Click the play button on the embedded SoundCloud player below and then read on to learn about the artist and his inspiration….

Johnny Stuka’s SoundCloud profile reads as follows:

Johnny Stuka is the pilot of a stolen Stuka Dive Bomber that crashed into the English Channel in 1999. Fortunately his life raft inflated. Unfortunately, his whistle sunk to the bottom. Since then he has bobbed on the currents, occassionally sighting the white cliffs but always whilst being driven back out to sea by weather. More recently he has sighted France but is unsure how close he should go.

Behind the cryptic myth of Johnny Stuka is London-based singer/songwriter John Harry Littleton-Stuka. John has played with numerous bands and musicians over the years, including London-based Stuka Dive Bomber during the 1990s and more recently the gypsy jazz outfit, Le Chutneys. But Littleton-Stuka says he’s always had a special place in his heart for the sea shanty, albeit with “a post modern tilt.”

Having not composed anything original for several months, John had started to doubt his muse. But when he recently happend upon the tale of the exploding whale on listverse.com, it was clear that John’s muse was alive and well.

“The song arrived almost ready written,” he claims. He particularly enjoyed the “marvellous accompanying narrative by Mr Linnman” and the Oldsmobile being “completely totalled by a humongous slab of flying blubber.” John hopes that his “somewhat odd” take on the story “brings a smile to exploding whale fans everywhere, in the same way it has cheered and inspired me.”

The inspiration John drew from the Exploding Whale didn’t stop at a song, though:

I believe the whale is even now guiding events from beyond the ether and that his death and subsequent detonation by the authorities has all been part of an even greater tale, as yet to unfold.

John, we couldn’t have said it better ourselves! Long live the Oregon Exploding Whale!

Below you’ll find a link to the complete lyrics plus several ways you can connect with John.

• Lyrics to Oregon Exploding Whale - John Harry Littleton-Stuka
• Johnny Stuka - SoundCloud
• JohntheMunch - LastFM
• @HarryLittleton - Twitter

If you’ve been inspired by Oregon’s Exploding Whale, drop us a line! We’d love to share your song, artwork, video, etc. with our audience.

Happy 42nd Exploding Whale Day!

The body of a dead and rotting Bryde’s whale, inflated from the gases of its decomposition, was mistaken for a capsized ship as it drifted toward the South African coast.

• Shark warning in southern Cape - News24
• Whale carcass washes up on rocks- Independent Online
• Whale carcass washes ashore in S.Africa - AFP
• S. Africa issues shark warning around washed-up whale - AFP

• 50 Years of KATU TV: A whale of a story that became a legend
  KATU, the Portland, Oregon, TV station that originally broadcasted Paul Linnman’s famous news report on the original Exploding Whale, celebrated their 50th anniversary on March 15, 2012. In honor of the event, they showed Linnman’s original report and interviewed him afterwards.
  

• Rare Whale Swims Up West Coast to Russian Home
  Varvara, a rare western Pacific gray whale, is the first to be documented all the way to Baja Mexico, where most California gray whales breed and give birth. Now she appears to be on the move again, expected to head to feeding grounds off Russia’s Sakhalin Island.
• ‘Whale Wars’ spin-off coming in April
  The Sea Shepherds head to the Faroe Islands to take on the slaughter of pilot whales, and Animal Planet cameras are there to capture the action. “Whale Wars: Viking Shores” premieres on Animal Planet on April 27 at 8 p.m. ET/PT.
• Whale barely makes a splash in Rio and Photos, video: Bryde’s whale makes waves in Rio
  A dead Bryde’s whale washed up on a Rio de Janeiro beach. Officials kept the carcass from hitting rocks and later tied it up to be towed to a nearby port for examination. Adult Bryde’s whales weigh between 13 and 25 tonnes. Despite their size, they are vulnerable to ship strikes because they spend most of their time near the surface.
• Whale dies on Teesside beach
  A 44-ft sperm whale was beached and subsequently died in northeast England. The video below is sad, but has some incredible full-body shots of these rarely seen creatures.
  
• Killer whale possibly killed by U.S. military explosion
  A three-year-old female killer whale that washed up off the coast of Washington last month may have been killed by a military explosion.
  
• A whale of a time at the Canadian Museum of Nature!
  A new Ottawa museum exhibit explores the diversity, biology and adaptation of whales to life in the oceans and also on the human impacts on whales such as the threats of fishing nets, foreign debris, predators and boats. The exhibit includes a life-sized replica of the heart of a blue whale, the largest living creature, and a fully articulated sperm whale skeleton.
  
• Mother Whale Lifts Calf Up to Get a Look at Humans on Boat
  Just watch the video. ‘Nuff said.

Whale Photo of the Week:

A dead Bryde’s whale doesn’t interrupt water sports in Rio de Janeiro

• Giant squid eyes are sperm whale defence
  An interesting article about how and why giant squid eyes may have evolved to be three times as large as any other known creature. I know this may come as a shock, but it turns out that being able to detect your one and only predator — and for giant squid that would be giant sperm whales — from far away increases your chances of survival. As the authors state, there appears to be a “powerful evolutionary pressure towards developing effective eyes.” It all seems rather obvious, but the article is a good read nonetheless.
• Japan Whale Catch Falls Short
  Sea Shepherd anti-whaling activists have once again significantly disrupted Japanese whaling in the Southern Ocean. The Japanese fleet had been hoping to harvest as many as 900 whales, but they are headed back to Japan with just 267. Even so, 267 seems like a lot of whales to kill for supposed “research” purposes. The Sea Shepherd group vows to return and harass the Japanese fleet if it returns next year.
• Discovery to make shows available through Amazon’s streaming video service
  Speaking of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society…. Discovery Communications, owner of Animal Planet, has announced that Whale Wars, the popular cable TV program which documents the Sea Shepherd group’s anti-whaling activities in the Southern Ocean, will become available through Amazon.com’s streaming video service.
• Amazon.com confirms ban on sale of whale meat
  And speaking of Amazon.com…. This is hard to believe, but apparently Amazon.com’s wholly owned Japanese subsidiary, Amazon.co.jp, was selling nearly 150 different products derived from whales and dolphins, including whale meat from endangered species. In a radical public relations move, they’ve decided to stop doing so.
• If One Orca Whale Was Blown Out of the Water, How Many More Died? and SA group fears whales deaths
  The effects of loud sonar on whales has been a concern for some time. This past week, concerns over underwater explosives testing were also raised. In the Pacific Northwest, the likely effects on orca whales were described, and in Southern Australia an environmental group wants BP to stop seismic testing at night to protect whales.
• Killer Whale Submarine a killer personal submersible
  For a mere $100,000 catalog retailer Hammacher Schlemmer will sell you a two-seat, 255-horsepower submarine that looks like an orca whale (see photo below). It can reportedly travel 25 mph underwater and skim along the surface at 50 mph. Since I know many of you will want to buy this right away, I’m providing a direct link to Hammacher Schlemmer’s page.

Whale Photo of the Week:

Hammacher Schlemmer’s killer whale submarine

In the BBC News article What happens after a whale is beached?, reporter Caroline Lowbridge describes how beached whales are (supposed to be) handled in the UK.

British law goes so far as to specify that the King gets the head and Queen gets the tail. Lest you think the Queen comes out behind on the deal, the queen “received the tail in order to be supplied with whalebone for her corsets and stays,” according to Wikipedia. (However, there is some confusion here; Moby Dick author Herman Melville claimed that “whalebone” was actually baleen, which comes from the mouths of certain whales.) Anyway, it’s not clear to what use the King may have put the whale’s head.

The article covers a number of other whale incidents in the UK and then wraps up — as every good whale article should — with a discussion of exploding whales.

When asked whether he’d ever blow up a whale in the UK, Rob Deaville, a manager with the agency that investigates whale strandings, replied:

“We don’t do that in the UK and we don’t advise that either, because you would be left with bits of whale over the beach which you’ve still got to clean up.”

Fess up Mr. Deaville! The real reason is you don’t want to have to tell the Queen that you blew up all the whalebone for her corsets.

• What happens after a whale is beached? - BBC News
• Royal fish - Wikipedia

The Life Story of a Chilean Sea Blob and Other Matters of Importance

For those of you that may be unfamiliar with the term, a “sea blob” — also known as a “globster” — is an “unidentified organic mass that washes up on the shoreline of an ocean or other body of water.” The title of the book refers to a highly publicized event in 2003 where one such “organic mass” washed up on the coast of Chile. Biologists were unable to readily determine what the “blob” was, and the world had to wait nearly a year before DNA testing revealed it to be the remains of a sperm whale. Many such events have occurred over the decades with the remains often misidentified as sea monsters, giant octopuses, or modern-day plesiosaurs.

Carter has apparently worked the Chilean sea blob into a collection of short stories, which his publisher describes as follows:

Much as Theodore Carter’s title sea blob proves a challenge to classify, the other matters of importance in this, the author’s debut, story collection emerge as equally amorphous and downright slippery when it comes to categorization. Yet, fleshy narrative makes indexing possible by way of a catalogue of characters who aren’t simply arranged, but rarities that act — largely at great personal risk. From the competitive eater working against an internal clock to a disengaged young man beguiled by an animate voodoo doll, from a junior-high water-walker to an eyebrow arsonist, the affable oddities of The Life Story of a Chilean Sea Blob and Other Matters of Importance confront doubt in its multifarious forms, establishing classification — organized into engaging, compelling, and affecting — as tantamount to the anomalous lives we lead.

Honestly, I’m not really sure what that description even means! But if it catches your fancy, by all means click through and read the reviews for yourself. Carter is also selling some “sea blob bling” here. (Ok, fine, it’s really just a bunch of t-shirts.)

Ichthyosaurs were giant marine reptiles that existed between 90 and 245 million years ago. This was, in case you weren’t sure, before the Internet. But still, one wonders — if the interweb were around during the Jurassic period, do you think there would have been an Exploding Ichthyosaur website? Recently, a group of scientists published a paper that could help answer that question.

I received an email from one of the Swiss researchers:

Subject: a new publication about “exploding whales”
Date: February 4, 2012 10:28:01 AM PST

Hi there,
yesterday our paper about “exploding whales” was published:
“Float, explode or sink: postmortem fate of lung-breathing marine vertebrates”
Best regards from Switzerland

It’s not the first time the Exploding Whale has been the inspiration for an academic pursuit. Fellow University of Puget Sound alumnus Chris van Vechten’s senior thesis, “Rendered, Redeemed & Transformed: The Social History of Whale Carcass Disposal on Northwest Shores” [pdf], was similarly inspired. Van Vechten’s thoughtfully researched 31-page survey of whale disposal in the Pacific Northwest draws a slightly ominous conclusion:

All that is certain is that – just as beached whales have played a tremendous role in shaping our past – so too are they bound to shape our future.

As for the Swiss paleontologists, it was the extent to which exploding “whales” (er, ichthyosaurs) may have influenced the prehistoric past that concerned them. In their paper, “Float, Explode or Sink: Postmortem Fate of Lung-Breathing Marine Vertebrates,” Reisdorf et al. try to determine whether putrefaction-induced ichthyosaur carcass explosions could explain the “skeletal disarticulation observed frequently in the fossil record.” In other words, they’re trying to figure out if prehistoric “whale” explosions are the reason bone fossils are sometimes found scattered about instead of all together.

Because, as students of the Exploding Whale know, a violent internal explosion could do that, right? As would the detonation of 1,000 pounds of explosives next to a dead whale….

Regrettably, only an abstract of the article is available (for free), but the authors tip their hand on their conclusions. In what has to be one of the most disappointing scientific results of the 21st century, the scientists conclude that ichthyosaur carcasses probably did not frequently explode and scatter bones. Rather, they conclude that dead prehistoric whale-like creatures would have sunk to the sea floor and would have only resurfaced when “they remained in shallow water above a certain temperature and at a low scavenging rate.” Subsequently, bone scattering would have supposedly occurred as the carcass floated around and decomposed gradually.

And so, as for my original question, it sounds like TheExplodingIchthyosaur.com would not have been a very popular destination on the prehistoric Internet. Good thing, too, ’cause I’m pretty sure the dinosaurs of the time would not have been able to type it correctly.

A few links of interest:

• Video: Exploding whale cited in Reisdorf et al. research paper - YouTube
• Definition: Whale fall - Wikipedia
• Video: The Luminous Deep - YouTube
• Video: Whale Fall (after life of a whale) - Vimeo.com
• Video: Whale Fall Community - YouTube
• Nekton Falls - music project based on dead organisms dropping to the bottom of the ocean, rotting and eventually turning into food for a new generation
• Video: A different kind of whale fall… - YouTube