A remarkable new study of how whales behaved when attacked by humans in the 19th century has implications for the way they react to changes caused by humans in the 21st century.
The article, published by the Royal Society on Wednesday, is authored by Hal Whitehead and Luke Rendell, prominent scientists working with cetaceans, and Tim D Smith, a data scientist, and his research addresses an age-old question: whether whales are so smart, why did they wait to be killed? The answer? They did not.
Using recently digitized logbooks detailing sperm whaling in the North Pacific, the authors found that, in just a few years, the whaling harpoon attack rate has dropped 58%. This simple fact leads to a surprising conclusion: the information about what was happening to them was being shared collectively among the whales, who made vital changes in their behavior. As their culture made the first fatal contact with ours, they learned quickly from their mistakes.
“Sperm whales have a traditional way of responding to orca attacks,” notes Hal Whitehead, who spoke to the Guardian from his home overlooking the ocean in Dalhousie, Nova Scotia, where he teaches. Before humans, orcas were their only predators, against which sperm whales form defensive circles, their powerful tails extended outward to keep their attackers at bay. But these techniques “just made it easier for whalers to shoot them down,” says Whitehead.
It was a frighteningly quick death and accompanied other threats to the ironically named Pacific. From whaling stations and seals to missionary bases, Western culture was imported into an ocean that remained largely untouched. Like Herman Melville, himself a whaler in the Pacific in 1841, he would write in Moby-Dick (1851): “The debatable point is whether Leviathan can withstand such a long persecution and such relentless devastation for a long time.”
Sperm whales are highly socialized animals, capable of communicating over great distances. They join clans defined by the dialect pattern of their sonar clicks. Their culture is matrilineal, and information about the new dangers may have been transmitted in the same way that whale matriarchs share knowledge about eating areas. Sperm whales also have the largest brain on the planet. It is not difficult to imagine that they understood what was happening to them.
The hunters themselves saw the whales’ efforts to escape. They saw that the animals seemed to communicate the threat within their attacked groups. Abandoning their usual defensive formations, the whales swam against the wind to escape the hunters’ ships, themselves driven by the wind. “This was a cultural evolution, very fast for genetic evolution,” says Whitehead.
And, in turn, it evokes another irony. Now, when whales are beginning to recover from industrial destruction by 20th century whaling fleets – whose steamships and grenade harpoons no whale could escape from – they face new threats created by our technology. “They are having to learn not to be hit by ships, to deal with the depredations of longline fishing, the change in the source of their food due to climate change,” says Whitehead. Perhaps the greatest modern danger is noise pollution, from which they can do nothing to escape.
Whitehead and Randall wrote persuasively about whale culture, expressed in localized feeding techniques as whales adapt to varying sources, or in subtle changes in humpback singing, the meaning of which remains mysterious. The same kind of urgent social learning that animals experienced in the whale wars of two centuries ago is reflected in the way they negotiate today’s uncertain world and what we have done with it.
As Whitehead notes, whale culture is many millions of years older than ours. We may need to learn from them in the same way that they learned from us. After all, it was the whales that provoked Melville to his prophecies at Moby-Dick. “We consider the whale to be immortal in its species, although perishable as an individual,” he wrote, “and if the world ever gets flooded again … then the eternal whale will still survive and … its sparkling challenge will blow up into the skies.”