15 July 2009

Whales actively seeking humans


The title sounds like a Craigslist advertisement, but the topic is a fascinating one, currently detailed in an article in the New York Times magazine and featured on either PBS or BBC this week. Whales are actively seeking to make contact with humans; no one knows why. The whales involved are grey whales - the behemoths of the sea. Mother whales are actively shepherding their children up to boats, and the youngsters are rising out of the water to view the humans in the boats.
Eighteen feet of boat on open seas is in almost any circumstance a tenuous alignment. But to suddenly find yourself in that same small vessel above a fleet, 40-foot-long midsea mastodon — one whose fluke alone could, with a cursory flip, send you and your boat soaring skyward — is to know the pure, wonderfully edgeless fear of complete acquiescence...
And then, within moments, the mother was surfacing again off to our stern and doubling back in our direction, but this time with her newborn male in tow... The baby gray glided up to the boat’s edge, and then the whole of his long, hornbill-shaped head was rising up out of the water directly beside me, a huge, ovoid eye slowly opening to take me in. I’d never felt so beheld in my life...
...there’s something very potent occurring here from a behavioral and a biological perspective. I mean, I’d put my career on the line and challenge anybody to say that these whales are not actively soliciting and engaging in a form of communication with humans, both through eye contact and tactile interaction and perhaps acoustically in ways that we have not yet determined. I find the reality of it far more enthralling than all our past whale mythology.”
More at the link. Image credit Ivan Chermayeff.

4 comments:

  1. I read the article this past weekend; it's tremendously moving. The last paragraph in the post is a quote from a marine mammal behavioralist, not just the reporter indulging in romantic fantasy.

    I've read a fair amount about dolphins and whales, but this article gave me a sense I've never had before, that there are people--there's no other word for it--inhabiting the oceans.

    Why they would be trying to make friends with us now, after all we've done to their race, is unfathomable and profoundly humbling.

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  2. About ten years ago I read Roger Payne's book Among Whales. Ever since I have felt that whales, especially the toothed species were far more than humanity has given them credit. It is shameful what we have allowed to happen to these denizens of the deep, especially in light of the fact that not a single product "harvested" from whales can not be produced synthetically or replaced, and for less money.

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  3. This is great, and beautiful. What would these whales have to teach us about the oceans, once we learn how to communicate? I hope those who have meaningful encounters with these beings are wise enough NOT to approach them as pets or what have you.

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  4. "Look carefully, Junior. They may be tiny, but there's something oddly whale-ish about them. When you grow up, maybe you'll be the one to figure out how to sing to them."

    :)

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