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Why Whales Are People Too
The science proves it, but are humans ready to see them as equals? Get ready for a new world order.
Photo: Jonathan Bird/Getty
Not three metres from where I’m standing on
the starboard side of the sailboat, six very large female sperm whales are doing something few humans have ever witnessed.
The captain of our 40-foot cutter is Dalhousie University biologist Hal Whitehead, one of the pre-eminent experts on sperm whales. It’s mid-afternoon on a sunny day in Mexico’s Gulf of California, a 1,000-kilometre-long body of water famous for its biodiversity. The gulf’s strong tides create a cool upwelling of nutrients that support countless species of marine life, such as snappers, sardines and sharks, as well as that fierce mass of tentacles known as the Humboldt squid. Sperm whales hunt these squid year-round—they dive kilometres under the surface, pinpoint the squid with their sonar and snap them into their large and toothy grins.
For the past five days, Whitehead and four crew members—including two Ph.D. students named Armando Manolo Álvarez Torres and Catalina Gomez—have been shadowing the sperm whales around the clock. They track their underwater echolocation pings on the hydrophone by night, and observe and photograph the animals by day. In many ways Whitehead’s approach is that of an old-fashioned behavioural scientist. While younger whale researchers tend to collect data using implants and satellite tracking, Whitehead still prefers following whales in person. By watching who spends time with whom doing what, he can extract insights about their social structure.
Until now, the whale behaviour on display during our trip has been pretty basic: They disappeared into the deep and—invisible to us—hunted. A bushy waterspout, often spotted from the crow’s nest, announced their return to the surface. Family units of half a dozen or so bobbed at the surface of the water, reoxygenating their blood and preparing for the next dive.
But on rare occasions the whales did something else: They socialized, squirming all over one another like a business of monster-size aquatic ferrets. “Whoa,” says Gomez, as the water in front of her churns with activity. One of the whales rolls onto her side—we can see the tender pink of her jaw, surprisingly slight and narrow against her large proboscis. Another whale rolls over her, twisting as she moves, while a third pokes her nose vertically out of the water, as if sniffing the air, before undulating sharply, bunching her back as she slides down and into the other bodies. The high-powered field camera whirls as Gomez shoots photo after photo while another crew member furiously fills out the behavioural log in the day’s workbook.
Next: We're destroying not just individual whale lives,
but an ancient, living culture.
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9 comments
The article mentions that while whales have no hands to manipulate their environment, they have brains to feel it. It also mentions their emotional area of the brain includes an additional lobe. Could perhaps the fact that they must accept their environment as-is be a cause to their deeper emotional understanding and feelings as they cannot change their physical world. ?
Get ready for a new world order? Is this some conspiracy? Is this the Illuminati? Is this what the high ones have been trying to hide. You have vaguely mentioned it. I applaud that jest. Let the world know what is really going on so we can stop it.
Fascinating article! The most fascinating parts to me are the differences/contrasts between the whale view of their world/community and our view of our world/community. They can "see" into each other, we have to ask/tell in words. Our cliche "walk a mile in my shoes", relies on our individual empathy, imagination, intelligence to be able to do so, they can actually do it by sensing the return echoes of their community members' clicks, calls, and whistles.
What a wonderfully written article. Very informative, engaging, and enlightening. A must read.
At last an article that removes the idea that whales are "persons" from the fringe borders of science. Thank you for an excellent article. I was both happy and excited as I read it, but also sad because of the cruelty these sentient creatures have endured at the hands of Humans. Perhaps now the world will recognize why heros like Paul Watson of Sea Shepherd Conservation Society will fight for the lives of Whales until he can fight no longer. What a shame that one of the most vocal protectors of these magnificent, intelligent sentient biengs is now bieng persecuted by the whale killers themselves. And the rest of the world is pretty much indefferent. How very sad.
It was a black and hooded head; and hanging there in the midst of so intense a calm, it seemed the Sphynx’s in the desert. “Speak, thou vast and venerable head,” muttered Ahab, “which, though ungarnished with a beard, yet here and there lookest hoary with mosses; speak, mighty head, and tell us the secret thing that is in thee. Of all divers, thou hast dived the deepest. That head upon which the upper sun now gleams, has moved amid this world’s foundations. Where unrecorded names and navies rust, and untold hopes and anchors rot; where in her murderous hold this frigate earth is ballasted with bones of millions of the drowned; there, in that awful water-land, there was thy most familiar home. Thou hast been where bell or diver never went; hast slept by many a sailor’s side, where sleepless mothers would give their lives to lay them down. Thou saw’st the locked lovers when leaping from their flaming ship; heart to heart they sank beneath the exulting wave; true to each other, when heaven seemed false to them. Thou saw’st the murdered mate when tossed by pirates from the midnight deck; for hours he fell into the deeper midnight of the insatiate maw; and his murderers still sailed on unharmed—while swift lightnings shivered the neighboring ship that would have borne a righteous husband to outstretched, longing arms. O head! thou has seen enough to split the planets and make an infidel of Abraham, and not one syllable is thine!” “Sail ho!” cried a triumphant voice from the main-mast-head. “Aye? Well, now, that’s cheering,” cried Ahab, suddenly erecting himself, while whole thunder-clouds swept aside from his brow. “That lively cry upon this deadly calm might almost convert a better man.—Where away?” “Three points on the starboard bow, sir, and bringing down her breeze to us! “Better and better, man. Would now St. Paul would come along that way, and to my breezelessness bring his breeze! O Nature, and O soul of man! how far beyond all utterance are your linked analogies; not the smallest atom stirs or lives on matter, but has its cunning duplicate in mind.” - Moby Dick by Herman Melville
and why some people are whales too... too much fish and chips I believe and less exercise. Tweeeee....Ooooo... aaaaaAAAAsqueeee (thats just the bed creaking as they roll over.
Agree with your every word, Claudia.
nice one. <3