Misplaced Pages:WikiProject Cetaceans

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Template:Cetaceaportal

This WikiProject is about cetaceans - that's whales, dolphins and porpoises to you and me. The aim of the project is to write a good description of every known cetacean species out there (all 78, or 79, or 80,... however many there are :-)).

Queue

Put news stories here that perhaps should be integrated/referenced in appropriate articles (if you are really into this stuff, maybe get Google News Alerts for "whale", "dolphin", and "porpoise")

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/4034383.stm

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/5066538.stm

http://news.scotsman.com/edinburgh.cfm?id=1044482006

Announcements

(10/06/2006) Redesigned layout of Cetaceans Portal
(26/06/2005) Added a list of species (List of dolphins and whales)
(26/02/2004) All species now have IUCN status and a range map in the taxobox
(12/02/2004) All species now have an article or part of an article
(05/02/2004) There is a vigourous debate going on at Misplaced Pages:WikiProject Tree of Life about whether and how taxoboxes should be extended to include there. General comments there and specific comments about how cetacean articles would be best served here are welcome.
(30/12/2003) We now have an article on each of the species in the Cephalorhynchus genus.
(28/11/2003) We now have an article on each of the species in the Ziphidae family.
(26/11/2003) We now have an article on each of the porpoise species. Shame the Delphinidae are five times as numerous!
(24/11/2003) We now have an article on everything in the Mysticeti suborder. Shame the toothies are five times as numerous!
(20/11/2003) Rice's classification moved in full to Cetacea article. This is liable to more updates... every book/webpage claiming to reproduce his listing says something different

Things to be done

Requests

Leave any requests you have or have found elsewhere here.

List of extinct species / evolution

Stubs

These articles are very short and may only include a sentence or two.

Expand

These articles are not listed as stubs but are only just about long enough to escape being so. Any help expanding these would be appreciated.

Hector's Beaked Whale
Ginkgo-toothed Beaked Whale
Shepherd's Beaked Whale
Archaeoceti
Cumberland Sound Beluga
Blubber
Chinese River Dolphin - Looks unclean but only because many browsers can not display the Chinese letters.
Humpback Dolphins

Copyedit/Formatting

These articles may have enough text but are poorly formatted and may have spelling mistakes.

Patrol for vandalism

Have a look at the recent changes for the Category:Cetaceans

Collaboration of the Month

The current Cetaceans Collaboration of the month
is North Pacific right whale.
To nominate or vote for an article visit the collaboration page.

The Cetaceans Collaboration of the Month is a collaborative effort to improve whale, porpoise and dolphin-related articles, in order to help them reach featured-article standards. Anyone, no matter what their level of knowledge about cetacea, is welcome to lend a hand. Each month, an article is chosen by people interested in the topic, and for the next month the chosen article is worked on, under Misplaced Pages's principle of collaborative editing. This provides a single article for people to concentrate their efforts on collaboratively.

Article assessment

Article assessment is the process by which cetacean articles are sorted into different qualities. Assessment is done through the assessment page.

What might be included in a cetacean article

Bowhead Whale

Conservation status
Conservation Dependent
Scientific classification
Kingdom:	Animalia
Phylum:	Chordata
Class:	Mammalia
Subclass:	Eutheria
Order:	Cetacea
Suborder:	Mysticeti
Family:	Balaenidae
Genus:	Balaena
Species:	B. mysticetus
Binomial name
*Balaena mysticetus* Linnaeus, 1758

Bowhead Whale range

Articles on almost every species have now been started. Most species have their own article with the exception of Mesoplodont Whales - too little information known for separate articles - and Humpback Dolphins - the lack of consensus from the taxonomists makes difficult to know what species to choose. Better to do at the genus level to avoid making a judgement.

See Misplaced Pages:WikiProject Tree of Life/taxobox usage for the details of how to construct a taxobox.

Images

An image in JPG or PNG format is very welcome, although the latter format is not as good for photographs. For public domain resources try the American National Oceanic and Atomospheric Administration, particularly the National Marine Fisheries Historic Image Collection.

Range maps

The basic template map is the world map without country borders that can be found at Misplaced Pages:Blank maps.

The blue colour shows where the species is (sometimes) present and white is where it is absent.

The grey colour has R:205 G:195 B:204 The blue colour has R:0 G:0 B:255 (:-))

If you edit a map, try to save at full-quality so that no blurring occurs at the edge of the countries - this blurring makes further editing of the map more difficult because the "fill" function of many image editing programs doesn't work with the blurred edges.

What to include

Some topics that might (and probably should) be written about are physical characteristics (birth size and weight, adult size and weight (male and female), life expectancy, gestation period, lactation period, baleen or toothed, colour, callosities, fins size shape and existence, speed, what do they eat, interaction with other species etc.) Population and distribution including changes over time. Distinguishing between one species and another. The relationship between this species and the whaling and whale-watching industries. The discoverer/describer of the species. Scientific names. Taxonomy debates. English meaning of Scientific name. This list is not exhaustive!

The study of whales is cetology. Some information is probably best described in an article outside a particular species e.g. baleen.

Articles at higher than species level

... check out Category:Cetaceans

Species

See the list at Cetacea.

References

There are huge numbers of books on the subject. The websites listed at cetacea may be useful for quick fact-verifying

American Cetacean Society
British Cetacean Site especially interesting is taxonomy
Cetacea.org homepage
Walker's Mammals of the World Online - Cetaceans (Unfortunately, the online edition of Walker's Mammals of the World is no longer available. The print edition may still be purchased through the Johns Hopkins University Press.)
Zoom Whales

Confessed contributors

User:Pcb21 (Pete)
Tannin
Dante Alighieri | Talk (just the river dolphins, really)
]
KJen74 - I discovered this project only this weekend, and I hope to increase my level of contribution as time permits.
68.169.113.246 Made the List of dolphins and whales page
Death Eater Dan (Muahaha) Created the new article box on the portal main page
Chris_huh
Gray Porpoise (no surprise; a cetacean's in my name)
Belugaperson Edited Beluga page, which is rather fitting

Unconfessed contributors

User:Jimfbleak
User:NuclearWinner
Loads of copyeditors

Other WikiProjects

Parent : Misplaced Pages:WikiProject Tree of Life, Misplaced Pages:WikiProject Marine life Grandparent : Misplaced Pages:WikiProject Biology Greatgrandparent : Misplaced Pages:WikiProject Science

Siblings : Misplaced Pages:WikiProject Birds (big sister!), Misplaced Pages:WikiProject Dog breeds (yapping little brother), Misplaced Pages:WikiProject Primates (big brother), Misplaced Pages:WikiProject Sharks (step-brother}

Things to be standardized

Capitalization: There was once a long debate about the capitalization of bird species on Misplaced Pages. The debate was backed by lots of research on both sides, but also became quite acrimonious. Call me a great wet lettuce (or Lettuce) but I for one hope to avoid repeating that debate, and get on with article-writing. Thus I propose we just borrow the convention from the bird project and then not worry about it too much. That is, capitalize species names when you write them in articles, e.g.

The blow of a Blue Whale is 9m high.

and when you create an article for the species, create it with caps in the title and then immediately create a redirect from the lower-case version of the same name. (N.B.: I didn't take part in the original debate and don't particularly care what the standard is, but standards are often useful and many people want standards, so I am proposing this one).

You are right IMO, and anyone who objects to importing the standard should know enough about the birds discussion to explain why cetaceans should be different, or else undertake to show why it should be changed at least for both, and preferably for vertebrates (or for some higher taxon that includes both).

And therefore someone who will be more active in this project than Jerzy should propose, at Misplaced Pages:WikiProject Tree of Life or its talk page, that there be a general standard (currently, capitalize all English species names, but of course subject to reconsideration) either

1. for all species, or

2. for all children of an independent (not redirected) Misplaced Pages:WikiProject Animals, where (in either additional project) the standard can be considered and promulgated without stepping on the toes of botanists (and perhaps microbiologists), whose realm(s) are the most likely ones to have conflicting naming or spelling standards in place.

One wrinkle: it is common practice in the cetacean literature to shorten e.g 'Southern Right Whales have no dorsal fin' to 'Southern Rights have no dorsal fin' i.e. drop 'Whale' as obvious. Two heavyweight books in the area are the Encyclopedia of Marine Mammals (which does this) and the National Audubon Society Guide to Marine Mammals of the World (which doesn't). I propose we allow (but not require) the shortening... it is better to avoid being unnecessarily prescriptive, and having two choices should make for less repetitious prose.

Spellings in taxonomy ( 'i' or 'ii', '-i' or 'es'): This seems to be inconsistent within the literature. Maybe we should have all article names in English, and make all common spellings of the Scientific version redirect to the English. I am thinking about sub-orders and families here; e.g. Mysticeti redirects to baleen whale.

Templates

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Cetaceans (inactive)

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