The following story reminded me of one of the best movies of the Star Trek series (not the TV show, the movies), number four – ‘The Voyage Home – where the crew goes back in time (the 80s), rescues a whale (Captain, there’ll be whales down here!) brings them back to the StarTrek time and saves mankind by having this whale communicate with a deep space probe that threatens our survival. All because we had killed off all the whales.

With acts like the one below, we hopefully don’t need the Star Trek crew to go back in time and have all their adventures – although I would definitely miss the scene with Kirk and Spock, in which Kirk explains that Spock had too much LDS in the 70s, explaining the reason for his unusual behavior.

Here now the story (thanks, Beverly)…

If you read a recent front page story from the San Francisco Chronicle, you would have read about a female humpback whale who had become entangled in a spider web of crab traps and lines. She was weighted down by hundreds of pounds of traps that caused her to struggle to stay afloat. She also had hundreds of yards of line rope wrapped around her body, her tail, her torso, a line tugging in her mouth. A fisherman spotted her just east of the Farallon Islands (outside the Golden Gate ) and radioed an environmental group for help. Within a few hours, the rescue team arrived and determined that she was so bad off, the only way to save her was to dive in and untangle her.

They worked for hours with curved knives and eventually freed her. When she was free, the divers say she swam in what seemed like joyous circles. She then came back to each and every diver, one at a time, and nudged them, pushed them gently around as she was thanking them. Some said it was the most incredibly beautiful experience of their lives.

The guy who cut the rope out of her mouth said her eyes were following him the whole time, and he will never be the same.

It is not really that surprising to me that somebody as intelligent as a whale is able to demonstrate thankfulness to a rescuer. There are so many examples that whales or dolphins are not just a bit higher developed animals than dogs. Especially after reading The Hitchhiker’s Guide, we know that the dolphins were smart enough to leave the planet before it was demolished to make way for a bypass, while humans were totally oblivious of that fact and perished.