by James Nestor
The extraordinary power of clicks lets whales use them to perceive a remarkably detailed view of their environment from great distances. They can detect a ten-inch-long squid at a distance of more than a thousand feet and a human from more than a mile away. Sperm whales’ echolocation is the most precise and powerful form of biosonar ever discovered.
The sperm whale’s brain, like its clicks, both distinguishes it from a human’s and suggests surprising similarities between the two species.
Six times the size of the human brain and in many ways more complex, the sperm whale’s brain is the largest brain that’s ever existed on Earth, as far as we know. The inferior colliculus in the sperm whale brain, which helps sense pain and changes in temperature and serves as an auditory pathway from one area of the brain to the other, is twelve times larger than a human’s; its lateral lemniscus, which processes sound, is two hundred and fifty times the size of a human’s. The neocortex, the part of the brain that, in humans, governs higher-level functions such as conscious thought, future planning, and language, is estimated to be about six times larger in the sperm whale brain than it is in ours.
It’s also possible that whales have emotional lives not unlike our own. In 2006, researchers at New York City’s Mount Sinai School of Medicine discovered that sperm whales had spindle cells, the long and highly developed brain structures that neurologists associate with speech and feelings of compassion, love, suffering, and intuition—those things that make humans human.
Sperm whales not only have spindle cells, but have them in far greater concentration than humans do. Scientists believe these cells evolved in sperm whales more than fifteen million years before they did in humans. In the realm of brain evolution, fifteen million years is a very long time.
“It’s absolutely clear to me that these are extremely intelligent animals,” said Patrick Hof, one of the researchers who made the discovery.
It’s this brain, specifically the oversize neocortex and spindle cells, that has brought Schnöller and the DareWin team to Sri Lanka.
A nonscientist might call love, suffering, and compassion the stuff of poetry. And no poetry was ever conveyed without words or something like them.
OUR FIRST TWO OUTINGS are a disaster. Both days, we spent several hours in two tiny, shadeless fishing boats juddering around the ocean without seeing any whales. The film crew’s cameraman got seasick the first day and refused to go back to sea. Without a cameraman, and still without any usable footage, the director threatened to pull the plug on the documentary.
On the evening of the second day, I meet Schnöller on the second-story patio. He’s sitting alone, haloed in mosquitoes. The blue fluorescent beam of a headlamp shines down on a table filled with half-assembled underwater-camera casings. Behind him, a waxing moon hangs low over a black sea.
“This is very hard work, you see,” he says, looking up as I take a seat at the table. He’s wearing an American flag headband and knockoff Facebook sandals that he picked up at a junk store on the way here, and he looks as ridiculous as that description makes him sound. “Ocean research takes patience, lots of patience, persistence, and is very physically exhausting.”
Schnöller grew up in the west African nation of Gabon, the son of a former French army lieutenant who worked for then dictator Omar Bongo. The family’s house was located beneath a canopy of mango trees at the shoreline of an unpopulated beach, which was where Schnöller spent much of his youth. He told me earlier how he remembered watching crocodiles from a nearby river crawl up the front porch and eat food from the dog bowl. Sometimes while the family was eating dinner, giant mambas would slide in through wooden planks in the roof and drop down on the dining-room table. Schnöller’s father kept a shotgun close by, and after a few years, the roof was peppered with holes.
On weekends, Schnöller would sail along Gabon’s wild coast and make camp on unexplored islands. He learned how to navigate through the ocean’s many moods, keep cool in crises, and improvise his way out of trouble.
Schnöller knows that Prinsloo’s team has been criticizing him and that the film crew is about to leave, but he shrugs it off. “There are no fast results in this research,” he says. “That’s why so few people bother doing it.”
Actually, he corrects himself, nobody is doing it.
Of the twenty or so sperm whale scientists in the field, none dive and interact with their subjects. Schnöller finds this inconceivable. “How do you study sperm whale behavior without seeing them behave, without seeing them communicate?” He’s convinced that to understand sperm whales, one must first understand their communication, and to understand their communication, one needs to understand their language, which he believes is transmitted through clicks.
“These patterns are very structured; this is not random,” he says, taking a sip of beer.
SPERM WHALES PRODUCE FOUR DISTINCT vocalization patterns: normal clicks, for tracking down prey at distances of more than a mile; creaks, which sound, despite their name, like machine-gun fire, for homing in on close-range prey; codas, the patterns used during social interactions; and slow clicks, which no one quite understands. One theory is that bulls use slow clicks to attract females and scare off other males. The clicks are very similar to dolphin clicks but more complex.
Coda clicks, the focus of Schnöller’s work, are used only during socializing and are significantly different from clicks used to aid perception and navigation. They sound unremarkable to the human ear—something like the tack-tack-tack of marbles dropped on a wood table. But when the clicks are slowed down and viewed as a sound wave on a spectrogram, each reveals an incredibly complex collection of shorter clicks inside it.
Inside those shorter clicks are even shorter clicks, and so on. The more closely Schnöller focused in on a click, the more detailed it became, unfolding on his computer screen like a Russian nesting doll.
An average click lasts anywhere from twenty-four milliseconds (thousandths of a second) to seventy-two milliseconds. Inside these clicks are a series of microclicks, which themselves are separated by microseconds, and so on. All these tiny clicks inside the coda are transmitted at very specific and distinct frequencies. There could be even shorter, organized click patterns within these microclicks, but Schnöller’s machines—which record at 96,000 Hz, the highest speed available on most modern audio equipment—aren’t fast enough to process them.
Schnöller tells me that sperm whales can replicate these clicks down to the exact millisecond and frequency, over and over again. They can also control the millisecond-long intervals inside the clicks and reorganize them into different structures, in the same way a composer might revise a scale of notes in a piano concerto. But sperm whales can make elaborate revisions to their click patterns, then play them back in the space of a few thousandths of a second.
“When you think about it, human language is very inefficient, it is very prone to errors,” Schnöller says. Humans use phonemes—basic units of sound, like kah, puh, ah, tee—to create words, sentences, and, ultimately, meaning. (English has about forty-two phonemes, which speakers shuffle around to create tens of thousands of words.) While we can usually convey phonemes clearly enough for others to understand them, we can never fully replicate them the same way each time we speak. The frequency, volume, and clarity of the voice shifts constantly, so that the same word uttered twice in a row by the same person will usually sound discernibly different, and will always show clear differences on a spectrogram. Comprehension in human language is based on proximity: If you enunciate clearly enough, another speaker of the same language will understand you; if you bungle too many vowels and consonants, or even pronunciation (think of French or a tonal Asian language), then communication is lost.
Schnöller’s research suggests that sperm whales don’t have this problem. If they’re using these clicks as a form of communication, he believes, it would be less like human language and more like fax-machine transmissions, which work by sending out microsecond-length ton
es across a phone line to a receiving machine, which processes those tones into words and pictures. Perhaps it’s no coincidence that a pod of socializing sperm whales sounds a lot like a fax transmission.
Human language is analogue; sperm whale language may be digital.
“WHY DO THEY HAVE SUCH huge brains, why are these patterns so consistent and perfectly organized, if they aren’t some kind of communication?” Schnöller asks rhetorically. He mentions that sperm whales have more brain mass and brain cells controlling language than humans do. “I know, I know, this is all just theory, but still, when you think about it, it just doesn’t make sense otherwise.”
To illustrate his point, Schnöller relates an encounter he had the previous year with a pod of sperm whales. The pod included both adults and their young and were hanging out in the water, clicking and socializing, when Schnöller approached them with a camera attached to a bodysurfing board. A calf swam over and faced Schnöller, then took the camera in its mouth. A group of adults immediately surrounded the calf and showered it with coda clicks. Seconds later, the calf let the camera go, then backed up and retreated behind the adults without ever looking at them. To Schnöller, the young whale looked ashamed. “It got the message not to mess with us.” He laughs. “That’s when I knew, they had to be talking to it. There’s just no other way.”
Schnöller says he’s also witnessed, on numerous occasions, two sperm whales clicking back and forth to each other as if they were having a conversation. He’s seen other whales pass clicks and then suddenly move in the same direction. He’s watched a whale bend its head in exaggerated motions to face one whale head-on and pass one pattern of clicks, and then bend in another direction to face another whale and pass a completely different pattern. To Schnöller, it all looked like communication.
But neither Schnöller nor anyone else will be translating the cetacean language anytime soon. It’s too complicated, and both resources and personnel are too scarce to study it closely. The DareWin team has come here to collect data in the hope of simply proving that sperm whales use clicks as some form of communication. They’ll record as much sperm whale socializing as they can, then correlate coda clicks with specific behaviors.
That’s what the crazy-looking pod is doing at Schnöller’s feet. The device, called the SeaX Sense 4-D, is a glamorized underwater-camera housing covered with twelve minicameras and four hydrophones, all placed at different angles. With it, Schnöller can record high-definition audio and video in all directions at once.
Schnöller explains that the sperm whale, like the dolphin, processes sound through an acoustic sac, the melon, which is found in the upper jaw at the tip of its huge nose, and, like a dolphin’s, has thousands of receptors to gather sound. Having more receptors (more ears, essentially) allows the whale a significantly broader and more accurate view of its environment. Using the melon and clicks for echolocation, a sperm whale can “see” clearly in all directions at once.
SeaX Sense 4-D, Schnöller says, “replicates what the sperm whale sees and hears” by capturing 360-degree video and surround-sound audio. An additional, smaller 3-D camera with just two hydrophones will replicate the human experience. Data from these two machines will be uploaded into a software program DareWin engineers developed that can pinpoint which whale clicked at which other whale and at what time. If a whale reacts in a specific way to the same click pattern, that will suggest these clicks are coded with some information. Researchers will then work backward and analyze these clicks for patterns and try to piece together the click vocabulary.
It’s not the Rosetta stone, Schnöller admits, but it’s a start. Nobody has ever recorded sperm whale interactions and behaviors with such sensitive equipment before, because no such equipment had existed. Schnöller built all this stuff from handouts and scraps.
Freediving with these rigs, he has recorded twenty hours of close-up sperm whale interactions—the largest and most detailed such collection in the world.
AT SEVEN IN THE MORNING on the third day, the boat captains arrive and lead us back to our hired “research vessels”—two beat-up fishing boats with wooden planks for seats.
The remaining two members of the film crew and the DareWin team will take one boat; Prinsloo’s team will take the other. I’ll be alternating between the two. The plan is to head out together, several miles off the coast, to a spot in Trincomalee Canyon where the seafloor drops off to a depth of more than six thousand feet. From there, we’ll split up and look for whales. Should someone on either boat spot any, he’ll use a mobile phone to alert the other boat. We’ll then trail the whales, wait for them to slow down or stop, and get in the water with them. With any luck, they’ll approach and interact with us.
We pack up, squeeze in, and set off south toward the horizon, our rickety craft riding low in the water. Hours later, we’re twenty miles off the coast, floating in a dead-calm sea. No whales. I’m beginning to side with the film crew: this expedition feels hopeless.
“There were just so many out here last year,” Prinsloo says apologetically. She’s curled up in a sheet wet with seawater and sweat, leaning against Peter Marshall. Both of them are wearing T-shirts around their faces, so only the lenses of their sunglasses peep through. “I don’t know,” Prinsloo laments. “I don’t know what happened.”
Ghislain wipes his sweaty palms against his light blue Abercrombie & Fitch T-shirt. He emits an exaggerated sigh, takes a sip of water, and turns to stare into the open ocean. A minute becomes an hour; an hour becomes two. I check my dive watch: the temperature gauge reads 106. Even my fingers are sunburned.
I recall when Schnöller told me months ago that he sees dolphins and whales only 1 percent of the time that he spends looking for them, and that he films them 1 percent of that 1 percent. Now I worry that the percentage is actually far lower.
I’ve discovered in the past fourteen months that deep-sea research has less to do with actually researching the mysteries of the sea and more to do with watching Tom Cruise movies on airplanes, brushing your teeth in gas-station bathrooms, sleeping in fleabag hotels, diarrhea, picking dead skin from your peeling shoulders, arguing, eating stale croissants for lunch and dinner, explaining to loved ones that you won’t be home anytime soon, and sitting in little boats over deep-water trenches in the middle of nowhere writing sentences like this one on a damp notepad.
Another hour passes. Still no whale. We sit and stare and sweat and wait . . .
THE NOTION OF ARRANGING a peaceful encounter with whales is a bit ironic, of course, given the way humankind has treated them for centuries.
According to legend, in 1712, an American ship captained by Christopher Hussey was hunting right whales off the southern coast of Nantucket Island when a gale suddenly blew the vessel dozens of miles south, beyond sight of land, to a barren stretch of deep water in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. The crew struggled to regain control of the ship and were readying the mast to tack back to shore when they noticed columns of mist shooting up at odd angles from the water’s surface. Then they heard heavy, heaving exhalations. They had floated into a pod of whales. Hussey ordered the men to draw lances and harpoons and stab the whale closest to the ship. They killed it, tied it to the side of the boat, fitted the mast, and sailed back to Nantucket, then dropped the whale’s body on a south-facing beach.
This was no right whale. Hussey knew that the mouths of right whales are filled with baleen, a hairlike substance used in filtering out krill and small fish. The whale he had just caught had enormous teeth, several inches long, and a single nostril on top of its head. The bones of its flippers looked eerily like those of a human hand. Hussey and his crew cut open the whale’s head, and hundreds of gallons of thick, straw-colored oil oozed out. The oil must be sperm, they thought (wrongly); this strange whale must be carrying its “seed” within its oversize head. Hussey named it spermaceti (Greek sperma, “seed”; Latin cetus, “whale”). The English version of the name took hold: sperm whale.
From
that point forward, the sperm whale was screwed.
By the mid-1700s, whale ships had flocked to Nantucket to join a thriving industry. Sperm whale oil, the straw-colored substance taken from the whale’s head, turned out to be an efficient and clean-burning fuel for everything from streetlamps to lighthouses. In its congealed form, it made top-quality candles, cosmetics, machine lubricants, and waterproofing agents. The Revolutionary War was fueled by sperm whale oil.
By the 1830s, more than 350 ships and 10,000 sailors were hunting sperm whales. Twenty years later, those numbers would double. Nantucket was processing more than five thousand sperm whale corpses a year and reaping upwards of twelve million gallons of oil. (A single whale could yield five hundred or more gallons of spermaceti; oil from boiled blubber could produce about twice that amount.)
But hunting the world’s largest predator didn’t come without dangers.
Whalers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were attacked regularly. The most famous incident occurred in 1820. The Nantucket whale ship Essex was off the coast of South America, its crew hunting whales, when they were rammed twice by a charging bull. The ship was lost. A crew of twenty men escaped in smaller boats and drifted off into the open ocean.
Nine weeks later, still drifting, the crew was close to starvation. Following maritime custom, the men drew lots to see who would be eaten. The captain’s cousin, a seventeen-year-old named Owen Coffin, was chosen. Coffin put his head on the side of the boat; another man pulled the trigger of a gun. “He was soon dispatched,” wrote the captain, “and nothing of him left.”