of porpoises, river and ocean dolphins, beaked whales, orcas and sperm whales–feed on fish and squid. The mysticetes or moustached whales–of which there are at least fourteen species–filter their diet of plankton and smaller fish through their baleen.
The bizarre nature of baleen seems to underline the otherness of the whale–one that begins in the womb. Although mysticete fœtuses have teeth buds, these are resorbed into their jaws before being born, to be replaced by sprouts of fibrous protein called keratin, the same material that furnishes humans with their fingernails. These long flat slats form pliable plates which line their gums in a great horseshoe shape, smooth edges outwards. They are continually growing, and are teased into fringes at their extremities by the constant play of the animal’s tongue. Swallowing swimming pools of water–so greedily that they actually disarticulate their jaws to maximize their intake–baleen whales expand the ventral pleats in their bellies, then contract them to expel the surplus water and thereby catch their food in the bristles.
Toothed whales pursue their quarry through the ocean, fish by fish. Baleen whales are grazers and gulp mouthfuls at a time, from herring and sand eels to the tiny zooplankton which drift through the seas like animated dust. Here in the fertile waters of Cape Cod, it is the mysticetes that reign: from the elusive, relatively diminutive minke and the performing humpback, to the rotund right whale and the sleek fin whale–the second largest animal in the world, known as the greyhound of the sea, able to reach twenty knots or more.
After the blue whale, the finback, Balænoptera physalus, is also the loudest of any animal; and since sound travels further and faster through water, an American fin whale (if it cared about such things as nationalities) could be heard by its European counterpart on the other side of the Atlantic. Its mating call registers below the lowest level of human hearing; when it was first detected by scientists, they thought it was the noise of the ocean floor creaking. And in a few seconds, this immense creature–larger than any dinosaur–will pass beneath me. Lowering its broad, flattened snout, the whale dips below the keel in one imperceptible motion, as if powered by an invisible, silent motor.
There you stand…while beneath you and between your legs, as it were, swim the hugest monsters of the sea, even as ships once sailed between the boots of the famous Colossus at old Rhodes.
The Mast-Head, Moby Dick
In that one motion, my entire presence is undermined. I feel, rather than see, this eighty-foot animal swimming below. Knowing it is there tugs at my gut, and something inside makes me want to plunge in and dive with it to some unfathomable depth where no one would ever find us.
The finback completes its manœuvre, emerging on the larboard side to breathe; unlike humans, whales must make a conscious decision to respire, otherwise their dives would be impossible. With all the force of its massive lungs, it expels exhausted air with the pneumatic sound of a finger held over a bicycle pump. It is a profound exhalation, rather than a spout of sea water; a visible condensation, like human breath on a frosty morning.
From its organ valve nostrils, the whale shoots out one hundred gallons of air in a second, each cloudy discharge creating its own rainbow in the sun; then it repeats the process again and again, charging its body with oxygen until it is ready to dive once more, an act of internal transformation. Collapsing its lungs–a special mucus prevents the organs sticking together–and folding in its ribs along joints on the sides of the body, all remaining air is driven into ‘dead spaces’ within the whale’s skull. This technique, and the lack of nitrogen in its bloodstream and air in its bones, prevents the animal from suffering the bends. More subtle than any submarine, the whale is a miracle of marine engineering.
With a last plosive whoosh as it fills its lungs, the finback shoots out a mixture of air and salt water and a little whale phlegm, its shiny blowholes closing in an airlock as it prepares to dive. The spume hits my face like a fishy atomizer. I have been breathed upon, and it feels like a baptism.
It is difficult not to address whales in romantic terms. I have seen grown men cry when they see their first whale. And while it is a mistake to anthropomorphize animals merely because they are big or small or cute or clever, it is only human to do so, because we are human, and they are not. It is sometimes the only way we can come to an understanding of them.
Nothing else represents life on such a scale. Seeing a whale is not like seeing a sparrow in a city tree, or a cat crossing the street. It is not even like seeing a giraffe, dawdling on the African veldt, batting its glamorous eyes in the dust. Whales exist beyond the normal, beyond what we expect to see in our daily lives. They are not so much animal as geographical; if they did not move, it would be difficult to believe they were alive at all. In their size–their very construction–they are antidotes to our lives lived in uncompromising cities. Perhaps that’s why I was so affected by seeing them at this point in my life: I was ready to witness whales, to believe in them. I had come looking for something, and I had found it.
Here was an animal close to me as a living creature–one that shared my heart and lungs, my mammalian qualities–but which at the same time was possessed of a supernatural physicality. Whales are visible markers of the ocean life we cannot see; without them, the sea might as well be empty for all we know. Yet they are entirely mutable, dreamlike because they exist in another world, because they look like we feel as we float in our dreams. Perhaps, without our projections, they would be merely another species, another of God’s creation (although, of course, some might say that’s just another projection in itself). Nevertheless, we imbue whales with the improbability of their continued existence, and ours. We are terrestrial, earthbound, dependent on limited senses. Whales defy gravity, occupy other dimensions; they live in a medium that would overwhelm us, and which far exceeds our own earthly sway. They are Linnæan-classified aliens following invisible magnetic fields, seeing through sound and hearing through their bodies, moving through a world we know nothing about. They are animals before the Fall, innocent of sin.
But they also have bad breath, and shit reddish water. They eat day and night without discretion. They are super-sized animals, ‘charismatic megafauna’ in the zoologists’ dismissive phrase. They cannot, like the old joke, be weighed at a whale weigh-station, although they once were placed on scales in pieces, like legs of lamb. Out of their element, they collapse under their own weight, lacking limbs to support themselves, pathetically incapable of self-preservation despite, or because of, their great size. (One soon runs out of superlatives when writing about whales.) For all their physical reality, they cannot be encompassed, or even easily described. We may stand around in awe and pick apart their carcases, but in the end all we are left with to show for our curiosity are bones which give little clue to the true shape of their living owners.
Whales existed before man, but they have been known to us only for two or three generations: until the invention of underwater photography, we hardly knew what they looked like. It was only after we had seen the Earth from orbiting spaceships that the first free-swimming whale was photographed underwater. The first underwater film of sperm whales, off the coast of Sri Lanka, was not taken until 1984; our images of these huge placid creatures moving gracefully and silently through the ocean are more recent than the use of personal computers. We knew what the world looked like before we knew what the whale looked like. Even now there are beaked whales, or ziphiids, known only from bones washed up on remote beaches–esoteric, deep-sea animals with strange markings which biologists have never seen alive or dead, so little studied that their status is ‘data deficient’. New cetaceans are still being identified in the twenty-first century, and we would do well to remember that the world harbours animals bigger than ourselves, which we have yet to see; that not everything is catalogued and claimed and digitalized. That in the oceans great whales swim unnamed by man.
In December 2004, the New York Times reported on the publication of an obscure scientific paper. Twelve Years of Tracking 52-Hz Whale Calls From a Unique Source in the North Pacific was the result of research on a whale cruising from California to the Aleutian Islands off Alaska, ‘calling out with a voice unlike any other whale’s, and getting no response’.
‘The call, possibly a mating signal, suggests that the animal lives in total, and undesired, isolation.’ The sound had been tracked for more than a decade, and in that