#seal colony

[docileeffects]

[thiswillnotdo]

2023_12_20

[hey-its-sybarite]

Rabid Seals

We didn’t know this could happen, we are worried about other marine animals. And not to be a sensationalist but someone call up Stephen King and ask him how he feels about the possibility of a rabid orca.

[weerentheworld]

we interrupt our regularly scheduled programming to bring you zoomed-in seals from Ytri Tunga Beach.

Can you spot both seals in the first pic?

[fatehbaz]

[M]onk seals continued to live in large herds along the largely unexplored Atlantic seaboard of northwest Africa. It was not until 1434 that Portuguese explorers landed on these [supposedly] untamed coasts, and discovered thousands of monk seals. Almost immediately, an intensive and lucrative trade in skins and oil was established [...]. Constantly vying with Spain [...], Portugal was determined to increase its sphere of influence in Africa. While Spain eventually became preoccupied with Columbus’ elusive vision [...] [and] his celebrated 1492 expedition [...] Portugal’s colonial influence in Africa was reaching its height by 1500. The first expeditions to Africa’s Gold Coast were recorded for posterity by an official chronicler, Gomes de Zurara [...]. In his book [...] he relates how the Portuguese Infante [royal prince], eager [...], dispatched explorer Afonso Gonçalves Baldaya in a cargo vessel to make contact with the mysterious “moors” or “pagans” who were believed to inhabit the region (Zurara, 1437).

“But these are people, no matter how beastlike they may be,” proclaimed the Infante, “and they need to be governed... I command you to penetrate this land as far as you can and that you work in order to learn about those people, perhaps taking one captive, so that you may become acquainted with them.”

It was in “the year [...] one thousand four hundred and thirty-six” that Alfonso set sail [...]. [T]he barinel eventually reached the shores of the Gold River, the Rio de Oro, situated at the Bay of Dakhla in the western Sahara. [...] Afonso and his crew sighted their first seals. Literally thousands were suddenly in their field of vision. [...] “Upon seeing on a reef at the mouth of the river a large number of sea-wolves,” relates Gomes da Zurara, “which, according to the estimates of some, amounted to five thousand, he ordered killed those that could be killed and had their furs loaded onto the ship [...].” Despite the windfall in skins and oil, Afonso was still dissatisfied, having failed to take captive any of the elusive natives. He therefore ventured a further 50 leagues “to see if he could capture a man or at least a woman or child in order to satisfy the will of his master.” [...]

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[In] 1437 [...] another Portuguese ship was dispatched to the Gold River to fill its hold with the furs and oil of the sea-wolves. [...] In 1441, [...] the Infante ordered his young wardrobe keeper, Antão Gonçalves, to captain a small ship and return to the Gold River. [...] “[T]he reason for this voyage, as instructed by his Lordship,” writes da Zurara, “was none other than to load that ship with a great quantity of hides and oil from those sea-wolves.” It appears to have been a lucrative undertaking. “ [...]

Antão Gonçalves had fulfilled the command of his master, his ship’s hold brimming with hides and casks, but the young man was eager to pursue his adventures rather than return home as ordered. He assembled his 21-man crew on deck, and addressed them with a rousing speech: “Friends and brothers, our cargo is complete, as you can see, so the principal aim of our mission has been accomplished, and we could well return should we wish to limit our toil…” He then proposed an adventure that would gladden the men’s hearts, providing relief from the laborious and tedious task of hunting, skinning and melting-down seals - a hunt for native slaves [...].

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These first tentative expeditions to the Gold River paved the way for hunting on a more intensive, industrial scale, with 15th century Portuguese explorers dividing their time between lucrative massacres of seals and the equally profitable slave trade [...].

Indeed, within a few years of the sea wolf discovery, a purpose-built installation to process seal hides and oil had been constructed on Ylha de Lobos [...] in the estuary of the Rio de Oro [...]. Around Cap Barbas [...] no less than three sites once bore the name of the sea wolf [...]. [T]he [French and British] colonial plundering of the region [in the early twentieth century] [...], like [...] [Portuguese] conquest before them, were also portrayed as essentially idealistic endeavours. Just as the conquest of the Rio de Oro by massacre and slavery [...] “proves anew that the pursuit of disinterested geographical knowledge [...] were never the only motives of colonial conquest, so the slaughter [...] [today] would today be called “rational exploitation” [...]”,

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All text above by: William M. Johnson. “Monk Seals in Post-Classical History: The role of the Mediterranean monk seal (Monachus monachus) in European history and culture, from the fall of Rome to the 20th century”. Mededelingen 39. The Netherlands Commission for International Nature Protection. 2004. [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me. Presented here for commentary, teaching, criticism purposes.]

[noosphe-re]

Coat of arms of French Equatorial Africa "French Equatorial Africa (French: Afrique équatoriale française, or AEF) was a federation of French colonial territories in Equatorial Africa which consisted of Gabon, French Congo, Ubangi-Shari, and Chad. It existed from 1910 to 1958 and its administration was based in Brazzaville." (Wikipedia)

[immmundus]

stamp seal of the leprosorium Beiderwies in Passau (Photo: Oberhausmuseum Passau)

[bunnyb34r]

Nothing like stumbling upon a news story ab a man being swarmed by bees for 3 hours to make you paranoid and have a panic attack :)

[tysonfurybattlepass]

Are there penguin people in your oc world, and would a certain leopard seal person eat them?

HSHSHDHSHSH the penguin-analog creatures aren’t sapient i dont think. good thing, too, because they’re kali’s absolute favorite meal. she will settle for whole turkeys as a substitute in their absence, though

the weddell seals, however, are fully sapient, and they tell stories about ravenous sea leopards to scare their children into not wandering off (these are not just stories. sea leopards have been known to devour anything that gets within rushdown range, including other young sea leopards)

[engel-hageshii]

@naffeclipse orca!Eclipse courting snatching them away from their colony selkie!Y/N~ gotta love the orcaman~

Today's Seal Is: Grabbed

[docileeffects]

[w-m-pitt]

Badge of South Australia (28 November 1878 - 14 January 1904)

[miss-floral-thief]

Came back to more ants on windowsill xP

[louisinart]

for what it's worth the plant is ice plant, an insanely invasive and unhelpful plant on the CA coast

[madqueenalanna]

been seeing homies get deep into "the terror" and making me want to rewatch SO i spent two hours in the dead of night reading the wiki/the subreddit/other linked articles and like. one of those articles was deadass fucked up

there was a woman who spoke inuktitut who was writing a book containing a lot of inuit oral histories, and in nunavut she was able to hear passed-down recollections of when survivors from the franklin expedition were passing through

and like. i can't imagine being an inuit family/group, knowing that europeans exist but having never seen them, seeing 8-9 shambling, blue-skinned, cold-to-the-touch out-of-their-minds white men come wandering by. they invited the men inside their igloos for warmth, for food, to be hospitable. the men refused to eat, refused to speak, and when trade was offered, clutched their possessions close and refused to entertain the idea of trade. this was, offputting, to say the least. the group set them up in their own igloo, with their own fire, and left three whole seals for them to eat. and then they fled cause what the FUCK get out of there. they came back in a few days to check on the strangers. the three seals were completely untouched, while all of the men had killed and eaten each other

i mean. fuck dude. there are obviously pretty dark angles to view the franklin expedition from– honestly can't think of a good angle, it's pure colonialism and british exceptionalism– but that specific interaction, that inuit group who were living lives as normal until a dozen fucking walking dead showed up and did cannibalism. no wonder that story got passed down, i'd be shitting my pants if i saw that

[plow-and-propose]

couldn't sleep last night because I was too busy wondering what a domesticated breed of fur seal would look like