A remarkable new study on how whales behave when attacked by humans in the 19th century has implications for the way they respond to changes caused by humans in the 21st century.
The article, published Wednesday by the Royal Society, was written by Hal Whitehead and Luke Rendell, leading scientists who work with whales, and Tim D Smith, a computer scientist, and their research addresses a centuries-old question: whether whales are so clever, why did they hang around to be killed? The answer? They did not.
Using newly digitized logbooks outlining sperm whale hunting in the North Pacific, the authors discovered that the strike rate of whalers’ harps had dropped by 58% in just a few years. This simple fact leads to an astonishing conclusion: that information about what is happening to them is shared collectively among the whales, which has made vital changes. As their culture made fatal contact with ours, they quickly learned from their mistakes.
“Potfish have a traditional way of responding to orca attacks,” said Hal Whitehead, who spoke to the Guardian from his home overlooking the ocean in Dalhousie, Nova Scotia, where he teaches. Before humans, orca were their only predators, against which potfish form defensive circles, with their powerful tails outward to keep their attackers at bay. But such techniques “only made it easier for the whalers to slaughter them,” Whitehead says.
It was a terrifying rapid killing, and it was accompanied by other threats to the ironically named Pacific. From whaling and sealing stations to mission bases, Western culture has been introduced into an ocean that has remained largely untouched. As Herman Melville, himself a whaler in the Pacific in 1841, would write in Moby-Dick (1851): ‘The point is, whether Leviathan can endure such a wide chase for a long time, and such relentless devastation.’
Potfish are highly socialized animals and can communicate over long distances. They associate in clans defined by the dialect pattern of their sonar clicks. Their culture is matrilineal, and information about the new dangers may have been passed on in the same way that whale matriarchs share knowledge about feeding areas. Potfish also have the largest brain on the planet. It is not difficult to imagine that they understand what is happening to them.
The hunters themselves realized the attempts of the whales to escape. They saw that the animals apparently communicated the threat within their attacked groups. The whales abandoned their usual defensive formations, and swam against the wind to escape from the hunters’ ships, self-propelled. “It was cultural evolution, too fast for genetic evolution,” says Whitehead.
And in turn, it evokes an irony again. Just as whales begin to recover from the industrial destruction by 20th-century whale fleets – whose steamships and grenade launchers could not evade whales, they are threatened by new technology. “They need to learn not to be hit by ships, and to cope with the weakening of longline fisheries, the changing source of food due to climate change,” Whitehead said. Perhaps the biggest modern danger is noise pollution, which they can do nothing to evade.
Whitehead and Randall wrote convincingly of the whale culture, expressed in localized feeding techniques as whales adapt to changing sources, or in subtle changes in humpback whale whose meaning remains mysterious. The same kind of urgent social doctrine that the animals experienced in the whaling wars of two centuries ago is reflected in the way they negotiate the uncertain world of today and what we have done about it.
As Whitehead notes, whale culture is millions of years older than ours. Maybe we should learn from them as they learned from us. After all, it was the whales that provoked Melville for his prophecies in Moby-Dick. “We reckon the whale that is immortal in its species, however perishable in individuality,” he wrote, “and if the world will ever be flooded again … then the eternal whale will still survive, and … his foaming defiance to heaven. ‘