On whales

I just read this wonderful article in the New York Times' magazine section, provocatively titled "Watching Whales Watch Us". I don't enjoy directly interacting with animals, but otherwise tend to be sympathetic to their plight, and am especially fond of intelligent mammals—bonobos, elephants, dolphins, and whales. One of the highlights of a recent trip to the British Museum of Natural History was seeing their life-sized model of a blue whale in a room full of extinct and surviving (but likely soon-to-be-extinct-or-endangered) terrestrial mammals. It's common knowledge that the blue whale is the largest living creature on earth, but such cold facts do little to convey the gargantuan enormity of its size: the blue whale in the museum is larger than a small herd of African elephants.

The elephant is regarded as a symbol of enormous strength, majesty, and wisdom in Indic culture, and whales would probably have been too had they been well known enough. (If you know more about whales and Indic culture, let me know!) Some species of whales are extraordinarily long-lived (just like elephants), and recent research mentioned in the article suggests that whales are capable of learning and teaching, of identifying and communicating with one another, of using tools, of cooperating in groups to tackle complex problems, and of perpetuating what can only be called culture. This list of achievements is as impressive as anything achieved by our closest simian relatives, and it's quite possible there is much more below the surface (no pun intended).

It is therefore a tragedy of Himalayan proportions that we humans have callously and, yes, inhumanly devastated global whale populations and altered their environments beyond recognition. Oceanic noise pollution is unlikely to be something that's on top of our list of things to be concerned about, but it's in fact a huge problem that is exacerbated every year by the growing number of vessels plying the seas. For creatures such as dolphins and whales whose clans are scattered over hundreds of thousands of square miles of deep sea, sonar is an absolutely critical tool for navigation and communication. But oceanic noise pollution plays havoc with sonar-based communication, disrupting their complex social structures and severely impeding the animals' ability to navigate or seek prey. And this devastation wreaked by us is but a by-product of sea-based economic activity that's not even targeted at whales. I'm not going to bring up the unspeakable cruelties of large-scale whaling; I don't have the stomach for it. 

Thank goodness we're finally coming to realize exactly what it is we nearly wiped out from our oceans. It's refreshing to read that cetaceans are finally being understood as socially sophisticated, intelligent, emotional creatures that are as curious about us as we are about them. Let's hope we abandon our well-honed whale slaughtering skills and treat these gentle giants with the sympathy and respect they deserve.

To close, an excerpt from the article about one hominid-cetacean interaction that ended happily:

A female humpback was spotted in December 2005 east of the Farallon Islands, just off the coast of San Francisco. She was entangled in a web of crab-trap lines, hundreds of yards of nylon rope that had become wrapped around her mouth, torso and tail, the weight of the traps causing her to struggle to stay afloat. A rescue team arrived within a few hours and decided that the only way to save her was to dive in and cut her loose.

For an hour they cut at the lines and rope with curved knives, all the while trying to steer clear of a tail they knew could kill them with one swipe. When the whale was finally freed, the divers said, she swam around them for a time in what appeared to be joyous circles. She then came back and visited with each one of them, nudging them all gently, as if in thanks. The divers said it was the most beautiful experience they ever had. As for the diver who cut free the rope that was entangled in the whale’s mouth, her huge eye was following him the entire time, and he said that he will never be the same.