Fathoms: The World in the Whale

by Rebecca Giggs

That was how I first learned about the sperm whale, washed up dead on the Spanish coastline with a greenhouse—an entire greenhouse—in its belly. In the flattened greenhouse—from a hydroponics business in Almería—were enclosed tarps, hosepipes and ropes, flowerpots, a spray canister, and bits of synthetic burlap. It had once sheltered off-season tomatoes, grown for export to Britain. High winds likely collapsed the structure, bundling it from dry land into the ocean. Flash flooding and storms of eerie, unexpected power were gaining in the region, known as the “salad bowl” of Europe. An inventory of the animal’s gut itemized other indigestible objects too; alarmingly, goods of comfort and leisure. In addition to the greenhouse, the sperm whale had swallowed parts of a mattress, a coat hanger, a “dishwater plastic pot,” and an ice-cream tub.

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 place starfish were presently being rent apart by a disease that induced their arms to crawl off their bodies (“Some locations saw complete mortality of sea stars,” reported The Seattle Times).

Baleens were hardened into police nightsticks as well as the thin classroom canes that raised welts on bad children’s palms (from which the phrase “to whale on” is derived).

Near the turn of the century, a medical hotel for therapeutic “whale cures” sprung up in Eden, on the south coast of New South Wales. The greases and gases of a whale’s decomposition were thought, by many residents and people in the surrounding region, to alleviate fatigue and rheumatism, and to remedy accompanying mental maladies. People with chronic pain and ill mood traveled to Eden to spend weeks bathing inside dead whales and their extractions.

Yet from 1900 to 1999, an estimated three million cetaceans were killed and removed from the world’s oceans—more whales than had been hauled in all previous centuries. Scientists estimate the total biomass of baleen whales found in the sea surrounding Antarctica was reduced by 85 percent. In 1960, whales had become the single most valuable animal on the planet, worth USD$30,000 each (close to USD$260,000 in today’s money).

Whale oil proved elemental to the glycerol used for nitroglycerine in explosive munitions in World War I, and was also used to stave off gangrenous trench foot. A single British battalion has been estimated to have gone through ten gallons of whale oil every day.

In mid-2010, a group of scientists from Flinders University in Adelaide published a remarkable set of findings. 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.

Each whale has been calculated to be worth more than a thousand trees in terms of carbon absorption. The Guardian’s George Monbiot has called large cetaceans “a benign form of geo-engineering.”

A study conducted by the Institute for Capacity Development in the International Monetary Fund (IMF) found that increasing phytoplankton productivity by just 1 percent would have the same effect as the sudden appearance of two billion mature trees.

Krill populations have already declined by 80 percent since the 1970s—suggesting, to scientists, that krill are significantly dependent on ice-fixed algae over free-floating plankton and other bits of pelagic detritus they consume.

There are bowheads on record living to 211 years. Bicentenary mammals. In 1992, a bowhead killed off Utqiaġvik, Alaska, was stripped of its exterior blubber to reveal a deep tract of scar tissue, in the terminus of which was concealed a stone harpoon tip. The whale’s wound had healed over the shrapnel long ago—evidence of a weapon used by indigenous whalers up until the 1880s, when metal tips introduced by Soviet whalers replaced hand-chipped blades of flint and slate. Other bowheads have also been found with stone points in their blubber. One had a fragment of a lance from a shoulder-mounted gun, shot last in around 1890. Another bowhead carried a piece of walrus ivory from a traditional spear. Yet another contained a whaling iron that could be tracked back to a specific Yankee whaling vessel.

report commissioned by the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) declared 60 percent of vertebrate life—mammals, birds, fish, and reptiles—had disappeared off the face of the Earth since 1970. French biologists estimated 130,000 species (including invertebrates, excluding sea creatures) were already gone. The UN said marine pollution had increased tenfold since 1980, and a million species now inched toward extinction. The total earthly biomass of wild mammals dropped 82 percent. Comparatively, the biomass of agricultural species soared: 70 percent of all the birds on the planet were revealed to be poultry. Livestock (cows and pigs) now made up 60 percent of all Earth’s mammals.

It wasn’t that all the insects had become roadkill but rather that inadvertently killing them with our vehicles had once made their sheer abundance visible. The insect eradications were the result of multiple interacting causes: herbicides and pesticides, habitat loss, shifting and intemperate seasons. Yet even as nature was breaking (maybe because nature was breaking), people’s emotional connection to nature intensified. Hiking and mountaineering associations in Europe implored visitors to stop scattering the ashes of their loved ones on famous peaks, because the phosphorus and calcium of so many incinerated bodies had changed the soil chemistry on which fragile high-altitude plants depended. In the shallow oceans some fourteen thousand tons of sunscreen was thought to have rinsed off sightseeing snorkelers and divers, contributing to the collapse of reefs. (Common ingredients in sunblock had been discovered to cause coral bleaching at very low concentrations.) The rush to see reefs still neon and jumpy had inadvertently sped up their decline.

The cairns, as it turned out, were found to disrupt bird nesting grounds, to dislocate populations of inching invertebrates, and cause soil erosion. In England, stone stacking resulted in the piecemeal dismantling of certain heritage-protected walls that had stood, undisturbed, since the Early Neolithic. Documenting a hike, in the information age, had the power to erode the landmarks that made it distinctive. An ancient culture, a minor nature, pillaged for the construction materials of a new photographic tradition.

When I thought about the small screens through which this glossy nature was encountered, I also thought, again, about the “windshield phenomenon”—how the vanishing of the insects became evident when you recognized the legion of bugs you, yourself, hadn’t dispatched with your car. What had been killed, indirectly by pollution and climate change, had ceased to be only within your immediate sphere of action—the kill space extended out in front of you, and behind you, for miles, and for years. Even after hours of driving you could still see the horizon clearly. There was no mess. The insectless future you approached lay, chillingly clear, up ahead.

During the making of the golden records, Sagan insisted that there should be no sounds or images of war scored into them. “A love song,” he said. Yet the biophony inscribed onto those metal plates—not only a humpback’s call, but, further on, the polytonal music of insects, amphibians, birds, and an elephant’s trumpeting—all this feels, today, like evidence of an ongoing conflict. That which was meant to manifest the axiom of astral travel, “We come in peace,” now transmits so many creatures under siege. It is a sonic archive of what stands to be lost, and, in some instances, that which is already diminished, muffled, or stilled. What stays with me most of all is a line President Jimmy Carter wrote for the golden records, which reads: We are attempting to survive our time, so we may live into yours.

Less reassuring is the following hypothesis: the whales may not need to waste energy being so loud because sound waves travel farther in oceans made acidic by the absorption of carbon dioxide. In time, if escalating acidity goes unchecked, the sea’s new biochemistry will also amplify and extend low-frequency noises generated by mechanical activity: construction, fishing, sonar, resource extraction—compounding our noise, to create ever greater crescendos in the world’s coastal shallows, and the mid-depths. So the sea will grow to be a louder place not only because the human bustle within it is multiplying, but also because, as a medium for conveying sound, the sea itself is becoming a better magnifier of noise, permitting certain sound waves to travel further. It is as though some forgotten god on the seafloor were, twitch by twitch, turning up the volume dial to account for their advancing deafness.

Recent monitoring of Antarctic blue whales has shown that, during the austral summer, their pitch rises again. The whales increasingly have to use their most forceful forte volume to be heard amid the cracking ice (a natural sound, amplified by unnatural processes as rising temperatures exacerbate ice melt). So the impacts of a warming climate may modulate animal sounds even in remote places where no ships go, where barely any humans subsist, and where the most thunderous notes come from the clatter of breaking ice. As we adapt our storytelling to the conditions of a transforming biosphere, whales likewise are called to modify the qualities of their dispatches, in line with this new reality.

Perhaps the most concrete example of people retuning the voices of whales can be found in the story of Noc, the beluga who sounded like a man. Noc’s name was given to him by the Inuit hunters who aided in his capture—it alluded to the tiny stinging flies, colloquially known as “no-see-ums,” that still appear on hotter days where Noc was born. Netted as a two-year-old calf off the northern coast of Manitoba in 1977, Noc lived for twenty-three years under the remit of a US Navy surveillance and retrieval program called “Cold Ops,” based out of San Diego Bay, in which beluga were trained to respond to hand signals and spoken commands in the open ocean. Along with dolphins and seals, the navy deployed beluga whales for reconnaissance, to identify aquatic mines, and to recover inert torpedoes for reuse. When not in training, or tasked to an operation, the whales and dolphins were housed in enclosures adjacent to one another. It wasn’t until thirteen years after his death (from meningitis, in 1999), that a recording of Noc’s voice became renowned online.