Fathoms: The World in the Whale

by Rebecca Giggs

whale carcasses that were too decayed to be portioned for human consumption were sold to fur farms. Arctic foxes, chinchilla, mink, and sable grew glossy on whale, before being slaughtered for garments.

Did people know it then, the moment when the oceans ceased to be infinite?

The pivot from whaling as an extractive industry to whales as heralds of a conservation ethic may seem, in retrospect, an unprecedented triumph—but

For activists, there was leverage in the fact that as whales vanished, their charisma intensified—the public’s enchantment with whales grew at the threshold of their disappearance.

For many ordinary people, joining anti-whaling marches meant participating in a globalized environmental citizenry that had never, before, been imaginable. They were called to be responsible for something they rarely, if ever, beheld: an icon of no nation, but of the planet at large.

the existence of whales shored up reserves of emotion associated with meeting nature on its most expansive dimensions: emotions like awe, humility, wonder.

Whaling, an ecologically untenable industry, was not suppressed by the invisible hand of the market as alternatives to its use became viable—rather, it continued long after it had ceased to be advantageously economic. Our expectation that renewable energy sources will, as a matter of course, supplant fossil fuels by function of expediency runs counter to this history.

Cave painting is an accretive practice, layering pigment over rock, but the making of a petroglyph is subtractive; inch by inch, rock matter has been chinked away. What a petroglyph fundamentally consists of is: a gap. That the effect of a petroglyph is to recall the form of an animal—that it creates the apprehension of a presence—is a mental feat, for a petroglyph is an artwork made out of absence.

What presences are left, after something ...

like an avant-garde literature made exclusively from punctuation, they sustain no recoverable narrative.

The aftershocks of whaling clearly reverberated in terrestrial and aquatic environments, but perhaps even more bizarrely, we now know that whaling altered the air and changed Earth’s atmosphere.

They had confirmed that the activity of one species of deep-diving whale—the sperm whale—significantly and quantifiably affected the composition of atmospheric gases worldwide. Later studies found that the same was true of humpbacks.

Whales function as nutrient “pumps” in the sea by feeding at depth on squid and krill, and then releasing fecal plumes—long, flocculent excretions, typically orange in color—at a shallower level. In this way large whales move great volumes of organic matter from unstirred or slow-moving lower waters up to the more rapidly mixing photic layers.

(Whales seem not to defecate down where they feed, likely because the higher pressure requires them to shut down ...

plankton absorb carbon dioxide and emit oxygen on a planetary scale. Over time they are smattered and egested by zooplankton and fish larvae, dying microscopically, expansively, to sprinkle through the ocean’s interior as sediment (marine snow).

the circulation of plankton, is thought to currently account for the absorption and displacement of roughly half the carbon dioxide produced by the burning of fossil fuels—a greater proportion than is sequestered by rainforests and by all other land-based vegetation combined.

Each whale has been calculated to be worth more than a thousand trees in terms of carbon absorption.

Stand ankle-deep on the beach at night, and you hear them. That is, you hear the whales breathing.

The descendants of those humpbacks that have since returned are now the foundation of several ecotourism ventures.

Legally, the tour is permitted to get within 330 feet, after which the skipper is obliged to cut the engines and wait to see if the whales are inquisitive enough to nudge closer.

Eden’s longtime tour operators trade on speculation that humpbacks know their boats by color and shape; rumor has it the whales not only remember specific watercraft, but express interest in, even affection for, some vessels over others. “Mugging” is the word the crew use for when whales approach of their own volition.

Dorsal-ventral coloration moderates sunburn and helps to camouflage the humpback from any animal eyes, looking up into the light-filtered sea from below.

humpbacks inhabit the waters off New England and a range of marine environments beyond.

Almost all humpbacks travel with the seasons, with the exception of one population found in the Arabian Sea.

Some cetacean species stay bonded as lifelong, familial pods, but at either end of the Earth the humpbacks are inclined to come together in social assemblages that are periodic and circumstantial, before migrating alone, as pairs or, rarely, in triads.

The humpbacks’ throats are furrowed into wide folds that expand, as the bellows of an accordion do, when the whales lunge to seize upon their squirming prey—they then strain the water out, catching the krill on the inward fibers of their baleens. Pack hunters, the humpbacks will sometimes send a hoop of bubbles up from below to cluster the krill together.

Electronic tagging of humpbacks has revealed that during feeding the animals roll preferentially toward the left or right (their dextral or sinistral side); like us, humpbacks are left- or right-“handed.”

Krill sometimes move into open water as round, roiling balls, thirty thousand thick.

Krill can collect in formations so numerous, they are visible from the upper atmosphere.

Ecologically, krill matter most as biomass and the basis of a polar food web. There are many more krill on the planet than any other animal; some four hundred trillion individuals.

They also consume the vast vegetable that is algae: an inverted, inch-thick pasture, thatching the ice, which the krill both graze on and huddle in with their larvae. Krill are a faunal tide within the sea.

These animals will travel more than six thousand miles in the course of their annual migration: elsewhere, humpbacks go even further, taking round trips of nearly ten thousand miles (equivalent to double the length of Africa, north to south). Knowledge of a migratory path is passed from parent to offspring—how, exactly, isn’t known—but a whale’s solitary orientation in the open ocean still demands innermost feats of navigation.

In the whales’ forebrains, or in cells in their eyes, particles are thought to draw to geomagnetic fields—a faculty not visual or tactile, but nonetheless sensory, and which likely aids in their migration.

The whales come to these shallower, coastal seas to breed and give birth at a time during winter when their main food source near Antarctica is depleted and tricky to obtain beneath the widening ice.

A female humpback matures at between five and seven years old, after which time she is capable of bearing a single calf every third year or so. She gestates for eleven months.

humpbacks feed their young on pink milk. Pink, as an indirect result of their rosy diet of krill. Around one hundred gallons per day, and ropy, on account of the milk being close to 50 percent fat. (Q: How does whale milk taste? A: More or less, it would taste of butter.) Humpback whales have no lips to speak of—their mouths have hard edges—so the calves are thought to curl their tongues into long, dexterous funnels, with which to suckle. On the return leg of their migration many calves sport roughened and blistered snouts from the friction of attempting to stay latched beneath their mothers.

adult humpbacks eat hardly anything during their migration.

The whales grow lean, then skinny on their return journey. At the last, they’re starving: their body size whittled down by close to a third.

I notice jellyfish. So many, splattered into the sea all around, as if dropped from great heights. Primordial things. Too soft to be harmed by the hull, they are the color of tea. Theirs are some of the planet’s earliest eyes: simple ocelli, capable of perceiving light, though little else. The first things with faces were only faces, I think, looking at these jellies, gelatinous like beauty masks, scrolling past the boat.

e e e e e go the prawns—animals that fit snugly into the printed vowel of their sound.

Ros reminds us the migratory whale species can also be identified by their spouting (not jets of water but geysers of steam speckled with nasal moisture: the condensation of breath heated in the whale’s lungs).

What environment was ever more shielded from our collective imagination than the underside of the sea surrounding Antarctica? Unlit omnisphere, far-fetched.

A void. The Southern Ocean is galactically dark.

We have come to be put in touch with a vaster world, one that exceeds human dwelling—if not human influence. We long to make contact with a wildness without.

We ache to meet the limit of the human world, and to look past it.

People once feared there was a terrible, existential emptiness in the ocean, an unpeopled and unending openness. In antiquity, cartographers populated the seaward frontiers of their maps with drolleries.

medieval mapmakers used drolleries both to enclose the known world and to indicate where nautical knowledge gave way before a front of myth.

we fear that there is no void, no part of the planet untouched. This fear intensifies on hearing of, among other obscenities, debris fields in the deeps, where tresses of plastic shopping bags are picked over by pallid, flea-sized amphipods (the only ghouls so versatile).

Our hunch is that what lurks beyond the end of the mapped territory now is neither a host of exotic drolleries, nor large, enchanting wildlife—there, instead, lies the dross of our everyday lives. A haunted house never inhabited but nonetheless built by our hands. This loss of containment destabilizes not just how we see nature but also our sense of self. Were we the monsters of trespass, all along, closing down the dominion of the wild?

That the whales themselves were, very nearly, relics, is key to their spectacle, and the breadth of their appeal.