Visiting La Jolla recently and meeting the great Walter Munk, aged 97 and still active. Former director of Scripps Institution of Oceanography, Munk “unlocked the secret to predicting waves, conquered the dark side of the moon, broke the code that revealed ocean warming” among many other things, according to the notes from Eliana Alvarez Martinez who has directed a documentary on Walter and my close colleague Giuseppe Notarbartolo di Sciara, who co-chairs the IUCN MMPATF with me. At Giuseppe’s invitation, I met up with Walter and his wife Mary as well as Eliana. So we’re having cocktails and snacks out on the terraced cliff behind his house and then a gray whale spouts, observed by Patty Elkus from Mission Blue and we all see them, followed by a pod of dolphins. That gray whale was very late for the long journey up to Alaska for the feeding season. Most have already passed San Diego, home of the first whale census in the 1940s with Carl Hubbs (who also spent years at Scripps). Reflecting on the intertwined histories of humans and whales and the sea…and of course rays, too, for the Eliana’s film is about Giuseppe taking Walter out to meet the rare species of ray that he had named after Walter: Mobula munkiana, the pygmy devil ray. By some coincidence I managed to secure a photo of a flying devil ray for my latest book and put it on a full page, opening the prologue of Creatures of the Deep on p.14. Check out Eliana’s film preview here.