Nature Talk

Here we are on the beach in south west Washington where I observed a skinny whale. Actually it was so skinny it was just bones. I figured it was probably dead because I kicked it and nothing happened.

Karen the Whale on Long Beach, Wash.

This is what probably happened. The whale was swimming along happily living on the Atkins diet, all the krill and fried calamari it could eat, when it came across a book that someone had tossed called The South Beach Diet. Most likely someone on a cruise ship who was confronted with all the buffets and nothing to do but eat and said “Throw out that book honey, you look fine fat, it’s time to eat again.”. Now we know whales aren’t very smart because they don’t hang out in schools the way fish do. They hang out in pods which are probably like gangs. So this stupid whale sees this book and thinks “Cool, I can be cool”. Now any fish would know that any beach diet is fatal, but this poor whale that we’ll call Karen didn’t realize until it was too late. So now Karen the whale is residing permanently on the beach looking cool and skinny. So please don’t throw your beach diet books in trash that ends up in the ocean, because every year you read about some group of teenage whales that winds up on the beach for no apparent reason and starves to death. They usually try to blame it on the Navy’s Radio broadcast, but the radio has been around for years with no problem. It’s only since we’ve had this proliferation of beach diet books that whales have been coming ashore. This has been another episode of Nature Mysteries solved by Dave.
_____________________________________________________________________________________