The Sea Inside

by Philip Hoare

  Like those remote astral bodies, which may be detected only when they dim the light of their parent suns almost imperceptibly as they pass between them and us, it is extraordinarily difficult to discern these strange species at sea, even for the most experienced cetologist. They remain a remarkable absence. Melville omits them from his Cetology, but given his love of the eccentric and the paradoxical, I dare say he would have had words for them. To me, they appear to be engaged in a cryptic choreography of their own, out there in the oceanic universe, a masked ball of beaked whales, elegantly pirouetting beyond the human gaze. But then, I probably think too much about whales, generally.

  The next day, after my visit to Marcelo in the vigia, reports come in confirming a group of Sowerby’s beaked whales, Mesoplon bidens, first identified in 1804 by the English naturalist James Sowerby. As social, toothed whales, beaked whales are particularly prone to stranding, and increasingly, it seems, susceptible to human-generated sonar because of their highly attuned reliance on sound. In one well-documented case in 2002, a mass stranding of Cuvier’s beaked whales occurred on the Canary Islands, four hours after the onset of military exercises in the area. Necropsies of the animals revealed the kind of haemorrhages and gas-bubble lesions associated with a build-up of nitrogen in the blood, known as necrosis – what human divers call ‘the bends’. The whales seemed to have been panicked by the noise into surfacing too early; other reports indicate that similarly frightened whales adopt an unnatural up-and-down ‘flight mode’.

  Such strandings address us directly, as emblems of our careless actions. In The Sea, The Sea, Charles Arrowby’s cousin James informs him, ‘The sea is not all that clean … Did you know that dolphins sometimes commit suicide by leaping onto the land because they’re so tormented by parasites?’ To which Charles replies, ‘I wish you hadn’t told me that. Dolphins are such good beasts. So even they have their attendant demons.’ In recent mass strandings of common dolphin on Cape Cod, rescuers discovered that the animals became less stressed if they were placed side by side, even as they lay beached and gasping on the sand. In their distress, their only consolation was each other.

  On 11 December 2009 there was a remarkable stranding on a southern Italian beach in the Mediterranean, where a ‘lost tribe’ of sperm whales live, distinct from their oceanic cousins, isolated in an inland sea. Their fate had all the elements of a classical tragedy. The seven whales, all males between fifteen and twenty-five years in age and measuring ten to thirteen metres long, had been driven into shallow waters, possibly by military sonar. Unable to forage on deep-sea squid, they first began to dehydrate, then to starve.

  Now a third threat came into play. In their state of hunger, their bodies began to break down their adipose fat, releasing the heavy metals and organochlorines they had inadvertently ingested from the polluted seas, and which had been absorbed into their bloodstream. In effect, the whales were poisoning themselves. As Dr John Wise showed me, in his laboratory at the University of Southern Maine, Portland, sperm whales are particularly susceptible to pollutants, not only because of their position at the top of the food chain, but due to the way they breathe so deeply. While I watched sperm-whale cells multiplying in a Petri dish under one of his electron microscopes, Dr Wise told me how sperm whales, which range widely in their oceanic travels, inhale chromium emitted from coastal chemical plants which, along with other contaminants, may be causing cancer and birth defects analogous to Down’s syndrome in human beings. We share the same air as mammals, yet we contrive to poison even that, as if not content with bespoiling the sea. The same chemicals that created Rachel Carson’s silent spring might yet silence the world of the whales.

  For the ill-fated spermaceti septet in the Mediterranean, that toxic cocktail weakened their bodies yet further, altering their sense of orientation and perception. The fishing gear, hooks, rope and plastic objects subsequently found in the whales’ stomachs – a result of their choosing to live in an inland sea subject to so much human detritus – hardly helped. (Recently, a juvenile sperm whale was found floating dead off Mykonos. The animal was emaciated, yet its stomach was distended; when it was cut open, nearly one hundred supermarket bags and other bits of plastic debris spilled out.)

  The last unlucky component in these, the last few hours of their unlucky lives, was the stormy weather that conspired to drive the seven whales inshore – possibly following the first of their number to give up and thereby demonstrating the loyalty for which their species is renowned. Four of the whales had already expired by the time they were discovered on the beach. The other three took days to die, ultimately suffocating under their own enormous weight; that which had sustained them at sea, a marker of their success as animals, doomed them on land. It must have been a painful death, reflected even in the usually measured words of the scientific paper, which described the whales ‘found agonizing on the shore’. In such circumstances, we humans look on helplessly. Smaller cetaceans can be given an overdose of horse tranquilliser which swiftly inhibits respiration and causes death. But for these leviathans, there is no such mercy. ‘It would be impossible to get enough quantities of the drug to euthanise a sperm whale,’ says Rob Deaville, ‘and even if we could, I doubt we could inject it.’

  The theories surrounding strandings are dizzying in their claims and counterclaims. Some focus on the whales’ ability to follow geomagnetic lines laid down in the earth’s crust. Such sensitivity – via minute magnetic cells that spin like internal compasses – has been detected in organisms from bacteria to birds. Birds in particular are thought to possess photopigments in their eyes known as cryptochromes that detect the magnetic field chemically, seeing it as a pattern of colours or lights which enables them to navigate. Could whales ‘see’ these same patterns? Some studies of the British coast, where the geomagnetic contour lines run parallel to the land, have suggested that whales move along ‘geomagnetic valleys’, and that where such valleys lead inland, strandings may occur.

  Others speculate that cetaceans set their ‘travel clocks’ by detecting these minute changes in the geomagnetic field; or that the circumstances for strandings may be created by sunspots known to affect the earth’s magnetic field, most visibly in the aurorae borealis and australis. Even more radical hypotheses suggest that cetaceans display a foreknowledge of seismic shifts in the earth’s surface, as if they were canaries warning of disasters as yet undetected by humans. The fact that recent major earthquakes in Japan and New Zealand were preceded by mass strandings of pilot and melon-headed whales seems to support this notion. But if we were ever able to lock into the magnetic fields that surround us, and that guide storm petrels and sperm whales alike, we lost the ability long ago. Our senses are sadly lacking, even in the three dimensions we purport to perceive.

  Out in the mid-Atlantic, we spend hours searching for sperm whales. ‘They’re acting weird today,’ says João, ‘playing games with us.’ We’re about to turn back when a pod of Risso’s dolphins appears out of nowhere.

  I’ve only ever seen these animals from afar. Now they’re just off the bow. Scarred and scratched, they resemble damaged ghosts, caught out of the corner of the eye. They even behave differently from other dolphins, staying shyly below the surface. Only as they come closer can I see their blunt snouts and high dorsals, their flanks graphically black and white, like psychedelic zebras. Antoine Risso, a French contemporary of John Hunter’s with a particular interest in crustaceans and copepods, lent his name to these animals. In the Azores they are known as moleiro, for their whiteness.

  Sliding over the side of the boat, I see their shapes moving below me in the gloom. Through the water I hear them singing – a sweet, high-pitched song rising up from these cetacean choristers in the sea’s cathedral. Melville does include them in his Cetology, although whether he ever saw one is uncertain: ‘Though this fish, whose loud sonorous breathing, or rather blowing, has furnished a proverb to landsmen, is so well known a denizen of the deep, yet is he not popularly classed among w
hales. But possessing all the grand distinctive features of the leviathan, most naturalists have recognised him for one. By some fishermen his approach is regarded as premonitory of the advance of the great sperm whale.’

  As they rise to the surface, their enormous dorsals appear, enough to identify them even without a glimpse of their battle-scarred backs, which resemble those of beaked whales. I peer at them through my mask; to see these cetaceans so close and yet so elusive only makes them seem more particular.

  Back on shore, Karin Hartman, a Dutch scientist studying Risso’s dolphins, tells us a little more. She says the males are whiter than the females, partly because they fight more and find more squid, leaving their scarred skin unpigmented. The paler they are, the more attractive they are to the opposite sex, as good foragers and representatives of a tough and frisky breed. ‘It’s sexy to be white,’ says Karin. The whitest are also the oldest, since their skin becomes thinner as they age.

  As with other whales, this ratio of dark and light is an advertisement of their individuality. Yet like sperm whales and beaked whales, their teeth are not used for feeding; they employ suction to feed on the squid of which they are so inordinately fond. Can there be enough calamari in the sea for these creatures? Hal Whitehead tells me sperm whales eat one hundred million tons of fish and squid each year, more than we humans take out of the oceans.*

  I fall back in the water, into a flurry of fins and limbs. We’re caught up in a trio of sperm whales, almost squashed in between them. Their big square heads float past mine, eyes and flanks, a confusion of us and them. It takes moments to sort us out – cetacean from human – before the whales dive, leaving my diving partner Drew and me to haul ourselves back on the boat.

  We sit squeakily on the rubbery side of the rib, awaiting our orders. Another blow appears close to our bow. João manoeuvres alongside the animal, slowly closing the distance between us. He tells us to be as quiet as we can. Not for the first time, it occurs to me how odd it is that an animal ten times the size of the craft on which we sit should be so timid of our proximity; as though, like the wheatear, it might be frightened by clouds, which is what we represent – a black rubber cloud over the whale’s head.

  My natural reaction in the water, to reach out and pull myself through it, is inappropriate with a wild animal; I might as well be waving my arms in front of a hippopotamus. Drew shows me how to drift back with the boat as we drop in, minimising the disturbance; how to keep my fins below the surface, so as not to create a stream of bubbles – a sign of aggression to a whale.

  Everything is about making our bodies as unintimidating as possible. At barely five foot eight and eight and a half stone, how could I present any peril to an animal with a body mass so many times my own? Yet even before I get in the water, I’m inflicting stress on a creature whose well-being I purport to protect. We are operating under special licence from the Azorean government, but no one has asked the whales.

  The Atlantic surges up to meet me, then sucks me in. The swell is powerful, the blue engulfing. I’m weightless and free. I duck down to avoid Drew’s descending six-foot-something bulk – armed as he is with his underwater camera – and attempt to orientate myself. João told me to look up every so often towards the landmark of the vigia, but that’s not so easy. Our skipper is a stern taskmaster; I feel as if he’s training me on the football field. He shouts instructions at me as I paddle away, in the general direction of whales.

  Through the waves that rock in front of my mask I can see, albeit intermittently, the animal’s head, the plosive blow from its single nostril. The sun turns its skin grey and shiny as it bobs there, rising and falling. Maybe it’s as nervous as I am. It’s not easy to maintain your balance when the sea is swaying you from side to side as if you were a goldfish in a bowl being carried in a pair of unsteady hands.

  Above is normality; below, everything is different. It continually surprises me, during these days with the whales, how invisible they are; like birds that vanish in mid-air, they seem to disappear in the sea. It’s an impossible feat of prestidigitation. Over the waves I can see the whale, quite clearly close; under the water, nothing. Then suddenly there it is – a great big beautiful animal held in the surf, stilled within the surge as I am flailing.

  To find oneself hovering over a whale’s flukes, caught up in what seems to be slow motion, is truly dreamlike, because it relates to nothing that could possibly happen on land. I’m walled in by whale and water, yet at the same time entirely open to what is around me. Nothing else matters. I feel nothing bad can happen if I’m with a whale. As if its grey mass insures against all the other evils. And I feel that because I am aware, in my head, of the power of its brain as well as its body.

  It’s stupid to be scared in such a luminous place. Their world is bright even when ours is overcast. As the clouds slide off the volcano’s slopes and into the sea, the conditions seem as uninviting as the sky, the water slate-grey, and three miles deep. But as I dive again, on the third day, it seems that a bank of lights is switched on. What appears dull from above is a floodlit field below. The sea’s surface acts as a lens, both filtering and focusing the sun’s rays. Under the ocean’s sky, the whales’ blue world is light beyond light, just as it shades into utter darkness – the profundity where they spend most of their time.

  It’s as if we were walking around with the night forever over us – as indeed we are, since the blackness of space is always there. The black and the blue, the dark and the light only underline the sense of scale. The whale’s environment would mean death for me. But it represents life in such a vast dimension that it takes all the fear away. I might be hypnotised by these mysterious animals, persuaded to stay a little longer, just to see what happens. Like the urge to throw myself off a cliff, the depths and their whales both appal and attract, dangerously. They have the measure of me.

  Out of the obscurity, a dark shape resolves itself into a large whale, a female. From below, it is joined by its calf. As they move just beneath the surface, the young whale aims at its mother’s belly to feed.

  It is an intimate tableau, and I feel like an interloper, as if I were staring at a woman breast-feeding in a café. Animals as old as thirteen have been found with milk in their stomachs, the equivalent of a human teenager suckling at their mother’s breast, or indeed the breast of their aunt or their mother’s best friend. This is alloparental care – a shared responsibility in which even unrelated females will suckle one another’s young while their mothers dive for food, as much for comfort and succour as for sustenance. These babysitters include non-reproductive or elderly females; whale tribes have a role for members which might otherwise be regarded as useless.

  Such behaviour emphasises the obvious: that sperm whales live in highly developed social structures. ‘Sperm whales are nomads, almost continuously on the move,’ says Hal Whitehead. ‘Their most stable reference points are each other.’ Home to a whale is other whales. Strong social bonds define sperm whales, like elephants, which they much resemble – the one possessed of the biggest brain on land, the other in the sea; both using over-developed noses as an extension of their senses; both with ivory teeth or tusks and small knowing eyes set in wrinkled grey skin; both highly matriarchal – sperm whales might as well be elephants in the water, or elephants, whales on legs. And as elephant society is itinerant, centred around itself, so where whales are not is as important as why they are there – both to themselves, and to scientists. Hal estimates a post-hunting global population of 360,000 sperm whales spread over 316,620,000 square kilometres of ocean, ‘giving a mean average density of 0.0011 whales/km2’. Such sums cannot assess how many whales lived in the oceans before that, although, before the global spread of Homo sapiens over the past two millennia, sperm whales accounted for the greatest biomass of any mammal on the planet. These ancient animals might as well be updated dinosaurs, facing the same prospect of extinction.

  By the time I was born, most of the world’s great whales had been killed.
Twentieth-century whaling devastated cetacean societies by depriving them of large males, a legacy which, given the longevity of whales, may take centuries to work out. That they manage to thrive, above and beyond all the threats they still face, is proof of the power of their natural selection and their social organisation. Given that their culture and organisation is passed on matrilineally, it is intriguing to wonder why sperm whales are so focused on the female line. One explanation is that, unlike land mammals, such groups cannot rely on males to defend them, since they may be attacked from any direction, in their three-dimensional world; and in any case, bull sperm whales travel far from the females, to remote northern or southern latitudes, in the same way that male elephants wander, returning only to breed. Thus the masculine role is reduced, and social hegemony reversed; perhaps sperm whales are truly liberated.

  At the same time, however – and somewhat paradoxically – Hal and his colleagues observe that these huge clans are mostly restricted to the Pacific, perhaps for reasons of safety, since the possibility of attack from orca is greater there than in the Atlantic. The result is a social difference between the whales of these two oceans similar to that between Western and Asian humans; they are all the same species, but subject to very different cultures.