Fathoms: The World in the Whale

by Rebecca Giggs

such a marvel was the animal, that hope proved difficult to quash.

While in the ocean, the whale’s blubber insulates it and allows the animal to maintain a constant inner temperature. Out of the ocean, the blubber smothers it.

By sunrise, a part of the whale that ought not to be outside of it was outside of it.

Swept slantwise, shallow waves smoothed, oversmoothed, smoothed.

Seagulls flew down to peck avian hieroglyphs in the whale’s back, their inscriptions legible to yet more skyward gulls that dove to elaborate the wounds. At every nip the whale flinched, still intensely alive.

The whale’s central nervous system was so large and complex, he explained, that euthanizing it in the manner that one might kill a cow or an old horse was impossible. A bolt through the brain would take too long for the heart to register it. A shock to the heart wouldn’t transmit immediate death to the brain. Exsanguination (opening the animal’s arteries and leaving it to bleed out) could take many hours.

whale’s body as a sort of setting in which dying could take place at multiple sites, over different durations. The animal, alive on a great scale, didn’t die in an instant. Only parts of it did.

Another humpback, found dead nearby, a few seasons hence, cost $188,000 Australian dollars (AUD) to remove.

If administered, the fatal chemicals would linger in the humpback’s carcass long after death, and imperil the survival, too, of any scavenger that came to dismantle the whale and gather what could be picked off the bones.

what instinctively feels like compassion toward one creature can prove poisonous in the orbit of small and smaller organisms left lying out on the beach after we leave.

After death, the whale’s putrefaction would generate yet more heat, scorching its bones and turning its organs black within the tight bind of its innards. If no one cut the body open, it might explode. Other whales had before. Gases puff up cavities inside the carcass, straining against the fat.

the heaviest bones lay in the whale’s topside; the big, leaden vertebrae, its ribs thickest where they met the spine. Buoyant in the ocean, it was no problem for the whale to be built this way. Even diving to great pressure, its weight distribution didn’t trouble it. On land, though, its largest bones exerted a downward force on the animal’s soft underside, causing crush injuries we couldn’t see.

“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.

At least a third of those rescued promptly returned to the sand and died.

Such an abundance: three hundred and twenty whales. An event like that you couldn’t help but see as sacrificial or ominous. Malevolent even, in the way of a curse long since passed into rumor, carrying over to afflict a successive generation.

Many of these animals died soon after they emerged from the ocean or kept on restranding with a seemingly fatalistic zeal; others, having been pulled out into the shallows, turned fast and purposeful for open waters. Biologists could not identify any discernible difference between the whales that insisted on survival and those that gave in and collapsed.

Offered in candor, these theories were nonetheless conspiratorial, being premised on the assumption that deeper streams of logic undercut the frail authority of science,

Their loyalty was to the unverifiable hunch, to intuited patterns of allegory, augury, or plot. As if the whale itself, in its fleshly presence, testified to hitherto unplumbed dimensions of reality.

Her fury wasn’t dignified. It was incandescent.

Brought down before its time, the humpback vouchsafed, however tacitly, the existence of other phenomena beyond our ken.

Instead, I found myself scrolling through a list of quotidian conveniences, overlooked residues and debris; a spill of lowly, forgotten things, sundry as junk mail.

The banality of household items belied their potential for a gruesome afterlife.

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.

The body of a whale is a magnifier for these chemicals, both because cetaceans live a long time and because many species accrue a toxic ballast from the organisms they consume.

Whales also lack a key gene that, in land-living mammals, functions akin to an antioxidant to neutralize low concentrations of organophosphate—run off from croplands and collected by the animals’ tissues—and, unlike some seabirds, whales cannot shunt chemical burdens into feathers to be shed during a molt. Fractional exposure bu...

To view animals as pollution is both worrisome and novel.

Being surface breathers, whales also inhale airborne carcinogens, including cadmium, chromium, and nickel, emitted by the world’s refineries and chrome-plating factories. The biggest cetacean species possess Earth’s most colossal lungs, and draw the planet’s deepest breaths.

They sometimes hold that air for record lengths of

time, beyond two hours. Subject to depth pressure underwater, abundant oxygen is pressed out of the respiratory system to saturate whales’ muscles—making them especially prone...

I took it for granted that the quantity of pollution afflicting any animal depended only on the chemical profile of its environment (and not how its body functioned to soak up and stockpile the poison).

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.

Polychlorinated biphenyls, PCBs—once used in coolants, concrete, paint, light bulbs, and electrical capacitors—are persistent compounds that, having entered the ocean through stormwater and waste, can take many decades to break down into benign molecules. Though these substances were phased out by governments in the 1970s and ’80s, PCBs have remained durable in the ecosystem. One site where they have intensified is within the bodies of killer whales––iconic, black-and-white whales, apex predators also known as orca. Research models released in 2018 foretold that all killer whale populations offshore from nations that had used PCBs would die out in thirty to fifty years.

From a detailed article on the development of PCBs and other benzenes, I 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.

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

legacy elements of these substances came to rest and accumulate in the living animals.

The whale as landfill. It was a metaphor, and...

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 benef...

Oceans bank the emanations of manufacturing long after laws and technologies improve, or our industries move on to more efficient, less noxious methods of fabrication.

In this way, the past is as unevenly distributed as the future.

Though the qualities that primed plastic for home amenity hadn’t materially changed, having departed the orbit of human use to tumble through the world as waste, plastic was recategorized a pollutant. From “consumable” to indigestible.

each mundane commodity on the shop floor, however nontoxic, called you to envision not just any pollution spawned by its manufacture but the pollution that it, itself, might in time become.

transmitting even to unborn animals, untouched by any environment outside their mothers’ interiors (this, the curse skipping a generation). Having never opened their eyes and as yet unbreathing, these fetal animals nonetheless bore the trace of our terrestrial past on a cellular level—more so, even, than their immediate ancestors: those animals exposed to the pollution at the time it was generated.

Greenland’s Inuit women, who seasonally consume whale meat, whale skin, and fat as traditional food, had been warned off eating beluga during pregnancy and advised to stop nursing their babies altogether. Their mammary tissues had become a locus of concentration for the chemical by-products from the whales, because the composition of human breasts, being spongy and replete with estrogen receptors,

make these body parts prone to act as dumping grounds for many types of transportable chemicals. The Inuit women may live in some of the most isolated and least industrialized regions on the planet, but sustaining themselves on whales had turned their bodies into habitats of contamination. According to the BBC’s Planet Earth: The Future (2006): “If her milk was in containers other than her breasts, she would not be allowed to take it over state lines.”

Seascape—the obsession of a golden age of painting, and once the saturnine vista with which to dramatize the psyche—had since

reverted to kitsch: a mixed-media project, churning found objects. Every thing a foreigner in its own home. What was lost, if you took the time to think about it, was the timelessness the sea had always stood for.

Word had it that the seawater itself had begun to acidify: a change too subtle to taste, smell, or touch, but staged across the breadth of oceans in tandem with rising carbon dioxide (CO2). As the oceans took in more CO2 from the air, their baseline chemistry shifted. Marine acidification verified what seemed a very ancient fear: that even as what was coming on promised to assume the dimensions of a vast and totalizing phase shift, it unfurled presently, on a mo...

How hungry we were, now, for awe! Whales elicited our smallness set against the largess of nature: they proved nature’s sovereignty and its resilience. Whales gave people cause to reflect, too, that governments had been known to be benevolent, that industries could be restrained, and that the protection of wonderment was a value

shared across the planet. So it was that whale watching surfaced feelings of humility and mastery both, for though it was humbling to be faced with such astonishing animals, that whales existed at all was due to past endeavors thwarting their extinction.