Quotes from Susan Casey

Spinners are known for their athletics, rocketing out of the water in aerial leaps whenever the urge strikes, but these dolphins were relaxed.

They showed no fear, despite the presence of several baby spinners tucked in beside their mothers, replicas the size of bowling pins.

The dolphins' evolutionary path is itself a preposterous feat: their predecessors were land mammals that resembled small, hooved wolves.

But while it's tempting to project onto dolphins all the superpowers we wish we had ourselves, I knew (on an intellectual level, anyway), that these were creatures who have it in them to be cranky and withdrawn and have their own version of a bad day.

I didn't understand their lineage or their language, they had somehow communicated with me.

The Guardian reported that a beluga whale named Noc had, after seven years in captivity, begun to mimic human speech. Belugas, members of the toothed whale family along with dolphins, have been nicknamed "the canaries of the sea," for their expressive vocals.

two photographers who accompanied him, Sonny Miller and Jeff Hornbaker.

more than 60 percent of the global population lives within thirty miles of a coastline.

SLAPP lawsuit (strategic lawsuit against public participation), charges intended to squelch free speech. The goal of a SLAPP is not to win in court, but rather to exhaust the defendants in every possible way (especially financially) by filing endless motions, charges, deferrals, requests for documents, subpoenas for depositions—a blizzard of legal paperwork.

inexperienced Rat Packer who constantly sidled up to the boat, was laden with so much electronic gear that he came to be known as Radio Shack. The lone

slime eel, a primitive creature with five hearts and no eyes that bores its way inside fish, devouring them from within

Every big-wave rider I'd spoken to had stressed the impossibility of getting a good night's rest before a large swell. Hamilton referred to this tossing and turning as "doing the mahi-mahi flop. Full pan-fried mahi. Up every hour, looking at the alarm clock.

The human brain is the most unsuccessful adaptation ever to appear in the history of life on earth," whale scientist Roger Payne once suggested.

No one knew exactly why the seals ate stones, but maybe, some thought, it was for ballast. Or to help digestion. Or to stave off hunger. Or, as Brown had written in the journal, 'maybe they're just weird.

While chasing birds, he had hitchhiked through some of the most desolate places imaginable. Nicaraguan jungles, Indian slums, Samoa fruit bat colonies. But when asked to name the least likable place he'd seen in the world, he instantly pointed to an affluent California suburb: Walnut Creek, no question.

How do you think humans got so cruel?" I asked Makili. He gazed at the ocean, then back at Turner and me. "We forgot," he said, letting the words linger. "We forgot our responsibility. And we forgot that we are as equal as any living thing within the chain. There's no hierarchy in this. Nah. We are part of the same family: living things. All the rest of it is just totally fucking bullshit.

The devices meant to float at sea and capture the waves' power have been destroyed in short order by . . . the waves. "they've all been smashed up in storms," Challenor said, shaking his head.

at the Tangalooma Island Resort in Australia, where wild bottlenoses are regularly fed fish by people standing in the shallows, biologists have documented—on twenty-three occasions—the dolphins reciprocating, swimming up to offer freshly caught tuna, eels, and octopi as gifts.

Australian pro surfer Dave Rastovich, straddling his board waiting for a wave, was astonished to watch a dolphin hurtle itself at a shark that was torpedoing toward him, sending it fleeing. (Coincidentally, only two days earlier Rastovich had launched a nonprofit group, Surfers for Cetaceans, to protect dolphins and whales.)

The jellies living nearest the surface had transparent bodies, but their edges twinkled and flashed, as though traced by fiber-optic cables, blinking and undulating like neon signs. They were delicate; if you weren't looking

A few years ago in Fushun, China, two dolphins ate strips of their tank's vinyl lining and were saved by Bao Xishun, a 7?9? Mongolian herdsman who appears in the Guinness Book of World Records as "The World's Tallest Man." When surgical tools failed, Xishun reached down the dolphins' throats with his forty-two-inch arms and extracted the plastic.)

One little known fact: The water that spouts out of a whale's blowhole in such a picturesque way reeks like the most toxic fart imaginable.

He even experimented on himself, hammering a sleeve into his own skull. Once this was accomplished, it was then possible to insert electrodes and inject chemicals "through small needles anywhere in the brain.

In Taiji, the town was malefic and the people could be horrid, but the cove's most demanding challenges were personal ones: How do you survive your own sadness?