https://www.businessinsider.com/gray-whales-or-devil-fish-friendly-to-humans-baffling-scientists-2023-7#:~:text=Gray%20whales%20were%20nicknamed%20'devil,humans%20pet%20them%2C%20baffling%20scientists.&text=Gray%20whales%20were%20hunted%20to,the%2018th%20and%2019th%20centuries.

Gray whales put up such a fight against whalers and their boats they earned the nickname "devil fish." Today, in the same places where the whales were hunted to the brink of extinction just decades ago, they swim right up to boats, enchanting and even befriending the people in them.

One of those remarkable encounters was captured in March in the Ojo de Liebre, a lagoon in Mexico's Baja Peninsula. The video showed a gray whale right beside a boat, allowing the captain to pick whale lice off its head.

Although some thought the whale was purposefully going to the captain for help with the whale lice — which are actually crustaceans, not insects — experts told Insider that's probably not the case.

Still, the fact that the gray whales of the Baja lagoons interact with boats and humans at all baffles researchers.

"This is what's so strange. They were hunted almost to extinction," Andrew Trites, director of the Marine Mammal Research Unit at the University of British Columbia, told Insider. "You would think being near a person in a boat is the last thing the few remaining gray whales would've ever done and they would've had this disposition to avoid them at all costs, the few that survived."

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https://undark.org/2023/07/05/neglect-of-a-museums-collection-could-cause-scientific-setbacks/

IN A DUSTY ROOM in central Florida, countless millipedes, centipedes, and other creepy-crawlies sit in specimen jars, rotting. The invertebrates are part of the Florida State Collection of Arthropods in Gainesville, which totals more than 12 million insects and other arthropod specimens, and are used by expert curators to identify pest species that threaten Florida’s native and agricultural plants.

However, not all specimens at the facility are treated equally, according to two people who have seen the collection firsthand. They say non-insect samples, like shrimp and millipedes, that are stored in ethanol have been neglected to the point of being irreversibly damaged or lost completely.

When it comes to how the FSCA stacks up with other collections she’s worked in, Ann Dunn, a former curatorial assistant, is blunt: “This is the worst I’ve ever seen.”

Experts say the loss of such specimens — even uncharismatic ones such as centipedes — is a setback for science. Particularly invaluable are holotypes, which are the example specimens that determine the description for an entire species. In fact, the variety of holotypes a collection has is often more important than its size, since those specimens are actively used for research, said Ainsley Seago, an associate curator of invertebrate zoology at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh.

A paper published in March 2023 highlighted the importance of museum specimens more generally, for addressing urgent issues like climate change and wildlife conservation, with 73 of the world’s largest natural history museums estimating their total collections to exceed 1.1 billion specimens. “This global collection,” the authors write, “is the physical basis for our understanding of the natural world and our place in it.”