Marine Mammals

ATLANTIC CITY - Environmentalists, fishermen, surfers and others lashed out at a proposal Friday to allow companies to test for undersea deposits of oil and natural gas from Delaware to Florida. At a hearing held by the U.S. Bureau of Ocean and Energy Management, opponents of the proposal vastly outnumbered supporters, who were mainly business groups that say expanded drilling would help America reduce its dependence on foreign oil. The agency, part of the U.S. Department of the Interior, plans a final decision by December.

This club gets my seal of approval. The New Jersey State Aquarium is looking for a few good kids to join its Jr. Seal Club. There are two species of these marine mammals in the aquarium's Seal Shores exhibition: harbor seals, which weigh up to 250 pounds, and gray seals, which can tip the scales at more than 700 pounds. Kids who join the club get special access to the seals on a private behind-the-scenes tour. Aquarium employees will share interesting trivia about seals and show the care they receive, including the brushing of teeth and clipping of nails.

The 20-ton humpback whale that has caused a sightseeing ruckus at the Jersey Shore emerged from the water Thursday morning just outside Great Egg Harbor Inlet and whacked the underside of a small fishing boat with its mammoth tail. The boat - owned by a couple devoted to marine mammals - has a cracked propeller shaft and several thousand dollars worth of damage. The whale, which is about the length of a three-story building, is believed to have injured its tail. No one knows how badly, because it hasn't been spotted since shortly after the collision.

A gripping thriller about dolphin trafficking, The Cove is an eco-mentary that's as passionate and persuasive an argument for change as An Inconvenient Truth. And it's a chronicle of a covert operation that reveals an ugly practice that takes place in one of the planet's most beautiful spots, the fishing village of Taiji, Japan. It all started with Flipper. In much the same way that Lassie cultivated a collie craze, the popular 1960s television show about a playful and wise bottlenose dolphin created a mania for the marine mammals.

Students at the Friends School in Haverford participated in a Peace Assembly on Oct. 15 in honor of the 300th anniversary of William Penn's plan for peace. Each student signed a peace pledge illustrated with a dove. Wearing William Penn hats specially made for the assembly, fourth graders read excerpts from Penn's writings. The third graders, who are in charge of the school's UNICEF collection, read a Bible passage from Isaiah that is inscribed on the United Nations building in New York.

Two young gray seals are Bob Schoelkopf's latest house guests, the latest in a parade of marine mammals that have been rescued and ministered to by the Marine Mammal Stranding Center that Schoelkopf runs on this island adjacent to Atlantic City. Schoelkopf, the director of the center, also finds happy homes for animals that would likely perish in the wild because they have spent too much time away from their native habitats. And although they'll leave Schoelkopf as a pair for the Knoxville (Tenn.

Though he has great stage presence and draws a crowd, H?lis the whale may be performing his final act, says the Canadian researcher who knows him best. "He may be just trying to finish his life in a warmer area," said Robert Michaud, who believes H?lis belongs to a beluga whale population he has been tracking since 1986. According to Michaud, who runs the nonprofit Group for Research and Education on Marine Mammals, in Quebec, the white whale who has roamed the Delaware River this week is nearing the end of his 30-to-35-year life expectancy.

Researchers sponsored by the Navy have begun a high-frequency acoustic experiment in the Delaware Bay despite concerns that the sounds could harm infant bottlenose dolphins and sea turtles as they are preparing to migrate. The New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection approved the Navy's application for the test but is requiring that underwater cameras linked to a University of Delaware Web site track any changes in marine-animal behavior. Any change beyond a temporary "startle response" to the sounds, which scientists say they believe can help measure the marine ecosystem, must be reported and might result in a suspension of the testing, according to the DEP. The testing began this week, even as several environmental groups and two New Jersey congressmen requested that the tests be delayed until October, after the dolphins and turtles have migrated south.

It looks as if he's Canadian. Researchers from Quebec believe the 12-foot beluga whale that has lost his way on the Delaware River is one of their own, a male named Helis. Identifiable by a large gash on his back near his dorsal ridge, the snow-white Helis (pronounced ell-EE) was first spotted in 1986 among belugas that make their home near the St. Lawrence River, Quebec's Group for Research and Education on Marine Mammals said yesterday. The Canadian government even gave him a number: DL 018. The whale swam back and forth on the Delaware yesterday, thwarting marine-mammal monitors who trailed behind him in motorboats, trying to will the whale to swim back out to sea. He drew crowds of delighted schoolchildren and businesspeople at riverfront parks from Beverly in Burlington County to north of Tullytown in Bucks County.