Weekend open thread
June 15, 2018
Follow the Leader
A blue shark follows a scuba diver in the waters of the Azores, Portugal. Male blue sharks typically weigh between 60-120 pounds, with female blue sharks more than doubling that.
Category: Open thread
It’s Fathers Day all day, so:
Happy Fathers Day to all you Pops, Dads, Daddys, Paws, and so on, and to my Dad, my grandfathers, great-grandfathers, and so on down the line.
The Pittsburgh Post Gazette is a paper I never heard of, at least that I recall. Until the other day, it had a cartoonist on its payroll who had been with that paper 25 years. He was canned, apparently, for his very negative portrayals of Trump. The paper had tried to persuade the inkster to do cartoons that are more in line with the paper’s editorials. He declined. The mayor of Pittsburgh reacted by saying that the firing “sends the wrong message about press freedoms in a time when they are under siege.” Huh? Freedom of the press has nothing whatsoever to do with this, but it sounds so grand. Either the mayor is an idiot or he thinks the citizens of Pittsburgh are.
Blues are fairly docile and very predictable. If you know what to look for, you’ve got 20 min. of warning(s) before the attack happens.
You need to be very, very careful around white tips, as they can go from 0-to-bite in less than a minute, and if you bleed the nearest white tips will not hesitate to join the party, and you are most likely to be the drunk sorority girl.
Bulls will attack any ankle or leg they see in the midst of a large group of reef fish. If you have solid info on where they reside, best to avoid ‘their’ places and spaces. Not worth the risk.
Great whites and Tigers – if you see them, exist the water in the safest manner possible. I rate Tigers as worse than Great Whites. If a Great White attacks a person it’s almost always a case of mistaken identity resulting from a combination of poor lighting and poor visibility. Most humans receive a ‘test bite’ and the shark leaves. Don’t surf within the red triangle at dawn or dusk near large groups of seals or sea lions and you should be fine. In ~5200 (free) dives I’ve seen one underwater, once; she’s the 14′ resident at Point Lobos. Swam within 40′ of me, and swam away, bored.
Tigers are the worst. They are damn near always hungry, and if they see you they will nearly always come right at you, with the intention of making a meal of you. Get out of the water ASAP, and if there’s no time for that, get you back against solid cover and maintain visual contact with the Tiger. If it makes an attack, strike the nose HARD! and also get your fingers in its eyes and/or gills.