by James Nestor
Ninety-five days later, the boat was rescued. There were two survivors: the captain and the man who had pulled the trigger. The harrowing tale served as the basis for Herman Melville’s novel Moby-Dick and, more recently, Nathaniel Philbrick’s nonfiction bestseller In the Heart of the Sea.
AS SPERM WHALE STOCKS DECREASED in the ocean near Nantucket, and whalers had to search farther away, the cost of oil increased. Meanwhile, a Canadian geologist named Abraham Gesner invented a method of distilling kerosene from petroleum. This process produced a substance close to whale oil in quality, but much cheaper. In the 1860s, the whale-oil industry collapsed.
The discovery of petroleum sounds like a death knell for whaling, but ultimately, this new cheap fuel would hasten the sperm whale’s destruction.
In the 1920s, new diesel-powered ships could process whale bodies so quickly and easily that whaling became profitable again. Sperm whale oil became a primary ingredient in brake fluid, glue, and lubricants. It was used to make soap, margarine, and lipstick and other cosmetics. The whale’s muscles and guts were mashed up and processed into pet food and tennis-racket strings. (If you own a top-quality wooden tennis racket made between 1950 and 1970, chances are it was strung with the sinew of sperm whales.)
Whaling went global. From the 1930s to 1980s, Japan alone killed 260,000 sperm whales—about 20 percent of the total population.
By the early 1970s, an estimated 60 percent of the ocean’s sperm whale population had been hunted, and the species was nearing extinction. While the world had grown proficient at hunting sperm whales, the whales themselves were a complete mystery. No one knew how they communicated or socialized; no one even knew what they ate. They had never been filmed underwater.
The documentary Whales Weep Not, which was seen by millions of people in the 1980s, offered the public the first view of sperm whales in their natural habitat. Sperm whales seemed far from the image handed down by history and literature. They were not surly brutes munching boats and men but gentle, friendly, even welcoming. The global antiwhaling movement gained support throughout the early 1980s and eventually ended all commercial whaling by 1986.*
The general increase in awareness of the sperm whale’s intelligence and human-like behavior has not deterred some countries from trying to hunt them again. As of 2010, Japan, Iceland, and Norway have been pressuring the International Whaling Commission to end its thirty-year moratorium on whaling. Schnöller and other researchers predict the moratorium could be lifted as soon as 2016, and hunting of sperm whales could again become legal.
Sperm whales have the lowest reproductive rate of any mammal; females give birth to a single calf once every four to six years. The current sperm whale population is estimated at about 360,000, down from approximately 1.2 million just two hundred years ago, where it probably hovered for tens of thousands of years before whaling began. Nobody knows for sure, but many researchers fear the population has been declining once more. Continued hunting could significantly decrease the population for generations and eventually push sperm whales back toward extinction.
IF HUNTERS DON’T ERADICATE SPERM whales, pollution might. Since the 1920s, PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls), carcinogenic chemicals used in the manufacture of electronics, have slowly seeped into the world’s oceans and, in some areas, reached toxic levels. For an animal to be processed as food, it must contain less than 2 parts per million of PCBs. Any animal that contains 50 ppm of PCBs must, by law, be considered toxic waste and be disposed of in an appropriate facility.
Dr. Roger Payne, an ocean conservationist, analyzed sea life for PCBs and found that orcas had about 400 parts per million of PCBs—eight times the toxic limit. He found beluga whales with 3,200 ppm of PCBs, and bottle-nosed dolphins with 6,800 ppm. All of these animals were, according to Payne, “mobile Superfund sites.” Nobody knows how much more pollution (PCBs, mercury, and other chemicals) whales and other oceanic animals can absorb before they start dying off en masse.
Payne and other researchers point to the baiji dolphin, a freshwater native of China’s Yangtze River, as a possible portent of the sperm whale’s fate. Considered one of the most intelligent of all dolphin species, the baiji dolphin has become functionally extinct due to pollution and other manmade disturbances. (At last count, there were about three baiji dolphins left.)
For Schnöller and his colleagues, cetacean research feels like a race against time.
BACK ON THE BOAT, ANOTHER hour passes. And another. I check the thermometer on my dive watch and notice the temperature has climbed to 109.
Then, suddenly, an electronic chirp blasts from the back of the boat. It’s Schnöller, calling our captain’s cell phone. The DareWin team has just spotted a pod of sperm whales near the Trincomalee harbor. Schnöller says the whales have probably been there the whole time; we just hadn’t been far enough out to spot them. They’re following slowly behind the pod, waiting for an opportunity to get in.
The captain starts the motor and we shoot south. Soon we’re surrounded by sperm whales.
“You see the ploofs?” says Prinsloo, pointing east at the horizon. What look like little mushroom clouds shoot from the surface at a 45-degree angle. A sperm whale has only one external nostril, which is located on the left side of its head and causes its exhales to emerge at an angle. These distinctive blows can go about twelve feet high, and on a windless and clear day, they’re visible for a mile or more.
“They look like dandelions, don’t they!” says Prinsloo. Three hundred yards to our right, another blow erupts.
“Get your mask,” she says. “Let’s go in.”
Our team has agreed to put only two people in the water at any one time, to avoid scaring off the whales. I’m on the first shift. The captain turns and pulls parallel to the pod so that we’re a few hundred feet in front of them.
“You can never chase down a whale,” Prinsloo explains as she yanks off the sheet and grabs her fins. “They always need to choose to come to you.” If we move slowly in predictable motions, just in front of the whales’ path, they can easily echolocate the boat and get comfortable with our presence. If they’re disturbed by us, they’ll take a deep breath and disappear beneath the surface. We’ll never see them again.
As the boat edges closer, the whales still haven’t dived—a good sign. Prinsloo says it’s not a full pod, just a mother and calf. Another good sign. Calves get curious around freedivers, and their mothers, in Prinsloo’s experience, encourage them to investigate.
Both whales are four hundred feet from the boat when they slow down, almost to a stop. Our captain cuts the motor. Prinsloo nods to me; I pull on my fins, mask, and snorkel, and we quietly submerge.
“Take my hand,” she says. “Now, follow.” Breathing through our snorkels with our faces just below the surface, we kick out toward the whales. Today, the visibility is mediocre, about a hundred feet. We can’t see the whales in the water, but we can certainly hear them. The blows grow louder and louder. Then the clicking begins; it sounds similar to a playing card stuck in the moving spokes of a bicycle. The water starts vibrating.
Prinsloo tugs my arm, trying to get me to hurry up. She pops her head above the surface for a moment and stops. I stick my head up and see a mound a hundred feet in front of us, like a black sun rising on the horizon. The clicking grows louder. The mound pops up from the surface again, then disappears. The whales leave; we don’t see them depart. But we can hear them beneath the water, their blows softening as they drift off. The waters calm, the clicks slow like a clock winding down. And they’re gone.
Prinsloo lifts her head and faces me. “Whale,” she says. I nod, smiling, take the snorkel out of my mouth, and begin to tell her how incredible the experience was. Then she shakes her head and points behind me.
“No. Whale.”
The mother and calf have returned. They’re stopped and are facing us in the other direction, a hundred and fifty feet away. The clicking starts again. It’s louder than it was before. I instinctively
kick toward the whales, but Prinsloo grabs my hand.
“Don’t swim, don’t move,” she whispers. “They’re watching us.”
The clicks now sound like jackhammers on pavement. These are echolocation clicks; the whales are scanning us inside and out. We watch from the surface as they exhale. With a kick of their flukes, they lunge toward us.
“Listen,” Prinsloo says urgently. She grabs me by the shoulder and looks directly at me. “You need to set the right intention now. They can sense your intent.” I know how dangerous human-whale interactions can be, but I strive to set my fear aside, calm myself, and think good thoughts.
Behind Prinsloo, the whales approach, hissing and blowing steam—two locomotives. “Trust this moment,” she says. The whales are a hundred feet, seventy-five feet away. Prinsloo grips my hand. “Trust this moment,” she repeats, and she pulls me a few feet beneath the surface.
A hazy black mass materializes in the distance, growing larger and darker. Details emerge. A fin. A gaping mouth. A patch of white. An eye, sunk low on a knotted head, peers in our direction. The mother is the size of a school bus; her calf, a short bus. They look like landmasses, submerged islands. Prinsloo squeezes my hand and I squeeze back.
The whales come at us head-on. Then, thirty feet from colliding, they pull softly to the side and languorously veer left. The rhythm of the clicks shifts; the water fills with what sounds to me like coda clicks. I believe they are identifying themselves to us. The calf floats just in front of its mother, bobs its head slightly, and stares with an unblinking eye. Its mouth is turned up at the end, like it’s smiling. The mother wears the same expression; all sperm whales do.
They keep their gaze upon us as they pass within a dozen feet of our faces, shower us with clicks, then retreat slowly back into the shadows. The coda clicks turn to echolocation clicks, then the echolocation fades, and the ocean, once again, falls silent.
I RECALL FRED BUYLE TELLING me about a friend of his who had been freediving in the Azores, the Portuguese islands off the west coast of Africa, when a pod of female sperm whales approached. The whales showered him with clicks and gently interacted with him over the course of many hours. Then a young bull approached and, according to Buyle, “probably got pretty jealous.” The bull turned toward Buyle’s friend and shot him with clicks powerful enough to stun him. He managed to kick to the surface and crawled back to the deck of the boat, where he experienced debilitating pain in his stomach and chest. After three hours, he recovered fully and has since suffered no ill effects.
Schnöller told me a similar story. He was diving with sperm whales in 2011 when a curious calf approached and started bumping him with its nose. Schnöller held out his hand to push the calf back and felt a sudden shock of heat rush up his arm. The energy from the clicks coming out of the calf’s nose was strong enough to paralyze Schnöller’s hand for the next few hours. He too recovered.
Prinsloo and Ghislain had their share of close calls in Trincomalee last year. After spending hours in the water with a pod, a bull approached Ghislain at a fast clip. Prinsloo motioned to Ghislain to get out of the way. Just then, the bull turned, raised his twelve-foot fluke above the surface, spun it, and slapped it down. If Ghislain hadn’t moved, his head would have been crushed.
Prinsloo and Ghislain claimed the fluke slap was possibly a playful interaction, not meant to harm. But when you’re in the water with an animal five hundred times your weight and ten times your size, such play can be fatal.
Freediving was a precaution against accidents like this and an essential skill when interacting with whales. Whales, especially calves, get excited during human-whale encounters and can sometimes charge and smother divers. Being able to dive down to forty feet and stay there for a minute or so until a whale passes could mean the difference between a life-changing and a life-ending experience. The fact is that nobody—not Prinsloo, Schnöller, or Buyle—really knows how risky these kinds of encounters are. Up until ten years ago, Schnöller told me earlier, nobody was diving with whales.
“Everyone thought it was too dangerous,” he said. Today, only a handful of divers attempt it, and most have had their share of narrow escapes.
Universities and oceanographic institutions would never allow their researchers or students to dive with whales. Few would want to.
Luke Rendell, a sperm whale researcher at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, told me in an e-mail that Schnöller’s research approach looked like “a pile of hokum” and was probably a “pretty flimsy scientific cover to go swimming with whales.” He finished by saying, “I’m perfectly capable of collecting data without freediving with the animals, thank you.” To be fair, Rendell said he welcomed more researchers to the field, but he thought the DareWin’s website looked suspiciously like pseudoscience.
Schnöller brushes off the criticism as “normal scientist reaction” and insists that most researchers don’t understand his work and those that do dismiss it as unscientific. But nobody can deny that Schnöller’s freediving approach gets results.
In six years of freelance work, he has collected more video and audio data on sperm whale interaction and gotten closer to these animals than most institutional scientists do in decades. Institutional scientists study sperm whale communication by recording clicks with a hydrophone from the deck of the boat, without ever knowing which whale is clicking and why. One of the longest-running sperm whale research programs is the Dominica Sperm Whale Project, headed by Hal Whitehead. The group studies sperm whale behavior by, among other things, following pods around and snapping photographs of flukes when the whales come up for air.
Meanwhile, last year Schnöller had a face-to-face encounter with five sperm whales that lasted three hours. The entire dive was documented in three-dimensional video and high-definition audio and is, to date, the longest and most detailed footage of sperm whales ever recorded.
Schnöller has since made inroads with the French scientific community and is working with renowned cognitive scientist Fabienne Delfour and acoustic scientist Diderot Mauuary on DareWin’s first scientific paper. They hope to publish it with Stan Kuczaj in a peer-reviewed journal in the next year. “This will all be official, it will all be scientific,” Schnöller insists. He says he’s not trying to subvert the scientific system—he wants to work within it—he is simply trying to speed up the collection of data, which, at the institutional level, happens at a glacial pace. For Schnöller, and perhaps for the whales, that pace may be too slow.
Sitting at the patio table that evening in the afterglow of my first sperm whale dive, I’m beginning to feel a bit of his frustration.
In the short encounter I had with Prinsloo, the mother and calf didn’t make a U-turn to escape us. They came back to say hello. My eye-to-eye interaction with these animals was one of the most powerful experiences I’ve ever had. I felt a sudden recognition, an instant and ineffable sense of knowing that I was in the presence of something extraordinarily powerful and intelligent. This is not a scientific observation, of course, but an emotional one. Still, I believe it is as true and telling as any objective fact we may discover about these animals. You can’t get that by sitting on the deck of a boat and sticking a robot in the water. You need to get wet.
ON THE FOURTH DAY, the film crew leaves. The cameraman who had been violently seasick since the first day has refused to spend another ten hours motoring around in a rickety boat. The director, Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee, was exhausted, and he and Schnöller weren’t getting along.
“You never told me it would be this hard,” said Vaughan-Lee when I’d talked with him that morning. He was scratching his bald, sunburned knees beside the patio table. I had warned him, repeatedly, but the point was moot. He told me he’d decided to cut his losses and take the next flight home to San Francisco.
He left a day too soon.
The remaining team of seven, plus the hired boat hands, cram into a single boat designed for half our number. With the motor coughing and wheezing, we he
ad south. Hours later, we’re fifteen miles from the coast and idling over the deep water of Trincomalee Canyon again. Schnöller checks his GPS, putting us near where they saw the whales yesterday.
“Turn the motor off. I listen for them,” he says. From the bow of the boat, he grabs a sawed-off broomstick with a metal pasta strainer tied to the end. He inserts a small hydrophone into the center of the strainer and drops the whole contraption in water, then puts on a pair of ratty headphones.
This strange device, which is wired to an amplifier, works like an antenna to home in on sperm whale clicks. By spinning the strainer around, Schnöller can determine what direction they’re coming from. Frequency and volume give him an idea of how deep the whales might be.
“They sell these to institutions for fifteen hundred euro,” he says, laughing. “I make mine from junk, and it works just as good.” Click Research, a new oceanographic manufacturing company he’s now building, will offer a version that works as well as the institutional model for only $350.
Schnöller puts the headphones over my head and hands me the broomstick. “What do you hear?” he asks. I tell him I hear static. Schnöller cups the headphones tightly over my ears. “Now listen. What do you hear?”
He takes the broomstick from my hands and spins the strainer slowly around below the surface. Through the static, I begin to hear a syncopated rhythm, like distant tribal drums. I tell Schnöller to stop moving the strainer. Everyone on the boat falls silent. The rhythm speeds up and grows higher in pitch, the patterns overlapping. What I’m hearing isn’t drums, of course, but the echolocation clicks of sperm whales hunting in the canyon miles beneath our boat.
Schnöller grabs the headphones and passes them around the boat. Everyone is entranced. A boat hand listens for a moment, then passes the headphones back to Schnöller. He gingerly walks to the bow and picks up a worn, wooden oar, then dips the paddle in the water and sticks the end of the handle in his ear.