Being Whale

Back in April, I heard Canadian whale biologist Shane Gero, who has spent thousands of hours in the company of sperm whales, speak about how culture was fundamental to these deeply social marine mammals.

“Sperm whales are sperm whales across the globe, but how they learn to live their lives is very different, in the same way as some of us learn to use chopsticks and some of us learn to use forks,” Gero said. Sperm whale clans — whose cultural differences are reflected in their various dialects — “are the largest, culturally defined, cooperative groups outside of humanity,” he said. And since they’ve been around for longer than we humans have been walking upright, “their stories are deeper than ours.”

His words stuck with me as we worked on this issue’s cover story, “Captain Joy’s Last Voyage”, about a whaler and his chronicles. Joy’s logbooks clinically describe the habits of whales, but what horror stories, I wonder, does the collective memory of these ancient beings hold about us humans?

We have massacred sperm whales up and down the oceans over two extended whaling periods: between the early 1700s and late 1800s, when whalers under sail killed around 300,000 individuals; and through much of the twentieth century, when, using diesel engines and exploding harpoons, whalers managed to kill about the same number in just 60 years. By some estimates, we have killed off two-thirds of the sperm whale’s pre-whaling population. We would have killed more, but the whales learned to avoid whaling ships and shared that information across clans.

While whaling is no longer a major threat, sperm whale populations have been slow to recover. Though none were spared, whalers especially targeted breeding-age males who were prized for their size. This has skewed the male-to-female ratio, impacting the birth rate in some clans. And that has consequences in terms of how populations recover, if at all. When a sperm whale family dies out, it takes along with it generations of gathered knowledge about the ocean — the best hunting grounds, resting places, birthing sites — which helped that particular family thrive in the past.

We are no different. We too need our mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, our communities, to learn how to be, how to grow, how to make sense of the world around us. And when we lose a culture or a language — to say war, or famine, or migration — we lose, with it, a unique way of being human.

Researchers are now using whalers’ logbooks to understand sperm whale behavior and to help save them from new threats, from ship strikes to climate change. That’s good use of the data gathered at a bloody cost to their kind. I like to imagine that we will build on this effort to be in better relationship with these ocean giants, and that a time will come when the stories that sperm whales tell each other will include a narrative on how their greatest foe, the humans, eventually redeemed themselves.