63. On being

Caroline and I were in Dominica recently and we went whale watching.  We set off in a small boat to about a mile offshore on the Caribbean side of the island and watched whales.  That’s about all there is to say really.

Whales are not the most exciting animals to watch at the best of times and the sperm whales found off Dominica are about as charismatic as a floating log.  But at least we saw some and that came as a great relief to the boat crew who told us that only about 80% of the trips that they run are fruitful.

A sperm whale lies on the ocean surface and blows spray every twenty seconds or so through its blowhole.  After about a minute, it will arch its back and dive exposing its tail.  That’s all that happened every time.  

Hardly a, “Wowee, look at that, Granny,” moment is it?

This is easily the most exciting part of watching sperm whales.  

After the whale had disappeared the boat crew would drop a sound sensor into the water, pick up another whale noise, calculate the direction and off we’d go again to see another area of dull blue/grey flesh, spouting air and a tail. This sequence was repeated about fifteen times over a two-hour period.

I say, “we saw some whales,” but I’m not sure that we did see some.  We certainly saw one but we may have been seeing the same one fifteen times. 

Sperm whales, unlike some other whale species, seem to have no distinguishing features. Every one that we saw that afternoon was the same colour, the same size and lacking (to my eyes at least) any unique, distinguishable characteristics.

This photograph is the most that you usually see of a sperm whale.  

I don’t want to libel sperm whales but I’m afraid that they are rather boring.  In the summer of 2006, Caroline and I sailed through the Galapagos Islands and were captivated by the antics of the accompanying pods of dolphins and the occasional glimpse of orcas or killer whales.  We also got very close to a humpback whale and when I say close, I mean so close that I touched it.

We had spotted the humpback about 400 yards away and set off to get closer to it in a panga – a small open, outboard-powered inflatable dinghy.  We were sitting on the sides hanging on to rope.  

Fishermen in Central America use them but pangas are also popular with Somali pirates!  By the time we had reached its last known position, the humpback had dived but our guide estimated where it would rise again and set off to that position. 

After about five minutes sitting in silence, the humpback surfaced. Not just nearby or close to us but as close as it could be to the panga without tipping it over. Its enormous body was about a foot from me.  I could see every mark and blemish on it and the many barnacles attached to it.  I reached out and let my hand run over its rough surface as it glided past.  Then, it expelled air through its blowhole and we all got covered in spray.  Amazing but very scary.

The sperm whales of Dominica aren’t as inquisitive as that humpback certainly was.  It knew what it was doing.  It wasn’t an accident or coincidence that made it surface so close to us that we could touch it.  Out of all the tens of square miles of Pacific Ocean that it could have chosen to come up in, it chose the bit of sea right alongside our tiny boat.  Perhaps it was having fun scaring the tourists because, even though it was scary, it was not threatening.

Between dives the sperm whale will come up to the surface for air and remain more or less motionless for up to ten minutes before it dives again for about half an hour and sperm whales will live for as long as 100 years - providing that the Japanese or the Norwegians don’t get to them first!

For approximately six hours a day every day for possibly more than100 years they lie there doing nothing. This means that for about 30 years in total they do nothing but lie and think.  What are they thinking about?

The brain of the sperm whale is the largest and heaviest of all animals, weighing on average 7.5 kg in a grown male, more than five times larger than an adult human brain.  They must be thinking about something but what stimulation does a sperm whale’s brain get while it floats on the ocean surface?  Virtually none at all.  

There is nothing for it to look at.  Its eyes are under water all the time so it doesn’t see any nearby coastline.  The ocean floor may be four kilometres beneath it and so not visible.  Does it see in colour?  Why should they ever need to and so they probably don’t.

Sperm whales are known to feed on the giant squid. These squid live in the deep oceans where there is not enough light for vision to be effective or even necessary.  It is believed that the sperm whale does not have good eyesight as its eyes are so disproportionately small to its head.  It is thought that sperm whales use echolocation to find prey. 

Whales do have ears but they don’t work as ours do and anyway, an animal using echolocation doesn’t want to have background noise babble to interfere with the important business of finding food.

So, for twenty years or more, sperm whales lies there seeing nothing and hearing nothing, deprived of mental stimulation.  It must do a hell of a lot of thinking.  My friend Sue told me yesterday that she reckons that they run the universe.  She could be right.  

It should become an international imperative to learn to speak whelsh.  Scrap all the defence budgets and pour billions of dollars into learning to communicate with whales.  Then test them out.  Give them a synopsis of Greece’s economic problems and ask them to come up with a solution within a week.  

(Actually, that isn’t necessary because I’ve come up with a solution and it only took me two seconds:  Get the buggers to pay taxes!)

Does a whale ever have a good day?  When does a whale get tired?  What makes a whale happy or sad?

As my friend Gwynne often said, “The answer to most things lies in whales.

This is a video I took from the boat in Dominica:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8S2E8Rap-qs