bond that carries over into every stage of life

friend i sit next to in every class and pass notes to/whisper to constantly

academic peer/colleague that i respect and have a little intellectual crush on

neighbour in the same apartment block that i say hi to on the stairs

neighbour across the street who i wave at every morning and evening

we're regulars at the same bar

<•> The Watcher and His Lonely ≈≈

something something the dichotomy of the eye vs the lonely, the lonely cannot be alone if they are watched and the watcher cannot see the imperceptible, the powers of seeing all vs turning invisible, and yet on both sides they end up working in tandem, unstoppable force shielded by immovable object…

The Whale Sanctuary Project have their sights set on Wikie and Keijo and they want to accelerate their plans and make a bay pen to put them into.

This "revolutionary plan" is exactly like what these whales already have - round the clock vet care, med pools, gated pools, slide outs - but with more stressors and uncontrollable variables than before.

These ~natural elements~ is just the naturalism fallacy being used as a marketing ploy. These whales don't understand this "natural life." You might as well be plucking them out and throwing them on a different planet.

Now, if you haven't worked on and around the ocean before, let me shed some light as someone who had to take a boat out to the Pacific Ocean to work with dolphins every day.

The ocean doesn't take kindly to man-made structures.

It will wear things down, ocean winds will rip your pontoons out and shred them, storm surges don't care about the weighted blocks you put down to stop your net lifting out. The animals will need to be fed in hurricane force winds that pull you off your feet. The net will need to be checked by divers and maintained no matter the season.

Your animals will have to fight daily with currents and tides that tug them around - sometimes those tides can pull them into nets. Wild marine life will harass them for their fish and naive animals will spook and shy away from coral and fish and anything that they haven't seen before (so good luck getting stationing for feeding when there's a weird looking fish around). You have to scoop out trash, cigarette butts and plastic bags and hope to whatever god you have that your retrieval training is enough to stop your animals from eating them. Your animals will very likely eat leaves, sticks, pebbles, anything they can get their mouths on.

(Since the sanctuary doesn't like training, I wonder if they'd even train a retrieval behaviour since it's "unnatural".)

A sea sanctuary is just captivity with a fun little animal rights activist spin on it. It is still captivity, no matter how big you make it. Wikie has been in human care for over 20 years. She has adapted to her current environment and throwing her into a bay pen is going to be stressful for her. She won't know anything about this new environment and there will be only a flood of new stimuli with nowhere to retreat from it.

The beluga Little Grey got stomach ulcers within only a few days of being out in the smaller acclimation bay pens. Little Grey and Little White have only been in human care for a bit over 5 years and they are struggling, even with the chance to decompress in their indoor pool.

Why are we planning this? What is this serving? We have no evidence that a sea pen is an inherently better housing situation for cetaceans.

We started with sea pens when orcas were first being captured! And orcas died there too.

Namu was one of the first captured killer whales and he died in a sea pen. The sea pen doesn't magically fix welfare issues caused by poor management.

"But that wasn't a REAL sanctuary!"

Okay then if sea pens are so inherently enriching and fix all welfare issues, why was Keiko logging for hours in his bay pen? Why did he become overweight and sluggish and sexually fixated on a giant red ball until someone who actually knew what they were doing started a proper training plan for him?

Why did Nami die with 180 lbs of stones in her stomach that she had ingested while living in a sea pen? Aren't sea pens so inherently enriching and stimulating that they don't need enrichment or training sessions? As Lori Marino put it in a bizarre webinar last year: "they'll be enriched by the flora and fauna; they won't need trainer relationships."

Anyway stop falling for these scammers and advocate for actual animal welfare that has science to back it up.

Whether or not you’re personally comfortable with killer whales in captivity, if you genuinely think (and share with others on your platform) that the SINGLE BIGGEST thing you can do to support wild orcas is to simply not visit a park (a literal non-action), then you are the one peddling “misinformation.”

And I remember being just flabbergasted. This wild card, this completely unrelated comment just blindsided the rest of the documentary. NZ killer whales haven never been captured or kept in captivity. There are no killer whales in captivity in Oceania. And Visser, with all her reach and popularity, if she could tell people ONE thing, just one, to help the oceans. Would tell them not to contribute to the welfare and care of well-managed cetaceans in captivity.

It's like the photos of wild dolphins jumping, and all the comments can say is "Wild and FREE like they should be!!!" Cetacean captivity has been so burned into the collective mind, it's bizarre. If anything even vaguely alludes to whales or dolphins, it's immediately brought up. And as mentioned above, this is such a harmful idea to perpetuate. There's so many things threatening wild cetaceans. Hundreds, if not thousands of dolphins still die in fishing nets each year. They are still killed for bait and food. But it's the single killer whale death in a zoo that everyone's foaming at the mouth over. And for influential scientists to also further this view... wow.

Our Heimler who art on YouTube,

hallowed be thy name

Thy brain cows milked,

thy five received,

on exam day as it is in class

Give us this day our daily video

And forgive us of our mistakes,

as we forgive ourselves

Ane lead us not into procrastination,

but deliver us from it

For thine is the kingdom,

And the power, and the glory, forever.

pov: you're waking up and it's june 1st