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A whale warrants pause—be it for amazement or for mourning. Its appearance, and its disappearance, are significant.
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.
a whalefall. Afloat at the beginning, they are pecked at by seabirds, fish, swimming crabs, and sharks attracted by scent trails.
Carrion eaters debride the underside of the carcass.
This part takes weeks, a month.
Deceased sperm whales will hang off the oil-filled chambers contained in their huge, blocky heads at the surface longer than most, though they are one of the largest and heaviest types of whales.
A dead whale slips below the depth where epipelagic foragers can feed from it.
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.
The only sound is the scrunch of unseen brittle stars, eating one another alive. Slowly. It is very cold. Hell’s gelid analogue on Earth. The hagfish rise to meet the carcass and tunnel in, lathering the passages they make with mucus. They absorb nutrients right through their skin.
The whale body reaches a point where the buoyancy of its meat and organs is only tethered by the force of its falling bones. Methane is released in minuscule bubbles. The ballooning mass scatters skin and sodden flesh below it, upon which grows a carpet of white worms waving upward, like grass on its grave.
the entire whale skeleton will suddenly burst through the cl...
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For a time, the skeleton might stay hitched to its parachute of muscle; a macabre marionette, jinking at th...
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The body is likely to settle far deeper than the depths to which any living whale will ever descend.
It is as though the whale were a piñata cracked open, flinging bright treasures. On the body gather coin-size mussels, lucinid clams, limpets, and crepitating things that live off sulphate. More than two hundred different species can occupy the frame of one whale carcass.
the Osedax—Latin for “bone devourer.”
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. Others are found, very occasionally, at hydrothermal vents or around briny cold seeps on the seafloor—spots where life on Earth is theorized to have first begun,
(if the larval can be said to be hopeful)
One estimate holds that there may be as many as 690,000 whalefalls coming undone at this very moment. Over half a million dead whales lying on Earth’s basement floor, jiggling with life.
the death of a whale proves meaningful to a vibrant host of dependent creatures, even as it may look senseless from the shore.
How little is yet known about the wildness that attends the whale, I realized, and how well the world is built to work without us.
Nothing ends without adding vigor to the conditions under which new beginnings are conceived. No state is condemned to be changeless.
Whales are conscious breathers, which means they have to remember to do it.
it was harder yet to imagine if, and how, the animal characterized its suffering—whether it understood its injuries as a prelude to the end, being capable of anticipating that mortal moment.
I sensed the thin border between hospitality and hostility; how it wavered but held. Nature, as they say, would run its course. That was a phrase we trusted. We passed it back and forth, hand to hand, between each other. We pressed that line close and thought that, because we were humans, it might still be possible to be humane in ways other species couldn’t be.
Did we owe whales greater distance or more intervention?
The duty of awe was—wasn’t it—care?
People, I think, tend to devise death as a gradual loss of heat; the gleam retracted from every corner, pulled to a wick within, a guttering out. Evicted, the human body turns cold. The whale’s descent was different. The whale was burning up, but we could not see the fire.
I put one hand briefly on the skin of the humpback and felt its distant heartbeat, an electrical throbbing like a refrigerated truck, sealed tight.
Why we seek contact with animals, and what we believe they give to us:
Animals have different ways of living with, and within, nature, being equipped with faculties unlike our own and moved by impulses we cannot resolutely apprehend.
Yet in attempting to map the varieties of intelligence and ingenuity that make a home on this planet, we enchant ourselves to think that there are more dimensions to this world, and wilder ways to experience it, than we have the scope to fully comprehend.
In antiquity people corresponded with spirits that took animate form, spirits that came from other realms and dictated moral lessons. But what is most cryptic about animals in this moment, many people suspect, are things we cannot yet gauge about our own impacts on their habitats and their bodies.
What is at the heart of an animal, governing its behavior, may reveal itself in time not to be a compelling mystery but, instead, a shameful familiarity:
Our fear is that the unseen spirits that move in them are ours. Once more, animals are a moral force. We look to wild animals to see the history of our material intimacy with remote places and the outer edge of our compassion. We look to animals, too, to see how we might survive the world to come and how to cohabit with other creatures there.
responsive, cognitively sophisticated animals, perhaps even capable of configuring our relation to their social worlds.
geology, the most persevering canvas.
the desire to represent animals is a desire we share with no other animal.
Capturing the likeness of another creature implies an imaginative or emotional relationship that exceeds the exigencies of survival: the instinct to fear a predator, or an appetite that hungers after prey.
Many sacred, some secret, all the petroglyphs are culturally vital in the knowledge systems of Indigenous people.
goods. The Eora tell of ancestors twisting their feet in the fine beach sand to transform a squeaking dune into a towering amplifier, emitting sounds analogous to whale calls. Less a hunt than a trap, this was just one means to draw sick or injured cetaceans to strand—but whether a whale was enticed into the shallows by imitating its voice, or if, by happenstance, it was discovered beached, it was always a relished windfall.
In the Pacific Northwest—where tradition mandated a tribal whaler needed to dream the whale before it could be glimpsed awake—lances
to scour barnacles off their flanks on the shingle underwater (itself, a kind of tool use).
Gray whales have disappeared from seas around the Korean peninsula today, though the waters through which the species once migrated remain protected as a whale reserve. A refuge for ghosts. Which is to say, a refuge for hope.
a petroglyph denoted an intention to generate, or invite, change. A petroglyph spoke to the future.
Some petroglyphs tied families to animal species in relationships of obligation and reciprocity.
whaling could expand to become the first truly globalized extractive industry.
To impart a capacity for witness to the Balls Head whale, it has seen—though no eyes are etched into it—the largest cull of any animal order ever perpetrated by our kind.
the whale has been retouched, over and over, as it divides itself between visible and invisible realms.
whales loomed large in mythos and were often believed to have an adversarial or heroic character. Whale hunters were solemnized, having assumed the mantle of challenging volatile beasts in an inhospitable wavescape.
Whalers became technicians: their skill, less a function of dialing into the mysterious caprice of the whale and more a matter of adroitly wielding a new kind of metal weapon.
