Felt a shiver down my spine hearing how much biomass we were able to take out of the ocean. We really like playing with fire until it burns us.

@Kamigawa411

11 ай бұрын

And that number continues to rise with japanese whaling, and overfishing

@justcallmeSheriff

11 ай бұрын

I had to stop the video and relisten to that part. That butchery was an “ecocide”, akin to the Tyranids in Warhammer or the Flood in Halo just consuming a world. And knowing how intelligent whales are makes it all the more tragic that we burned them for lighting our homes. And it was only for a few decades in a small number of industrialized countries…

@bendover-bz4bc

10 ай бұрын

Stop crying . Animals go instinct so the time . Dinosaurs also went instinct because their time was up. Humans will go instinct when our time is up too. So don't assume yourself like superhero social justice warrior for whales.

@takenname8053

10 ай бұрын

@@bendover-bz4bc Why are you yucking my yum?

@Kinknuckle

10 ай бұрын

@@bendover-bz4bcyou sound stupid

This must have had a devastating effect on the ocean floor where Whale falls probably supported life there too!

@hansolowe19

11 ай бұрын

Yes, we've been destroying the oceans for centuries.

@goosenotmaverick1156

11 ай бұрын

​@@hansolowe19not just the oceans, the entire planet

@hansolowe19

11 ай бұрын

@@goosenotmaverick1156 I know.

@julianleivers1608

11 ай бұрын

People care more about which bathroom to use than our planet

@goosenotmaverick1156

11 ай бұрын

@@julianleivers1608 that's the truth.

The amout of opportunities people passed up to call it a Whalehouse is unforgivable.

@philjongboom

4 ай бұрын

I didn’t even watch the video. It was in my recommended and I clicked strictly to make sure this comment was here lol.

I grew up on Cape Cod and remember going on field trips to whaling captains houses. One house had 2 jawbones forming an arch over the driveway that cars could drive through. Nantucket and New Bedford were the whaling capitals of the world. It was said that a man couldnt get married on Nantucket until he had speared his first whale, or survived a "Nantucket Sleigh Ride", when they harpoon a whale from a dingy then hold on till the whale tires, or the boat breaks. There were so many whales in cape cod bay that sources from the 1600's and 1700's said you could "Walk across their backs to the other side" It breaks my heart now knowing how intelligent whales are, I really hope we can get it together and bring them back.

@ianlucas7679

10 ай бұрын

Defo agree wit you . Why wud we as human beings want to harm , kill, and eat this beautiful animals . I can't get my head round it .The people who do need to get ther karma . Horrible , pathetic humans I'd say 😡

@jeaninemonet3845

10 ай бұрын

Impressive

@Louzahsol

10 ай бұрын

A friend of mine in New Zealand has tons of sperm whale teeth. His garden has an archway made from the jaws of blue whale

@magisterrleth3129

9 ай бұрын

​@@ianlucas7679 The reason was fuel. Humans will do anything for a cheap source of energy.

@maxsmith131

9 ай бұрын

@pjk9225 that is the captain Penniman house in eastham but they took the bones down because they were deteriorating

Thank you PBS for making shows like this possible. Great episode. But I feel devastated. Great presentation Shane.

@KiraRagged

11 ай бұрын

thank you. glad to know i wasn't the only one who had a reaction of "this is incredible.. and also i hate it... "

@BlackSlimShady

9 ай бұрын

"..in 1972, 99% of the blue whales that were alive in 1900, were gone"... Well yeah, no shit, there life span is only 80-90 years. Obviously over 90% of them are going to be dead... This is exactly what mathematicians/statisticians mean when they say misleading stats.

@013nil

8 ай бұрын

Yes, but if you you want to make a show like this, make it right.

Chilean here. Two things. Until the 70s, you could buy whale meat at the fish market. I ate whale several times. Very much like beef, but with a distinct "fishy" taste, not at all off-putting. I remember at the time there were news about krill, how abundant it was, how it could be processed to make krill sticks and other delicious foodstuffs. After a while, no more news. Whale meat was not available anymore at the fish market. This episode explained both disappearances. Second thing. Trekkie here. It has been said that the fourth Star Trek film (1986, the one with the whales) helped to change people's minds about whaling. Maybe yes, maybe not, but the pro-whale message in the film is unmistakable. Also, it's a great movie, one of the best in the franchise. Space people from the future (including an alien who has just resurrected - and is slightly amnesiac) comes to the 1986 America because they need a whale to answer a message from a gigantic alien spaceship or Earth will be destroyed. Whales are extinct in that future. So, clueless future people trying to navigate 20th century culture - lots of fun!

@Tser

11 ай бұрын

One of the most fun Trek movies ever. "There be whales here!"

@MariaMartinez-researcher

11 ай бұрын

@@Tser "Maybe he's singing to that man."

@srwla2501

10 ай бұрын

People can eat you too, you know. It won't taste musch different.

@MariaMartinez-researcher

10 ай бұрын

@@srwla2501 I presume you are aware that in the years of the 7th decade of the 20th century, whaling was legal everywhere, and very few people were concerned or knew of any threat to the survival of whales. I presume you know that commercial whaling was forbidden in 1986. I presume you know that currently, Iceland, Norway and Japan continue to commercially hunting whales for their meat and other body parts, and indigenous peoples from Alaska and the Faroe Islands hunt whales for their survival. I presume you know the meaning of "you are barking up the wrong tree."

@BlackSlimShady

9 ай бұрын

"..in 1972, 99% of the blue whales that were alive in 1900, were gone"... Well yeah, no shit, there life span is only 80-90 years. Obviously over 90% of them are going to be dead... This is exactly what mathematicians/statisticians mean when they say misleading stats.

I want to shoutout PBS for still having amazing content that educates after all these years. I grew up on this channel and love seeing it still thriving ❤

This is absolutely incredible. I'm so impressed with what's being studied about whales and the entire eco system they are part of. Thanks for sharing.

New favorite phrase “there’s knowledge in the stank” 😂🖤

@Jobobn1998

11 ай бұрын

I feel like I need this on a t-shirt XD

This was absolutely amazing on so many levels. Thank you for sharing!!

36 secs that music is so out of pocket i can't😂

It blew my mind when they said the blue whale jaw bone isn't just the largest bone on earth, but the largest to have ever existed!? When I think about the absolutely humongous sauropod called Argentinosaurus. But after doing some maths it seems the largest blue whale on record is still quite a bit larger and much heavier than the Argentinosaurus. 🤯

@myriamickx7969

6 ай бұрын

The blue whale is the largest animal that ever existed on our planet. If there is/was a larger dinosaur, it hasn't been discovered yet.

@treeaboo

6 ай бұрын

@@myriamickx7969 It's also unlikely there ever could have been due to the laws of physics, things can get much larger in the water than they can on land, even were a larger animal to exist it's extremely unlikely that any single bone on it would be as large as a blue whale's jaw bones.

this gives me 2010s discovery channel nostalgia love it

So glad YT rec'd this show to me. Well done, thank you for making content like this.🐳🐳

Every little fish has its place in the eco system we need them all

Amazing! I'm always here for the whale content :) One whale fact I never considered was the role that whales played in moving biomass vertically through the water column! I couldn't even imagine how whales hunting in the deep and defecating on the surface sustained zooplankton until this episode

This series should more appropriately be named “Human Atrocities.”

This was beautiful and super depressing, but it highlights those OTHER things about the food web we often forget. Through better understanding hopefully we can help restore some of the balance, because it is clear that this anthropocene extinction is not slowing down at the moment.

This is my first time watching this show, and I'm really digging it! Also, I wonder how bottlenecked the blue whales' total genome has gotten from their near extinction. I have to imagine it's pretty pared down. Of course, long-lived, slow-developing animals tend to have some mechanisms to speed up genetic diversity development, so hopefully that's helping keep the populations healthy and able to fend off disease.

@jso6790

11 ай бұрын

That was a thought that crossed my mind, an idea I learned about on PBS Eons' episode about Mammoths and their extinction.

learned a lot, thanks PBS! great episode

Almost cried when I realized the magnitude of the biomass loss so recently.

@Louzahsol

10 ай бұрын

Weak

@JoeRogansForehead

5 ай бұрын

Soft

@Cptdng

Ай бұрын

Snowflake

It hurts to see how much damage to an entire beautiful species just decades of human abuse cost. Thanks for making this, all of us hope the whales make it through and thrive

The Blue Whale is so cool!

Oh I don't know. We seem to be able to wipe out damn near anything we touch

“Theres knowledge in the stank”. Truer words have never been spoken.

The discovery of petroleum was a miracle for whale populations of the world, the fact that J.D. Rockefeller saved more cetaceans than Green Peace could ever dream of is kind of poetic irony. Speaking of oil, the whale oil that permeates the warehouse is rancid which is why it smells so funky.

@mistermist634

8 ай бұрын

Well, that depends. If you calculate in the devastating effects of climate change (still to come), he might as well have killed more animals than any other person.

@Guapo10292

8 ай бұрын

Rockefeller did not discover or even popularized drilling for oil. He was just the most successful businessman, like implying Steve Jobs is responsible for the computer.

@blowitoutyourcunt7675

6 ай бұрын

When you consider how much of that oil has been dumped into the ocean to the detriment of not only citations, I think it comes out at an even score.

I really enjoyed this show Just wonderful PBS Never Disappoint 🐦💙

@pbsterra

11 ай бұрын

Glad you enjoyed this episode of Human Footprint!

@Lookdownhereiam

11 ай бұрын

I love the chemistry with these two gentlemen. ❤

It's sad to think many classic works of literature were written by the light from whale oil 😢

@JJH-jc1fg

10 ай бұрын

including Moby Dick 😒

@jadesea562

3 ай бұрын

No, what is sad is that you can't see all of existence is 1 thing playing out. So the classic works of literature coming into creation by the light of whale oil is a tiny piece of the one giant story of existence unfolding.

Excellent program! Thank you! ❤

Dude just told the bro to smell his giant whale finger 😂

I'm really loving this series. I love how it connects different scientific disciplines and shows how humans are deeply connected to and affected by the world around us and the history of the world, even though a lot of times we try to pretend we're removed from nature or above it somehow. Like. I know these things, more or less, in the back of my mind. But the way these videos link all those facts and figures in a way that tells a coherent story of HOW connected we all are to the world we live in is great, thank you~ ❤

I wish I could see the ocean before we ruin ones it, it must’ve been so full of life and just down right beautiful

@JohnJames.

6 ай бұрын

Hearing old timers on the river talk about the good old days, then hear them brag how much roe they have in the freezer. No wonder we have it bad

@xtera5718

6 ай бұрын

@@JohnJames. imagine how much more lively the ocean felt, old shipmen must’ve seen so many more animals, especially large curious ones like whales.

Great episode!

When we talk about ancestors that relied on hunting for survival.. i can understand hunting a whale here & there. BUT, if it gets to a different lvl. Where Tons of people r just wiping out whales. That is just utterly unacceptable. It's Like what people did with the Bison. We take something that can be acceptable & sustainable and instead of utilizing it & realizing how important it is for our surrounding environment to flourish for Us to have a chance to flourish too... Yet people repeatedly mess up, destroy, devastate entire ecosystems. We need our habitat's to thrive alongside us in order for us to live our best life's. The planet/the food chain/the weather/geographic diversity/habitat & biodiversity all depends on if Humans are capable of NOT destroying the balance in our ecosystems.. I don't get why this is such a hard thing for us humans to understand? Especially since the industrial revolution era onward.. we gotta do better. The better nature is doing, the better we all can be doing. We cannot take it for granted and throw it all away for a quick buck.

@Sentrme

11 ай бұрын

100%, but human population has to be reduced. The more people, the more likely for some to take advantage and undo the good of others. I hope we can find balance. It took millions of years for Earth ecosystem to find balance. We destroyed it in less than 1% of that time.

@Louzahsol

10 ай бұрын

Your iPhone wouldn’t exist without whale oil, because the industrial revolution would have never happened

A hundred years after man is gone, the earth will never know we were here.

Though we appreciate the attention to detail in adding specific background music, could it be turned down in future videos? It makes it difficult to focus on the dialogue. Thanks!

I've never heard such a fire soundtrack on a PBS film 💯

@greenfire7236

9 ай бұрын

Whats the Name of the First Song ?

I especially appreciated the debunk of the "less whales means more krill right" assumption. Many cycles are more complicated & have more unseen steps than you might think. We can't rest on assumptions.

Some new discoveries around Sauropods are putting into question the idea that the Blue Whale is the largest living animal ever, but I don't think any Sauropod will have a bone that outmatches the blue whales jaw.

Awesome~👍 Thank you for sharing this video~🤗

I live on the island of Newfoundland and as a result have seen hundreds of whales in my lifetime. Each and every time it’s a shock, awe, and amazement to see them. Thank God we never killed them all

Interesting connection between krill and whales. They are dependent on each other. Ecosystem engineer.

One of the best contribution I';ve ever seen. Thank you.

Shane rocks! Put Shane in more vids!

9:29 Warehouse owner: "the fortunate thing is, they [whales] didn't go extinct! so I think we have a second chance in the 21st century to make a greater impact." Japan: "And I took that personally"

.........those poor , beautiful , gentle animals😢😢😢😢😢. what a pitiful waste...........😠😠😠😠😠😠..........

@GrandDawggy

11 ай бұрын

What's crazy is people didn't even see them as gentle back then and called them things like "hellfish" I don't know if that's because people thought it was more romantic that men done battle with demonic creatures than murdering intelligent beings or if it's another reason.

They are not the only warehouse, there is one in Argentina I was fortunate enough to visit in Usuhia

Love Shane’s commentary

Good stuff!

Amazing video, in so many ways. Whale anatomy is one of the most fascinating things in the world.

great show, thanks.

For the future or re-releases, the sound mixing should keep the music much quieter; it's making the dialog hard to hear, and I don't even have hearing loss which would make that effect worse.

A word about krill: it seems that, now that our species has let the whale family recover some, we are exploiting their most important food supply: yes, krill. I’ve read that, in the Southern oceans, industrial fishing fleets are "harvesting” krill to provide cheap food for fish farms. On the other hand, no one knows how krill will be affected by climate change, which means warming oceans with higher acidic content. Will we threaten the whale population a second time through starvation?

Seeing this thumbnail while scrolling was like that scene from Ace Ventura, way to fk my vibe far the fk up with this “lovely room of death”

@phantumTom

11 ай бұрын

Edit: tried watching it, that stupid edit with that cheesy song sent me. Fk this video and why it even exists to begin with. Fricken humans man.

Great video, well presented, and Shane has SUCH clever turns of phrase! Enjoying this series quite a bit! The thing that astonishes and dismays me most is that - while we were doing all of this to get whale oil - how much of the other whale products ended up being wasted? I know in some parts of the world whale meat was eaten and so in those areas maybe the animals did get used (though perhaps when speaking of industrial level hunting we can't say used "with respect" ) - but what did people do with those carcasses? I know that in cultures where whales are taken specifically for survival, there's not a single part of that creature that isn't used for something, so what I'm curious about it just what the "Civilized World" did with those parts that weren't rendered down for oil or eaten. Whale bones for corsetry, perhaps? But how much bone did that really use? It makes me curious. I know most of the time we think of industry (especially the industries of a hundred years ago) as being wasteful and terrible and kinda the source of all our current troubles, but I feel like that's an oversimplified view. Not so much inaccurate as incomplete. We got where we are through many, many small steps, after all, and getting through this predicament will take many, MANY small steps as well. I do believe we can repair our planet, and even manage to do it in about the same amount of time it took us to break everything. But I'm always interested to learn the complexities of HOW we got here, what people did to survive, to thrive, to turn a profit or to eradicate something they saw as terrible. Folks don't go around killing whales while twirling their mustachios and yelling MUAHAHA, so it's always fascinating to understand what drove the choices made by our ancestors.

Really like Shane Campbell-Staton as host

Why the intro montage go that hard tho. 😭😭

Brilliant video 👏🏽🐋 This issue is so clear, so it’s just hard to understand how to this day, it continues to happen (in similar ways). Just look at the yearly slaughters on the Faroe Islands… and the whole world just lets it be 💔

Whalehouse is RIGHT THERE.

Great Content!

For some reason. It hurts seeing our ancestors doing that to the animal that has been living in peace.

That music is too funny 😂

It's not a warehouse. It's a horrifying mausoleum. ☹️😣😢

@RealPlatoishere

10 ай бұрын

Its like a holocaust display of victims....

@Shugo5775

9 ай бұрын

It's a whalehouse.

@PaigeDWinter

8 ай бұрын

​@@RealPlatoisherethats a real garbage take.

@blowitoutyourcunt7675

6 ай бұрын

If it were in any other context than scientific knowledge, you'd be correct.

Daymmmm, I didn't expect the intro to go so hard, the music caught me off guard 😅

This host is great!

Nicely done

Very interesting

Haha I love this guy. He can host my educational videos any day 😂. Sees a whale bone and is like bruuhhh

Funny thing is; before the video even began, I wanted to know what that room smelled like. I got my answer, thank you.

Immediatly ordered Nicks book.

@bobrocha6058

8 ай бұрын

'Spying on Whales' is a very good read. He's a good presenter, too. He did a lecture, at my invitation, for us at the New Bedford Whaling Museum.

Excellence in presentation this should be shown to all elementary students world wide

Thank you for the video. If this is for kids, the language seems a bit rough. Thank you!

You shouldn’t need a economic reason to not kill whales Edit: You can do the same thing with a lot of issues. “You shouldn’t need a economic reason to not knowingly pollute the atmosphere and poison all life on Earth.” “You shouldn’t need a economic reason to alleviate the suffering of sick people.” “You shouldn’t need a economic reason to house homeless people” These are all examples of the tail wagging the dog. Instead of humanity controlling its own economic system for its own benefit We have our economic system controlling humanity for its own benefit. I like the first class and coach example. People in first class are never going to voluntarily give up their leg room so those in coach can have more. They also see any decrease in their own leg room as a negative, even if that means those in coach have more. Furthermore, those in first class get to decide how leg space gets allocated.

The coolest thing to me was that the biggest bone in the world was right there for scale

"Akchually" there is another whale bone repository in Tierra del Fuego, Argentina, maybe not so complete though.

This was so fascinating whales are some of my favorite animals

Please no extinctions prayers 🙏 😢

In the not too distant future, scientists will rate mass extincion events on a scale as a percentage of the 20th century: The great meteor impact that marked the end of the Jurassic era was almost 70% as bad as the 20th century.

@ExtremeMadnessX

11 ай бұрын

Jurassic era?

@Deckzwabber

8 ай бұрын

@@ExtremeMadnessX it was a different era, I know, but it eludes me which one. The metaphor still works I think.

thanks.

😮😮😮😮 I learned a lot.

You managed to throw in some militant rap music in the background

Great video. I remember watching Animal Planet shows that detailed Greenpeace fighting against whale killing. I was shocked to see that although illegal, Asian countries still killed whales almost at will as long as it was done for “research purposes”. As this was some years ago, I hope that too has been outlawed.

No doubt we could have done to Dinosaurs as well, its shameful to be human sometimes.

Very interesting!

STOP ALL WHALING!!!😢

Live and you learn, still doesn't make humans evil

Amazing!

We can't have nice things. Ever. The krill paradox is similar to how, when the buffalo, the wolves, and the beavers were hunted to near extinction, their ecosystems started to collapse. It was until then that we realized, oh, we needed the wolves to keep the buffalo healthy, and we needed the buffalo to run through the plains and valleys and trample and fertilize the grass to keep those ecosystems healthy, and we needed beavers to keep the rivers healthy and to prevent erosion. Without those more complex animals that were higher on the food chain actively applying pressure to their environments, their food supplies and environments would collapse. How stupid we are, as a species, to make the same mistake over and over again.

Wow. Learned a lot from this. Thank you. Especially about krills need each other.

Okay, now that I see all the carnage I have to look away. Those sweet animals we just decimated them

@coolbreeze2.0-mortemadfasc13

11 ай бұрын

Totally agree.

@Sentrme

11 ай бұрын

Looking away is what allowed the decimation to go on for so long. Because people only cared about their needs not the ecosystem.

@SoulDelSol

11 ай бұрын

Yes why did you do that

@Road_Rash

11 ай бұрын

It wasn't 'we'... I've never hunted a whale in my life, nor would I... it was humans, but it wasn't this human...

PBS didn’t have to go that hard on the beat. 😆

Wow. By the way, I have difficulty communicating because I had a stroke in Broca’s area, the part of the brain that controls speech. 2/8/2021 but I lived again. (My wife helped me compose this.)

Did I just hear gangster rap on PBS. Things have changed since I was a young boy many years ago.

My great granda was a whaler from Shetland

This being a docu type of production but having a pimp my ride audio kinda threw me off lmao.

Wow it's Long beach Griffy hosting a documentary on whale bones!

Now we know what happened to hiruko’ whale body when ushio vanished it.

These are the same people that tells other country to stop hunting because they've fucked up in the past. And same people nuked japan and tells other country you can't have nuke in case you're just as crazy as we were and still are.

Is it just me or the presenter was much more interesting and relating to than your usual boring script reading ones? :D

We need to protect these amazing animals