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“Killer whales pick off the weak ones,”
was killing the whale, now that it had beached—was gravity.
“There’s an argument, a conservation argument, not to put a whale that’s been weeded out back in again.”
The name “pilot whale” comes from the notion that these animals are steered by a leader, though whether this is true has never been indubitably proven. Around Australia such whales are thought to be nomadic, rather than migrating with the seasons, as other species do. No one knows why they might be predisposed to come ashore on this stretch of coastline specifically.
Eighty pilot whales stranded in the same region in 2009,
The most daunting number, 320 pilot whales, beached in 1996—though
Why do the whales do it?
The spectators fostered their own suspicions as to why this young humpback whale had drawn up on the sand. Hadn’t a shooting star flared icily over Rottnest Island last week? Astral debris was said to have sprinkled down over the Goldfields. Comets and meteorites were believed, by many, to be connected to whale beachings, though few could say why—maybe the animals confused night for day when stars fell, or changes in the stellar positions led whales to misreckon their nearness to land.
And what was happening in the sea? The weather was undeniably weird, all the time—wasn’t that the truth? One woman’s brother, “a serious man,” had let slip mention of clandestine naval operations offshore. Military sonar terrified whales. Oh no, its effects were physical. Thumped by infrasonic noise, whales bleed from their ears.
that marine impedimenta, as a category, had expanded across the early twenty-first century to draw in consumer goods and the refuse of terrestrial agriculture in manifold forms.
Because whales are so well insulated by their thick layer of blubber, they attract fat-soluble toxicants, absorbing molecular heavy metals and inorganic compounds that comprise pesticides, fertilizers, and other pollutants that have come to powder the modern sea.
Fractional exposure builds up over multiple seasons, making some whales more polluted than their environment. Which is so different to how we conceive of pollution ordinarily, I think, as pervading a landscape or being an atmosphere through which, and within which, animals move—each loaded with less malignancy than their surroundings.
Estuarine beluga in Canada had been discovered to be so noxious that their carcasses were classed as toxic waste for disposal.
Scientists declared Earth’s most toxified animals to be killer whales living in Washington’s Puget Sound—a
prey. Being surface breathers, whales also inhale airborne carcinogens, including cadmium, chromium, and nickel, emitted by the world’s refineries and chrome-plating factories.
The threat comes when a whale begins to starve and its body reverts to ketosis—breaking down blubber for energy in the absence of food. Released back into the bloodstream, stored toxins then cease to be dormant.
The humpbacks seen from Australia’s coastline carry lower accumulations of synthetic chemicals compared to whales that live, year-round,
Stranded whales, too, often undergo ketosis. The sublethal impacts of even low levels of industrial pollutants on a whale’s health, and behavior, are poorly studied, being difficult to monitor.
discovered that these widely used, artificial compounds—eventually extracted, at scale, from coal tar—were first engineered by chemists as isolates from gases rendered out of whale oil. This was during the era when whales were a global commodity and a proto-energy industry—their fat sheared off by whalers and distilled to light lamps, grease machines, process textiles, and fuel the late stages of the industrial revolution. What a cruel and intimate historical loop: whale bodies provided the base chemistry from which the precursors to PCBs were extracted, and now, so many decades later, the
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Female whales shed some of their toxicity to their calves: during pregnancy, through the placenta, and then in their uncommonly creamy milk. The firstborn calf, most of all, arrives seeded with iotas of human industry because it is subject to the mother’s lifetime load; subsequent calves benefit from the birth of the first as though it were a kind of live sequestration.
This whale’s body serves as an accounting of the legacies of industry and culture that have not only escaped the limits of our control but now lie outside the range of our sensory perception and, perhaps even more worryingly, beyond technical quantification. We struggle to understand the sprawl of our impact, but there it is, within one cavernous stomach: pollution, climate, animal welfare, wildness, commerce, the future, and the past. Inside the whale, the world.
If whales that expire mid-ocean are not washed into the shallows by the wind and tides, their massive bodies eventually sink and simultaneously decompose on the descent. This disintegration is called a whalefall.
A dead whale slips below the depth where epipelagic foragers can feed from it. The whale’s mushy body decelerates as it drops, and, where pressure compounds, putrefying gases build up in its softening tissues. It drifts past fish that no longer look like anything we might call fish but resemble instead bottled fireworks, reticulated rigging, and musical instruments turned inside out. The whale enters the abyssopelagic zone. No light has ever shone here, for so long as the world has had water. Entering permanent darkness, the whale passes beyond the range of diurnal time. Purblind hagfish
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Some of the organisms that materialize on the whale are called “fugitive species.” Some live nowhere else but in dead whales, and a few are so specialized they thrive only within the remains of a single cetacean species.
So the death of a whale proves meaningful to a vibrant host of dependent creatures, even as it may look senseless from the shore.
Whales are conscious breathers, which means they have to remember to do it. The whale’s eye—the color of midnight, mid-ocean—had no eyelashes and, according to another wildlife officer, no tear ducts
