Ari says: These whales are called right whales because people make soap out of their blubber and that is why they are called right whales, because they are right to make soap.
These whales are endangered because people make lots of money from selling the soap and people kill the whales for the blubber to make soap.
The whales in this picture are trying to hide but most whales get caught by the hunters.

Ms. R-M replies: Dear Ari, The blubber from whales is used by humans for many things, and in times gone by the quality of the lives of the Inuit people were linked to the availability of blubber- like using the blubber to melt down into an oil to use in lamps. Imagine how dark the night would have been for those people with out the lamps. Some people still use the blubber in their cooking and food and for medicines. Do you think that is ok? What do you use to light your home in the dark? What does your family use to cook with? Where do those things come from and how does that impact the earth? Ms. R-M   

Ari replies: I think that it is okay for the people to use the bludder oil only if they need it, but most are just rying to get rich. At night the people could use fire to light the home. Lights are not very useful and I think that people should enjoy the day time and sleep at night when it's dark. Sometimes we use our lightbulbs but we tryto use candles and the fire. I think that my family uses vegtable oil to cook. This is good for the earth because you are not killing anything. only at Thanksgiving do we eat meat, it is a special treat for us. Ari

People are taking animals from the wild to be pets and then the animals die because the people don't know what they eat. The animals miss their friends and they die. Dinosaurs have gone extinct but they might have changed into something like the crocodile. Some animals turn into other animals so we have some animals and we think that maybe it's related to animals that are extinct. So we look at long necks and wonder if that came from an extinct animal with a long neck. Before humans came there was a big asteroid. Humans might have relations (like dinosaurs) that are extinct. We don't know how to figure this out. Why do people want to figure this out? We want to figure out why, why humans came and how humans came. People find fossils and they say "what are these things?" Why don't we find sea creatures in our ground, bones of them?

Sean Bell replies: Last things first, we certainly do find the (fossil) bones (and shells, tracks, teeth, etc.) of sea creatures, all the time. Think of such animals as sharks, ichthyosaurs, fish, crabs, whales, corals, ammonites, plesiosaurs, and a whole lot more. In fact, we probably have an even better fossil record of sea creatures than we do of land creatures. Humans certainly do have relations, but they have gone extinct. We want to know about them so that we can understand what humans were like before now including behaviour and habitat--it helps explain why we do the things we do. And it is also part of understanding the changes of the organisms of the world over time.

Ari asks: I am studying the giant panda and I want to know what else do they eat other then bamboo?

Sean Bell replies: Pandas (I assume you mean the Giant Panda) are a strange species of bear--they have all of inconveniences that most bears have, like slow birth rates and the need for big territories; but they don't normally have the advantages that the rest of the bears have, like speed (for some) or a varied diet. Instead, the giant Panda eats mainly bamboo (different kinds, depending on the time of year) but they will actually eat other things if they find them such as the occassional fruit, egg, or even carrion (meat of dead animals). The other panda, (the red or lesser panda) is a species of racoon (last I heard) that also specializes on bamboo, but it actually eats a lot more of the other food available to it. It probably helps that red pandas are small and can climb trees to find the fruits themselves.