Manaia (mythological creature) Manaia (mythological creature) The Manaia is a mythological creature in Māori culture, and is a common motif in Māori carving and jewellery. The Manaia is usually depicted as having the head of a bird and the tail of a fish and the body of a man, though it is sometimes depicted as a bird, a serpent, or a human figure in profile. Other interpretations include a seahorse and a lizard. The word "manaia" is cognate with the founding Samoan term "fa'amanaia", and relevant to the Niuean "fakamanaia", both meaning to make a decoration or embellishment. The Manaia is traditionally believed
Minke whale and around the Haro Strait of British Columbia and Washington state. Minke whale The minke whale , or lesser rorqual, is a type of baleen whale. The two species of minke whale are the common (or northern) minke whale and the Antarctic (or southern) minke whale. The minke whale was first described by the Danish naturalist Otto Fabricius in 1780, who assumed it must be an already known species and assigned his specimen to "Balaena rostrata", a name given to the northern bottlenose whale by Otto Friedrich Müller in 1776. In 1804, Bernard Germain de Lacépède described a juvenile specimen