by Farley Mowat
The whale locates a herring school either by sight (the finner’s underwater vision is excellent) or by means of a highly sophisticated echo-location system of his own, transmitting a pulse of very low-frequency sound through the water.* This low-frequency “sonar” has a broad-beam effect. If there is anything in front, below or above him within a range of one to several miles, he will “see” it in the pattern of returning echoes. If it is a herring school—and the whale can presumably distinguish and identify herring as distinct from other species of fish of similar size—the whale heads for the target at his normal underwater cruising speed, which seems to be about eight knots.
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* New evidence suggests that finners may also have, and use, high-frequency, narrow-beam sonar similar to that possessed by many of the toothed whales, capable of scanning objects at great distances, and perhaps also used for long-range communication.
As he closes in on the school, he accelerates in a burst of speed which may reach twenty knots. Approaching his target, he alters course and at torpedo velocity begins circling the school, spiraling steadily inward. As he does so, he turns on his side with his belly presented toward the herring. Unlike his grey-black back, his belly offers a huge expanse of glistening white with a very high light-reflecting value. Encircled by this flashing ring of light,* the herring jam tightly in upon one another in much the same manner as if they were surrounded by a seine.
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* The fin whale’s use of reflected light to “herd” herring explains another minor puzzle—his strikingly asymmetrical colour pattern. The white of the belly extends far higher up the flank on the whale’s right side than it does on his left. I conclude that this is because the fishing whale circles a herring school clockwise, which means that his right side is always presented to the herring so that the barrier effect produced by the reflected light comes into play even before he turns on his side and begins to tighten the circle.
When the circle (the “net” of reflected light) is tight enough and the herring sufficiently concentrated, the whale abruptly charges straight into the mob of little fishes with his enormous mouth agape.
Sheer speed, even when combined with his big mouth, might not alone suffice to bring him an adequate return for his effort; so he brings into play another and very special device. The whole underpart of his body, from directly beneath his mighty chin and extending aft to a point near his navel, is slit and pleated like a gigantic accordion. All rorquals have these slits, which in the fin number about a hundred. When a finner is travelling at speed and suddenly opens his mouth, the immense pressure of static water exerts itself on the whole gaping forefront of his body, which promptly inflates to gargantuan size as the accordion pleats open to their fullest extent. Thus, instead of being able to engulf only a few barrels of salt water, and whatever herring are contained therein, he almost instantaneously ingests many tons of water together with its contents. Smartly now he closes his mouth, contracts the muscles controlling the pleats, and squirts the unwanted water out of apertures set at the corners of his jaws. The herring are tapped against the sieve of baleen plates. When there is nothing left in his mouth but herring, he uses his tongue to sluice them through his surprisingly small gullet into the first of his several holds, or stomachs. The entire operation takes about ten minutes.
Human seiners can only take herring, capelin and other such small fry when these are at or near the surface of the sea; but the fin knows no such limitations and can probably go as deep as, or deeper than, any of the food fishes he pursues. Fin whales can certainly cruise contentedly at a depth of at least three hundred feet for as long as thirty minutes and on occasion can go much deeper and remain even longer. We do not know how deep they can go, but one fin which was harpooned with a device containing a depth recorder descended 1,164 feet.
The fishing procedure I have described appears to be standard for daylight fishing; but what do fins do at night? That they do sometimes fish in darkness is an observed fact. Echo location would work as well by night as by day, but the light-barrier effect presumably would cease to be of much value. Apparently the fin does not employ the circle-and-concentrate system on very dark nights, relying instead on a straightforward rush executed at high speed against a school of prey fishes. This is probably a relatively inefficient procedure, and it may be that the only fins who regularly hunt at night are pregnant or nursing females, who need a heavier than normal, and more nearly continuous, food supply.
The similarities between the fishing methods of whales and those of technological man are fascinating, but there is an essential difference between them. After the whale has scooped up a ton or two of food, he ceases fishing and is free to do whatever it is whales choose to do with their spare time. The human herring seiner, on the other hand, operates on a different principle. Until the seiner is loaded to her marks with as much as two hundred tons of herring, the human crew keeps at the killing.
Before modern man began his murderous exploitation of the seas, the oceans swarmed with herring... and with whales. Now that is changed. Having come close to eliminating the great whales, man is now rapidly doing the same thing to the herring. Today the once-famous herring fishery in the North Sea is fast declining. There are almost no herring stocks of any significant commercial value left off the coasts of Norway, England or other European nations. A few years ago the British Columbia herring fishery, which was one of the richest in the world, was virtually fished out. By 1967, more than fifty big, modern British Columbia seiners had made the long voyage via the Panama Canal to Canada’s east coast, where they are now helping to clean the herring out of the Bay of Fundy, the Gulf of St. Lawrence and the waters adjacent to the southern coast of Newfoundland.
This fishery was extremely successful in its first few years of operation. In 1969 more than 120,000 tons of herring were taken by seiners in Newfoundland waters alone... and almost all of this mighty harvest of the sea was reduced to fish meal and fish oil for agricultural and industrial use. Only an insignificant part was used directly as food for man. However, by 1970, despite an even greater catching effort, the take had fallen by one third. Samples taken in 1971 by fisheries biologists showed that the new-year classes (new generations) of herring were not coming along at anything like a sufficient rate to fill the gaps in the herring ranks. It is a competent prediction that by 1980 the herring fishery in eastern Canadian waters, if not in the entire North Atlantic Ocean, will have ceased because there will be almost no herring left.
Their disappearance will bring the threat of starvation to a vast array of commercially important fishes such as cod, halibut, haddock and even salmon, all of which depend heavily upon herring and upon which, in turn, the wildly proliferating human species is itself becoming increasingly dependent for its survival.
This is not something which worries the owners of the efficient new herring-reduction plants which have sprung up all along the Canadian Atlantic coasts. These plants (there is now one in Burgeo and it is due to triple its capacity before 1973) are highly mechanized, low-cost, low-employment operations. Most of those built on the Sou’west Coast amortized their investment costs in the first three years of operation. They are now intensely profitable, and the owners expect to continue making a big profit, even after the herring have been destroyed, by switching the attack to the other primary food of those large northern food fishes which man has used to sustain himself for countless centuries. The seiners will go after the capelin: a slim, beautiful little fish which is found only in northern waters but which may be as numerous at present as the herring were in the days before the purse seine fishery began.
The Norwegians have already begun seining capelin in eastern Atlantic waters in order to feed their reduction plants. Two Newfoundland plants are already experimenting with them. One of the executives of an international fisheries corporation happily told me he expects the capelin supply will “hold up for as long as five or ten years.” What happens after that is something fo
r which the fishing industry, apparently, has no great concern.
It will not be a happy prospect for the North Atlantic fin whales, if, indeed, any remain alive that long. It will also be a poor lookout for the remnants of the once great herds of harp seals, which are primarily capelin-eaters and which are still being savagely decimated by Norwegian sealing fleets with some assistance from Canadians.
The prospective elimination of the great base herds of capelin and herring, upon which so many other forms of marine life depend for survival, is actually being used to provide a human rationale for the continuing butchery of seals and whales. This rationale was explained to me by a man who has interests in both whaling stations and sealing ships.
“It is nonsense to try to save the seals, or the whales either. The herring and capelin, and probably squid also, are going to go into the reduction plants, so the whales and seals will end up starving anyway. We might as well kill them while they are still some good to us.”
Another rationale for continuing the slaughter to extermination was given to me by a fisheries biologist charged with helping to conserve the resources of the oceans: a task which, I suspect, he may feel is already beyond our capabilities.
“A lot of people in the business [resource management] say it’s ridiculous to get worked up about saving whales because they are probably going to disappear anyway, because of pollution. All the fish-eating species are at the top of oceanic food chains and they concentrate such pollutants as DDT, mercury and the rest of the stuff we are dumping into the sea. If those things don’t kill them outright, it will likely make them sterile, or at least shorten their lives... Of course, if we did stop hunting them, it would certainly ease the total pressure they are under now and, who knows, they just might make out despite the pollution problem.”
There is still another reason for exploiting the remaining whales, of all species and all sizes. This has to do with the extremely heavy capital investment required to build a modern whaling fleet and its ancillary industries. The Japanese, who are now the world’s major whalers, claim they cannot afford to stop killing whales until all their investments have been amortized and, even then, it would be economically wasteful not to continue to make use of their fleet and plant for whaling since most of it cannot be converted to other uses. Presumably Russia, with the second largest whaling fleet, Norway and other whaling countries, such as Canada, agree with this.
However, these are not the publicly stated reasons for continuing the massacre. Propagandists for the whaling interests insist we must continue to kill whales, and in quantity, to provide protein and fat for hungry human beings and to provide industrial and medicinal products vitally needed by modern society. These arguments are, at best, fraudulent. At worst they are downright lies. There is no single product derived from whales which cannot now be synthesized at comparable cost, and proteins and fats can be more effectively produced by farming on a sustained-yield basis than by the hunting-to-extinction methods which we still apply to oceanic life.
Nevertheless, we should not be much surprised by any of these attitudes. They are, after all, no more than expressions of the basic approach of modern man toward the world around him. Exploit... consume... excrete... at an ever-accelerating pace. Such is the mad litany of our times.
Like imbecilic children loose in a candy store, we may well come to a sticky end in a belch of indigestion, but, if we do not, then we will assuredly die of hunger when the sweets run out. They are running out very rapidly in the oceans of the world. The fond expectation that the seas will feed mankind when the ravaged earth can no longer do so is no more than an illusion. Already the seas are being grossly over-fished. Competent fisheries experts predict, with gloomy certainty, that within two decades food-fish populations in the oceans will have plunged to less than half their present levels, while during the same twenty years the fishing pressures upon them will have increased at least tenfold!
The appalling destruction of herring in Newfoundland waters is already seriously affecting the inshore fishery for cod and related species. Taken in conjunction with the gross overkill of all the larger species of food fishes on the offshore banks by the burgeoning fleets of trawlers and draggers belonging to a score of desperately competing nations, the loss of the bait fishes (mainly herring and capelin) will mean an early end to any significant continuing catch of large edible fishes. It will also mean an end to fisheries as a way of life for many thousands of men. However, not everyone views this as a disaster. As Premier Smallwood, a rather typical politician in the modern mould, once told me:
“That would be a good thing. Yes. A very good thing. A very, very good thing indeed! It would mean the fishermen would have to take jobs ashore as industrial workers. It would lead them into a better way of life, you see. A good thing! Yes, the best thing in the world for them.”
7
ALTHOUGH MY ATTEMPTS TO GAIN insight into the lives of the finners were bound to be frustratingly inadequate, because I could only encounter them at the interface between air and water, I occasionally had a stroke of luck. Lee Frankham, a friend who was the pilot of a Beaver airplane on floats and who sometimes came visiting and took us joyriding along the coast, was responsible for one such happy accident.
On a July day in 1964 we flew off with him to visit the abandoned settlement of Cape La Hune, Uncle Art’s onetime home. It was a cloudless afternoon and the cold coastal waters were particularly pellucid and transparent. As we were crossing the broad mouth of White Bear Bay, Lee suddenly banked the Beaver and put her into a shallow dive. When he levelled out at less than a hundred feet, we were flying parallel to a family of six fin whales.
They were in line abreast and only a few feet below the surface. As seamen would say, they were making a passage under forced draft. Lee estimated they were doing all of twenty knots.
He throttled back almost to stall speed and we slowly circled them. From our unique vantage point, they were as clearly visible as if they had been in air, or we in water, and we could see minute details of their bodies and of their actions. Yet if it had not been that their swift progress underwater was relative to a light wind-popple on the surface, it would have been hard to believe they were progressing at all.
Their mighty tails and flukes, which, unlike the tails of fishes, work vertically, swept lazily up and down with what appeared to be a completely effortless beat. Their great, paddle-like flippers—remnants of the forelimbs of their terrestrial ancestors—barely moved at all, for these organs serve mainly as stabilizers and as diving planes.
There was no visible turbulence in the water although the whales were moving at a rate of knots which few of man’s submarines can equal when submerged. The overall effect was of six exquisitely streamlined bodies hovering in the green sea and seeming to undulate just perceptibly, as if their bodies were composed of something more subtle and responsive than ordinary flesh and bones. There was a suggestion of sinuosity, of absolute fidelity, to some powerful but unheard aquatic rhythm.
They were supremely beautiful beings.
“It’s like watching a fantastic ballet,” was Claire’s response. “Perfect control and harmony! They aren’t swimming through the water... they’re dancing through it!”
Dancing? It seemed a wildly imaginative concept, for I knew these beasts weighed seventy or eighty tons apiece. And yet I cannot better Claire’s description.
Man, being a terrestrial beast of rather rigid perceptivity, is limited in his ability to conceive of alien beings except in terrestrial terms. In attempting to convey something of the magnitude of the great whales, men have inevitably compared them with the largest dinosaurs that ever lived (the great whales are much larger), or with the largest surviving land animal, the elephant—“a herd of twelve African elephants could be contained inside the skin of one blue whale.”
Even more misleading is the concept we have formed of the great whales from looking at them stranded on a beach or hauled up on the flensing plan at a whaling f
actory. Out of its own element (and stone dead in the bargain), one of the great whales becomes a monstrous lump of a thing: a shapeless and gigantic sack, loosely stuffed with meat and guts and fat, only remotely identifiable with the living, functioning entity it once was.
The living whale is something else. The all-too-brief period during which we watched the fin family crossing White Bear Bay was a revelation. We were all three of us made sharply aware that these creatures were paragons of grace who had achieved a harmonious relationship to the world of waters such as man will never know in air or on the land, in nature or in art.
About ten minutes after we first saw them, the whales rose as one, surfaced, blew and inhaled several times, then sounded while still moving at full speed and without leaving more than a few faint ripples. Since they have excellent vision in air as well as in water, they may have seen our plane. In any event, when they sounded they went deep; shimmering and diminishing in our view as if they were sliding down a long, unseen chute leading to the privacy of the abyssal depths.
SINCE THE LAST world war men have become very interested in how whales move so swiftly and smoothly in both the horizontal and vertical planes of their three-dimensional world. This interest has not been prompted by admiration or even by true scientific curiosity, but rather by the desire of human warriors to build better submarines with which more effectively to destroy one another. This curiosity, perverted though it be, has led to some fascinating discoveries about the whale as a machine; and everything science has discovered has strengthened the conclusion that whales are among the most highly perfected forms of life ever to dwell upon this planet.
One thing that sadly puzzled early investigators was the question of how a whale could achieve its great speeds with such a “rudimentary” power source as living muscle, and such a simple transmitter of power to water as a pair of flukes. Streamlining was obviously a part of the answer, but only a part. Most modern submarines are almost slavishly streamlined after the whale pattern but, even so, and even when equipped with engines and propellers of maximum mechanical efficiency, they can only achieve speeds comparable to those of whales by expending many times the amount of energy. The secret seems to lie in the fact that the submarine is a rigid object and the whale is not. Experiments in test tanks with those little whales, the dolphins, show that the illusion Claire, Lee and I thought we were experiencing—that of seeing a sort of shimmering undulation in the dancing fins—was no illusion at all.