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Chapter nineteen uses the example of mother sea otters who protect their young to highlight how even in keeping to themselves and in secrecy, there is strength. This website is from the local Point Defiance Zoo in Tacoma where sea otters reside.

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Meet Clara the Sea Otter - Point Defiance Zoo & Aquarium

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CLARA THE SEA OTTER MAKES DEBUT She’s calm and patient – and loves participating in training and enrichment sessions with her keepers. Clara, the newest southern sea otter, made her … Continued

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Chapter eighteen tells a story about how mother gray seals take time to rest, emphasising the importance of rest. This link is a PSA about seal pups, but it showcases how despite the dangers and perhaps negative side effects of leaving their pups, the mother gray seals still take time to rest because they recognize how important rest is.

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While Marine Mammals of Maine receives reports of strandings year round, the busiest time is harbor seal pup season. Harbor seals give birth as early as April, and pupping season is in full swing between May and June. After birth, mother harbor seals leave their pups alone to rest for extended periods of time while she hunts and forages for herself. After feeding, the mother returns to collect her pup and nurse. Harbor seal pups typically stay with their mothers for around a month before weaning. All too often, a dependent pup is left to rest on its own on busy beaches or popular visiting areas, coinciding with Maine's tourism and coastal recreating season. If a mother harbor seal returns to reunite with her pup and finds busy human activity, or the pup has been moved to a different location by people, this can lead to abandonment. For you, your pet's, and the seal's safety, remember that all marine mammals are federally protected under the Marine Mammal Protection Act and that it is illegal to approach them within 150 feet, touch or harass them.

If you encounter a lone resting harbor seal pup, it is very important to first remain a safe distance away and keep the area as quiet as possible to give the pup the best chance of reuniting with its mother. You can help by immediately reporting the seal to the Maine Marine Animal Reporting Hotline at 1-800-532-9551.
Download a Copy of the Marine Mammals of Maine Pup Season Poster

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While Marine Mammals of Maine receives reports of strandings year round, the busiest time is harbor seal pup season. Harbor seals give birth as early as April, and pupping season is in full swing between May and June. After birth, mother harbor seals leave their pups alone to rest for extended periods of time while she hunts and forages for herself.

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Chapter seventeen is about recognizing the need to slow down. This made me think of perception of time and how this is different for everyone, but generally everyone experiences time faster as they age. Tying into undrowned, just like the ocean waves its important to take a step back and experience.

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Time going too fast? How to slow it down

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Ruth Ogden, PhD, talks about how our experiences and emotions influence our sense of time.

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Chapter sixteen delves into the importance of being 'unappolegentically black'. There is emphasis on being true to yourself and your surroundings.

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The power in being “unapologetically Black”

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By S.A. Miller, Special to the AFRO The term ”unapologetically Black” has been used by a lot of people for a lot of years. The meaning is often based on the context in which it is being used. For some, it connotes boldness and a “take no prisoners” attitude. For others, the term suggests that, […]

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Chapter fifteen goes through many different lessons. One that stuck with me was the start of the poem - breathe. This infographic highlights all of the ways the simple act of breathing is impactful and useful.

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Chapter fourteen is about understanding. Something Undrowned emphasises focusing on is the oceans and the planet environment as a whole.

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Objective: Define environmental science, and compare environmental science with ecology.

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Chapter thirteen touches on the topics of sexuality and expression in marine mammals. This website I found goes through many animals, including bottlenose dolphines, and plants who display sexual diversity

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Our shared planet is home to billions of species, each contributing to a tapestry of diversity. Within this abundance, life manifests in various embodiments, gender expressions, family structures, and sexual strategies. What astonishes us is that even among well-known species, relationships often extend beyond the conventional norms centered around reproduction. Indeed, queer behavior is a widespread occurrence in the natural world!

In the coniferous forests of northern Europe and Siberia, both male and female red squirrels engage in homosexual mating with multiple partners outside of the breeding season. This "seasonal bisexuality" is also observed in red foxes across the Northern Hemisphere. While males typically display equal preferences for female and male partners, females are more commonly oriented toward same-sex relationships. In certain communities, up to 95 percent of females do not reproduce in their lifetime. Bonobo apes, too, exhibit predominantly bisexual behavior, with same-sex female relationships forming the bedrock of their social hierarchy.

Interestingly, sexual dynamics are not the primary determinant of the strongest family bonds found in nature. Female grizzly bears often co-parent their young with several other mothers. The cubs respond to the aid and commands of their mothers with equal respect. Giraffes also exhibit similar behavior, forming nursery groups for their calves. These groups allow adult females to take turns watching over the young ones and enjoy moments of solitude while feeding.

Gender expression, too, showcases fluidity in the wild. Avocado trees seamlessly transition between male and female reproductive phases within a span of 36 hours. During the day, they unfurl pollen-producing flowers, while by night, they bloom with pollen-receiving buds. The striped parrotfish exhibits five distinct genders, and within their species, transsexuality is so commonplace that its absence is considered an anomaly. Additionally, fungi exhibit over 23,000 unique forms of embodiment alongside numerous asexual and nonsexual methods of reproduction. Sociologist Myra J. Hird eloquently captured the essence of mushrooms, stating, "there are so many genders, so little time."

Bottlenose dolphins, flamingos, and greylag geese establish lifelong male partnerships, sometimes even forming triads. These same-sex relationships are prevalent among approximately three-fourths of male dolphins. Among greylag geese, roughly 20 percent form same-sex couples who often assume high-ranking positions within the flock's social structure. Male flamingos also engage in shared parenting as they incubate orphaned eggs, oversee hatching, and raise foster chicks. Parenting responsibilities are equally distributed among two or three adults.

Countless other species defy the conventional notions of sexuality, gender expression, kinship, and societal and family structures. These examples affirm a world that refuses to fit into neat categories, constantly evolving and embracing its beautiful diversity. They serve as a reminder that our human perspectives often fall short of capturing the full breadth of the natural world. By understanding and appreciating queer ecology, we expand our horizons and redefine our notions of relationships, life, and love on this wondrous planet.

Let us come together to celebrate the magnificent diversity that thrives in our wild and beautiful home. Each creature, with its unique expressions of queerness, gender, and sexuality, contributes to the vibrant tapestry of life. In embracing and cherishing this diversity, we honor the intricate interconnectedness that defines our shared existence.

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Celebrating queerness, gender expression, and sexual diversity in the natural world | One Earth

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From bisexual squirrels to the five gendered parrotfish, queer behavior and sexual diversity is quite common in many plant and animal species.

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Chapter twelve dives into the threats against marine mammals. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association website goes into details about these threats and active work being done to protect marine wildlife.

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marine mammal health and stranding response program

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Marine mammals are mammals that rely on the ocean to survive. They include whales, dolphins, porpoises, seals, sea lions, walruses, polar bears, sea otters, manatees, and dugongs. Some are fully aquatic, such as whales and dolphins. Others, such as seals and sea lions, spend most of their time in water but return to land or ice for activities such as resting or giving birth.

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Chapter eleven is about the depth and history in personal features. A narwhal's tusk is often mistaken as decoration or simply unneccessary, however, when you learn more about the narwhales tusk the recognize the importance of it's tusk and the purpose it plays.

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It's Sensitive. Really. (Published 2005)

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New research into narwhal's tusk discovers that whale's tooth, which can grow as long as nine feet, is acute sensory organ; Dr Martin T Nweeia, Harvard University School of Dental Medicine clinical instructor, leads study presented at 16th Biennial Conference on Biology of Marine Mammals; estimates around 10 million nerve endings tunnel from tusk's core to outer surface; history of tusk, which was once passed off as unicorn's horn, discussed; tusk had been thought to be used socially or in mating rituals and may still have use outside sensing environment; photos; map; drawings (L)

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Chapter ten is about honoring boundries and holding your own. Black Power is rooted very deeply rooted in self reliancy and determination.

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National Museum of African American History and Culture

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Black Power emphasized black self-reliance and self-determination more than integration. Proponents believed African Americans should secure their human rights by creating political and cultural organizations that served their interests. They insisted that African Americans should have power over th…

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Chapter nine is learning from conflict. This made me think about throughout history humans could be so cruel and unjust to one another. The main point that is highlighted is thedehumanization of others, this also makes me think about how this applies to animals and how certian people are able to justify animal cruely and how this dehumanizing effect may play a role in this.

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Why are human beings so cruel to each other? And how do we justify acts of sheer inhumanity?

The conventional explanation is that people are able to do terrible things to other people only after having dehumanized them. In the case of the Holocaust, for example, Germans were willing to exterminate millions of Jews in part because Nazi ideology taught them to think of Jews as subhuman, as objects without the right to freedom, dignity, or even life itself.

Paul Bloom, a psychology professor at Yale, thinks this explanation of human cruelty is, at best, incomplete. I spoke to him about why he thinks its wrong to assume cruelty comes from dehumanization - and about his grim conclusion that almost anyone is capable of committing staggering atrocities under the right circumstances.

A lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows.

Sean Illing

Can you sum up your argument about the roots of human cruelty?

Paul Bloom

A lot of people blame cruelty on dehumanization. They say that when you fail to appreciate the humanity of other people, that's where genocide and slavery and all sorts of evils come from. I don't think that's entirely wrong. I think a lot of real awful things we do to other people arise from the fact that we don't see them as people.

But the argument I make in my New Yorker article is that it's incomplete. A lot of the cruelty we do to one another, the real savage, rotten terrible things we do to one another, are in fact because we recognize the humanity of the other person.

We see other people as blameworthy, as morally responsible, as themselves cruel, as not giving us what we deserve, as taking more than they deserve. And so we treat them horribly precisely because we see them as moral human beings.

Sean Illing

I've always thought a campaign of genocide or slavery requires two things - an ideology that dehumanizes the victims and a massive bureaucracy.

Paul Bloom

I think the truth is somewhere in the middle. I disagree that those things are "required." I think a lot of mass killings unfold the way you described it: People do it because they don't believe they're killing people. This is what some call instrumental violence, where there's some end they want to achieve, and people are in the way, so they don't think of them as people.

This is obviously what happened in the Nazi concentration camps. People were reduced to machines, treated like animals for labor. But a lot of what goes on in concentration camps is degrading and humiliating, and it's about torturing people because you think they deserve it. It's about the pleasure of being dominant over another person.

But if you merely thought of these people as animals, you wouldn't get that pleasure. You can't humiliate animals - only people. So dehumanization is real and terrible, but it's not the whole picture.

Sean Illing

What does that say about us, about our psychology, about our susceptibility to this kind of violence?

Paul Bloom

Think about it this way: We're all sensitive to social hierarchies and to a desire for approval and esteem. So we often fold to the social pressures of our environment. That's not necessarily evil. I come into my job as a professor and I want to do well, I want the respect of my peers. There's nothing wrong about that.

But our desire to do well socially can have an ugly side. If you can earn respect by helping people, that's great. If you can earn respect by physically dominating people with aggression and violence, that's destructive. So a lot depends on our social environment and whether it incentivizes good or bad behavior.

"If you and I were in Nazi Germany, we'd like to think we'd be the righteous ones, we'd be the heroes. But we might just be regular old Nazis."

Sean Illing

Are our intuitions about why people do terrible things wrong? Are we too sanguine about human nature?

Paul Bloom

I think our intuitions are wrong in just about every way they can be. First, there's this myth that people who do evil are psychopaths or sadists or monsters who are driven by the sheer pleasure of watching other people suffer. The truth is far more complicated than that.

Then there's the myth of dehumanization, which is that everybody who does evil is making a mistake. They're just failing to appreciate the humanity of other people, and if only we could clear up that mistake, if only we could sit them down and say, "Hey guys, those Jews, the blacks, the gays, the Muslims, they're people just like you," then evil would disappear. I think that's bogus.

Sean Illing

Why is that bogus?

Paul Bloom

Consider the rhetoric of white supremacy. White supremacists know about the humanity of Jews and black people and whoever else they're discriminating against - and it terrifies them.One of their slogans is, "You will not replace us." Think of what that means. That's not what you chant if you thought they were roaches or subhuman. That's what you chant at people you're really worried about, people who you think are a threat to your status and way of life.

Sean Illing

So cruelty isn't an accident or an aberration, but something central to who and what we are?

Paul Bloom

It's many things, and I don't think there's ever going to be a magic bullet theory of cruelty. I think some cruelty is born of dehumanization. I think some cruelty is born out of a loss of control. I think some cruelty is born out of an instrumental desire to get something you want - sex, money, power, whatever.

I think a lot of cruelty is born out of a normal and natural appreciation of the humanity of others, which then connects with certain important psychological appetites we have, like an appetite to punish those we think have done wrong. I think that, for the most part, people who do terrible things are just like us. They've just gone astray in certain specific ways.

Sean Illing

I tend to think of human beings as more malleable than we'd like to believe. Under the right conditions, is anyone capable of almost anything?

Paul Bloom

Wow, that's an interesting question. I sort of believe that. I think, under the right conditions, most of us are capable of doing terrible things. There may be exceptions. But we've seen, both in laboratory conditions and real-world circumstances, that people can be manipulated into doing terrible things, and while there are some people who will say, "No, I won't do that," they tend to be a minority.

Again, I think the banal answer is that we're swayed by social circumstances in ways that might be good or bad. You and I would be completely different people if we lived in a maximum security prison, because we'd have to adapt. There are powerful individual differences that matter, though. People can transcend their conditions, but it's rarer than we'd like to believe.

"White supremacists know about the humanity of Jews and black people and whoever else they're discriminating against - and it terrifies them."

Sean Illing

I ask because I used to study totalitarian ideologies as a political theorist, and I spent a lot of time thinking about Nazi Germany and how an entire society could be led into a moral abyss like that. People look at that moment of insanity and say to themselves, "I could never have participated in that." But I don't think it's that simple at all. I think almost any of us could have participated in that, and that's an ugly truth.

Paul Bloom

I think you're right. We have this horrible tendency to overestimate the extent to which we're the moral standouts, we're the brave ones. This has some nasty social consequences. There was a great article that came out in the Washington Post last week about people who say, "I'm confused about the people who have been sexually assaulted, because if it happened to me, I would say no way, and I would put the person in their place, and I would speak out."

This attitude is oftentimes scorn towards people who get harassed. They're somehow morally weak, or maybe they're just not telling the truth.

It turns out that one of my colleagues, Marianne LaFrance, did a study a while ago in which they asked a group of people, "How would you feel if you had a job interview and someone asked you these really sexist, ugly questions?"

Just about everybody says, "I would walk out. I would give the person hell," and so on. Then they did it. They did fake interviews where people thought they were being interviewed, and people asked the sexist, ugly questions, and all of the women were just silent.

The point is that we don't behave in stressful situations the way we think we would or the way we would like to. So yeah, if you and I were in Nazi Germany, we'd like to think we'd be the righteous ones, we'd be the heroes. But we might just be regular old Nazis.

Sean Illing

If your thesis is right, then it's foolish to think we can get rid of cruelty if only we got rid of those noxious ideologies that justify it. In the end, it's about us, not our ideas.

Paul Bloom

I think there are all sorts of ways we can become better people, and I think we are becoming better people. But if I'm right, there's nothing simple about this. Acknowledging other people's humanity won't solve our problems.

Ultimately, we need better ideas, better ideologies. We need a culture less obsessed with power and honor and more concerned with mindfulness and dignity. That's the best we can do to quell our appetites for dominance and punishment. Am I optimistic that we can do this? Yeah, I am. But it won't be easy.
This article was originally published on December 14, 2017.

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Why are human beings so cruel to each other? And how do we justify acts of sheer inhumanity? The conventional explanation is that people are able to do terrible things to other people only after having dehumanized them.

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Chapter eight is about the idea of being fierce, even in the face of adversity or challenges. Orcas in present day face the threat of going exticnt due to PCB plastics that enter their systems, and yet they are still known as one of the most fearsome creatures on planet earth.

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Killer Whales and Killer Plastics - Faunalytics

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A single class of chemicals - PCBs - may be responsible for the loss of entire populations of orcas. This research report explores the issue.

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Chapter seven is about the importance of presence. This made me think back to when we there were protests for black, asian, or other nationality studies, highlighting the importance of presence and knowledge.

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AAIHS - African American Intellectual History Society

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Black Studies, (also known as African American Studies, Africana Studies, and Pan African Studies) has its origins in the Black Campus Movements of the late 1960s. Black students and their Native American, Asian American, Latinx, and supportive white allies demanded relevant education that decentered European and Euro-American approaches to education. They desired a more inclusive and relevant

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Chapter six delves into how vunrebilty can be a source of connection, while also focusoing on how it can be hidded. The mimic octopus is the most edept at hiding.

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Why the Mimic Octopus is the Ultimate Master of Disguise - Ocean Conservancy

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The mimic octopus can change its color, texture and even the way it moves to impersonate a variety of other marine species. Read about this wild cephalopod.

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Chapter 5 highlights the importance of community. Gumbs ties this into the black community and how community is needed and craved and important. Marine mammals recognize the importance of community, even as apex predators, orcas stay in pods with their own community.

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Chapter 3 is about practice. There are very basic traits that are just 'known' to us from birth. Most everything we do is practiced. Marine mammals have practice in diving and the chemical reaction that takes place within their bodies, they know this through practice.

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Champion breath-holders Whales can remain under water for a long time. How long? Humans can hold their breath for one and a half to two minutes on average; the world record is over seven minutes. In whales, the record belongs to beaked whales and male sperm whales, which can dive for ove

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Chapter three delves into how history is intertwined with the present. There is history related to how the the Tuxuci have kept their indegiounes names. This made me think about how the civil rights movement has changed and shaped into the movement it is today over the course of history.

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60 years after the Civil Rights Act, ‘the activism continues’

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CU Boulder scholar Ashleigh Lawrence-Sanders reflects on what has and hasn’t changed since 1964.

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Chapter two introduced the importance of breathe. This chapter made reminded me of the Black Lives Matter movement, I wanted to tie in how Gumbs was able to tie in this movement to the explanation of breathe.

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Chapter one centers around the idea of listening, being grounded. What can we learn when we listen? We are introduced to echolocation and how the simple act of listening can be influential.

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Echolocation in Land vs. Marine Animals - Baleines en direct

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Echolocation is used by several animals such as bats, dolphins, toothed whales and some nocturnal birds. This technique allows animals to emit sounds and