geomancer
07-12-2009, 06:54 AM
Read the whole thing - this the final part.
Richard
https://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/12/magazine/12whales-t.html?pagewanted=1&th&emc=th
ON MY FOURTH and final day in Baja, I set out once more with Frohoff in Ranulfo Mayoral’s panga. We were well into Hour 2 of our watch that last day when a mother gray suddenly emerged from San Ignacio’s riled-up waters a short distance off our bow. Having trained my eye somewhat over the previous days, I knew straight off that this was the same mother from my first day’s encounter because of the telltale markings of her barnacles and orange sea lice, some 400 pounds of which gray whales typically bear upon their bodies all of their adult lives.
The mother gray let out a great exhale before sliding under again, only to re-emerge a moment later, this time with her male calf, who began treating us to such a rollicking display of playful turns and flips we soon dubbed him Little Nut. For the next 30 minutes or so, despite the choppy seas, mother and son repeatedly wove us and our boat into their designs, and then all at once Little Nut popped up directly alongside the boat again and held there. I reached over and touched him on the head, the smooth, shiny, melon-cask of him, dimpled everywhere with stubbles of hair.
Then, as spontaneously as the interaction had been initiated, it was deemed, by the mother at least, over; time to move on to other things. Not, however, before she abruptly decided to admit us into that exclusive club of unwitting whale riders, the many Sinbads and other, real-life seafarers of this world.
“She’s coming under the boat,” Mayoral shouted, cutting the engine, and there we suddenly were, borne up on a swelling promontory of whale back, giddily airborne and helpless.
When Little Nut next emerged, the mother let us gently back down. She then thrust the whole of herself between her calf and our boat, and began to shepherd him away. For another 10 minutes or so, the two swam along about 50 yards off and parallel to us, the mother at one point going into a spectacular series of breaches, as if in both great relief and playful salutation, she and Little Nut fully off in their own element now, heading west toward the lagoon’s mouth and the open Pacific. “They’ll behave totally differently when they do decide to leave,” Mayoral said. “It’s all business out there. They know they’re going to be attacked and that they need food. There’s no time to be friendly.”
AMONG THE MANY obstacles migrating grays face in the course of their travels, boat traffic has become such a problem that a number of whale researchers are now proposing to establish an official boat-free zone or “whale’s lane,” as they call it. From the Icelanders’ “whale’s road” to the “whale’s lane” — a transition that, in many ways, encapsulates the entire arc of our history with whales: from mythologizing to massacre to marveling at and making way for them anew.
At the American Cetacean Society’s biennial conference in Monterey, Calif., last November, a mixed bag of gray-whale experts, marine biologists, marine paleontologists, geologists and oceanographic researchers participated in a workshop on “Gray Whales and Climate Change.” They proposed that the resiliency and adaptability of gray whales in response to the shifts in their environment made them what’s known as an indicator species, one whose health and long-term survival prospects are a good reflection of the state of the overall environment in which they live. “We refer to them now as ‘sentinels of the seas,’ ” says Steven Swartz, a government marine biologist in Silver Spring, Md., and one of the world’s foremost experts on gray whales. “Typically, an indicator species is among the smaller creatures in the environment, micro-organisms. But here we have the largest taking on that role. So it is very unique. Gray whales are delaying their southbound migration and spending less time in the breeding lagoons. They’re expanding their feeding grounds all along their migration route and in the north, and some are even staying in Arctic water over the winter, all of which reflect climate change and changes in the whole ecosystem.”
Scientists and devout whale watchers alike now keep constant vigil over the movements of gray whales up and down the West Coast, conducting a census of their numbers, watching out for the injured and stranded. By far the best-known stranding incident occurred in January 1997. A 7-day-old, 14-foot-long baby gray whale was found on the beaches of Marina del Rey, Calif., her skull and ribs evident from extreme malnourishment. An army of local volunteers tried to push her back out to sea to rejoin the southerly migration of her fellow grays, but by morning she was found in a nearby channel, listless, near death.
J. J., as the stranded baby was named, was loaded onto a flatbed truck and driven 150 miles south to SeaWorld in San Diego. The plan was to try to nurture J. J. back to health and release her back into the wild, something that had been done only once before with a captive gray whale, GiGi (for Gray Girl) at the same SeaWorld park. Kept in a 40-by-40-foot tank and tube-fed fluids, glucose and antibiotics, J. J. began to rebound. Soon shifting to a formula that included cream, puréed fish and vitamins, intended to approximate a mother’s milk, and then to a daily intake of up to 500 pounds of everything from krill to squid to sardines, J. J. by her 14th month had grown to be 30 feet long and 18,000 pounds, the largest marine mammal ever in captivity.
Her tenure at SeaWorld proved to be an invaluable learning experience for whale scientists. J. J. would lead researchers to, among other things, a key insight into the gray whale’s navigational skills. During the first spring of her stay at SeaWorld, J. J. was always found floating off to one side of her pool, and caretakers feared that she was perhaps suffering from boredom and depression. It soon dawned on them, however, that she was facing north, the direction of the gray’s spring migration. Subsequent necropsies on gray-whale brains revealed that they contain tiny particles of magnetic iron oxide, inner navigational ball bearings of a sort that whir in concert with the earth’s magnetic fields, guiding the whales toward their Arctic feeding grounds and, in the early winter, back down to Baja’s birthing lagoons. (Russian scientists, meanwhile, conducted sleep studies on J. J. and found the first definitive evidence that whales do, in fact, dream.)
By March 31, 1998, J. J.’s scheduled release date, millions around the world were following the story, hoping for the successful release of the largest animal ever to be returned back into the wild. The freeways were closed for J. J.’s transport to the release spot off San Diego’s Point Loma, where a construction crane lifted the 31-foot-long, 19,200-pound whale onto the Coast Guard vessel Conifer. Coast Guard helicopters, meanwhile, were out off Point Loma, scanning the seas for any pods of northward migrating grays that J. J. might join up with. Researchers also outfitted J. J. with radio transmitters in hopes of tracking, for the first time, a complete whale migration. The public would be able to log on to the SeaWorld Web site and track J. J.’s daily progress.
As her huge body was being hoisted with winches and harnesses off of the Conifer’s deck and then swung out and gently set down into the Pacific, the first question on everyone’s mind was would J. J. even know which way to swim. She immediately dove out of sight. Two days later, radio contact was lost, the transmitters having likely been scraped off against the ocean’s bottom.
The last confirmed sighting of J. J. had her not far from the U.S.-Mexico border. She was said to be near a group of migrating grays and heading north. Having been set free without any of the barnacled baggage and telltale scarring of a wild whale’s travels, J. J. cannot be positively identified. There is no way to confirm, for example, the hopeful rumor that I would hear often during my days in Baja: that J. J. is now among the Friendlies who return each winter to the waters of Laguna San Ignacio.
BACK AT OUR BASE camp that last night, still worked up from the day’s earlier turn with Little Nut and his mother, I sat up late talking with Mayoral and a number of the other boat guides, or pangeros. We talked that night mostly about the Friendlies and what might be behind their overtures toward us humans.
A distinctive aspect of the new cognitive revolution that Toni Frohoff spoke to me about is that scientific facts, of all things, are now freeing scientists like herself to be more expansive storytellers. The accusation of anthropomorphism — of projecting our thoughts and feelings on other animals; of trying to guess at what a whale’s day might be like, or a chimp’s or an elephant’s — has been obviated by the increasing evidence that such creatures have parallel days of their own, ones as distinctly intricate and woundable and, ultimately, unknowable as ours. “I don’t anthropomorphize,” Frohoff told me. “I leave it to other people to do that. What I do is study gray whales using the same rigorous methodologies that have long been used to study the behaviors of other species and interspecies interaction. Those who would reject out of hand the idea that whales are intelligent enough to consciously interact with us haven’t spent enough time around whales.”
The pangeros, for their part, have seen enough remarkable whale behavior to know better than to prejudge any explanation, however mind-bending, for what is going on in the lagoons of Baja. A 25-year-old named Alberto Haro Romero, known as Beto, told me of something he saw a month earlier while kayaking off Cabo San Lucas. A group of southward-migrating gray whales were suddenly surrounded and attacked by a pod of pilot whales. Out of nowhere, a group of humpbacks — who, like grays, are baleen whales — appeared and began going at the pilot whales, a highly coordinated counterattack. “It was unbelievable,” Beto said. “One baleen whale coming in on the behalf of another. It was, like, tribal.”
As Beto spoke, I thought of another bit of interspecies cooperation involving humpbacks that I recently read about. A female humpback was spotted in December 2005 east of the Farallon Islands, just off the coast of San Francisco. She was entangled in a web of crab-trap lines, hundreds of yards of nylon rope that had become wrapped around her mouth, torso and tail, the weight of the traps causing her to struggle to stay afloat. A rescue team arrived within a few hours and decided that the only way to save her was to dive in and cut her loose.
For an hour they cut at the lines and rope with curved knives, all the while trying to steer clear of a tail they knew could kill them with one swipe. When the whale was finally freed, the divers said, she swam around them for a time in what appeared to be joyous circles. She then came back and visited with each one of them, nudging them all gently, as if in thanks. The divers said it was the most beautiful experience they ever had. As for the diver who cut free the rope that was entangled in the whale’s mouth, her huge eye was following him the entire time, and he said that he will never be the same.
Charles Siebert, a contributing writer, is the author, most recently, of “The Wauchula Woods Accord: Toward a New Understanding of Animals.”
Richard
https://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/12/magazine/12whales-t.html?pagewanted=1&th&emc=th
ON MY FOURTH and final day in Baja, I set out once more with Frohoff in Ranulfo Mayoral’s panga. We were well into Hour 2 of our watch that last day when a mother gray suddenly emerged from San Ignacio’s riled-up waters a short distance off our bow. Having trained my eye somewhat over the previous days, I knew straight off that this was the same mother from my first day’s encounter because of the telltale markings of her barnacles and orange sea lice, some 400 pounds of which gray whales typically bear upon their bodies all of their adult lives.
The mother gray let out a great exhale before sliding under again, only to re-emerge a moment later, this time with her male calf, who began treating us to such a rollicking display of playful turns and flips we soon dubbed him Little Nut. For the next 30 minutes or so, despite the choppy seas, mother and son repeatedly wove us and our boat into their designs, and then all at once Little Nut popped up directly alongside the boat again and held there. I reached over and touched him on the head, the smooth, shiny, melon-cask of him, dimpled everywhere with stubbles of hair.
Then, as spontaneously as the interaction had been initiated, it was deemed, by the mother at least, over; time to move on to other things. Not, however, before she abruptly decided to admit us into that exclusive club of unwitting whale riders, the many Sinbads and other, real-life seafarers of this world.
“She’s coming under the boat,” Mayoral shouted, cutting the engine, and there we suddenly were, borne up on a swelling promontory of whale back, giddily airborne and helpless.
When Little Nut next emerged, the mother let us gently back down. She then thrust the whole of herself between her calf and our boat, and began to shepherd him away. For another 10 minutes or so, the two swam along about 50 yards off and parallel to us, the mother at one point going into a spectacular series of breaches, as if in both great relief and playful salutation, she and Little Nut fully off in their own element now, heading west toward the lagoon’s mouth and the open Pacific. “They’ll behave totally differently when they do decide to leave,” Mayoral said. “It’s all business out there. They know they’re going to be attacked and that they need food. There’s no time to be friendly.”
AMONG THE MANY obstacles migrating grays face in the course of their travels, boat traffic has become such a problem that a number of whale researchers are now proposing to establish an official boat-free zone or “whale’s lane,” as they call it. From the Icelanders’ “whale’s road” to the “whale’s lane” — a transition that, in many ways, encapsulates the entire arc of our history with whales: from mythologizing to massacre to marveling at and making way for them anew.
At the American Cetacean Society’s biennial conference in Monterey, Calif., last November, a mixed bag of gray-whale experts, marine biologists, marine paleontologists, geologists and oceanographic researchers participated in a workshop on “Gray Whales and Climate Change.” They proposed that the resiliency and adaptability of gray whales in response to the shifts in their environment made them what’s known as an indicator species, one whose health and long-term survival prospects are a good reflection of the state of the overall environment in which they live. “We refer to them now as ‘sentinels of the seas,’ ” says Steven Swartz, a government marine biologist in Silver Spring, Md., and one of the world’s foremost experts on gray whales. “Typically, an indicator species is among the smaller creatures in the environment, micro-organisms. But here we have the largest taking on that role. So it is very unique. Gray whales are delaying their southbound migration and spending less time in the breeding lagoons. They’re expanding their feeding grounds all along their migration route and in the north, and some are even staying in Arctic water over the winter, all of which reflect climate change and changes in the whole ecosystem.”
Scientists and devout whale watchers alike now keep constant vigil over the movements of gray whales up and down the West Coast, conducting a census of their numbers, watching out for the injured and stranded. By far the best-known stranding incident occurred in January 1997. A 7-day-old, 14-foot-long baby gray whale was found on the beaches of Marina del Rey, Calif., her skull and ribs evident from extreme malnourishment. An army of local volunteers tried to push her back out to sea to rejoin the southerly migration of her fellow grays, but by morning she was found in a nearby channel, listless, near death.
J. J., as the stranded baby was named, was loaded onto a flatbed truck and driven 150 miles south to SeaWorld in San Diego. The plan was to try to nurture J. J. back to health and release her back into the wild, something that had been done only once before with a captive gray whale, GiGi (for Gray Girl) at the same SeaWorld park. Kept in a 40-by-40-foot tank and tube-fed fluids, glucose and antibiotics, J. J. began to rebound. Soon shifting to a formula that included cream, puréed fish and vitamins, intended to approximate a mother’s milk, and then to a daily intake of up to 500 pounds of everything from krill to squid to sardines, J. J. by her 14th month had grown to be 30 feet long and 18,000 pounds, the largest marine mammal ever in captivity.
Her tenure at SeaWorld proved to be an invaluable learning experience for whale scientists. J. J. would lead researchers to, among other things, a key insight into the gray whale’s navigational skills. During the first spring of her stay at SeaWorld, J. J. was always found floating off to one side of her pool, and caretakers feared that she was perhaps suffering from boredom and depression. It soon dawned on them, however, that she was facing north, the direction of the gray’s spring migration. Subsequent necropsies on gray-whale brains revealed that they contain tiny particles of magnetic iron oxide, inner navigational ball bearings of a sort that whir in concert with the earth’s magnetic fields, guiding the whales toward their Arctic feeding grounds and, in the early winter, back down to Baja’s birthing lagoons. (Russian scientists, meanwhile, conducted sleep studies on J. J. and found the first definitive evidence that whales do, in fact, dream.)
By March 31, 1998, J. J.’s scheduled release date, millions around the world were following the story, hoping for the successful release of the largest animal ever to be returned back into the wild. The freeways were closed for J. J.’s transport to the release spot off San Diego’s Point Loma, where a construction crane lifted the 31-foot-long, 19,200-pound whale onto the Coast Guard vessel Conifer. Coast Guard helicopters, meanwhile, were out off Point Loma, scanning the seas for any pods of northward migrating grays that J. J. might join up with. Researchers also outfitted J. J. with radio transmitters in hopes of tracking, for the first time, a complete whale migration. The public would be able to log on to the SeaWorld Web site and track J. J.’s daily progress.
As her huge body was being hoisted with winches and harnesses off of the Conifer’s deck and then swung out and gently set down into the Pacific, the first question on everyone’s mind was would J. J. even know which way to swim. She immediately dove out of sight. Two days later, radio contact was lost, the transmitters having likely been scraped off against the ocean’s bottom.
The last confirmed sighting of J. J. had her not far from the U.S.-Mexico border. She was said to be near a group of migrating grays and heading north. Having been set free without any of the barnacled baggage and telltale scarring of a wild whale’s travels, J. J. cannot be positively identified. There is no way to confirm, for example, the hopeful rumor that I would hear often during my days in Baja: that J. J. is now among the Friendlies who return each winter to the waters of Laguna San Ignacio.
BACK AT OUR BASE camp that last night, still worked up from the day’s earlier turn with Little Nut and his mother, I sat up late talking with Mayoral and a number of the other boat guides, or pangeros. We talked that night mostly about the Friendlies and what might be behind their overtures toward us humans.
A distinctive aspect of the new cognitive revolution that Toni Frohoff spoke to me about is that scientific facts, of all things, are now freeing scientists like herself to be more expansive storytellers. The accusation of anthropomorphism — of projecting our thoughts and feelings on other animals; of trying to guess at what a whale’s day might be like, or a chimp’s or an elephant’s — has been obviated by the increasing evidence that such creatures have parallel days of their own, ones as distinctly intricate and woundable and, ultimately, unknowable as ours. “I don’t anthropomorphize,” Frohoff told me. “I leave it to other people to do that. What I do is study gray whales using the same rigorous methodologies that have long been used to study the behaviors of other species and interspecies interaction. Those who would reject out of hand the idea that whales are intelligent enough to consciously interact with us haven’t spent enough time around whales.”
The pangeros, for their part, have seen enough remarkable whale behavior to know better than to prejudge any explanation, however mind-bending, for what is going on in the lagoons of Baja. A 25-year-old named Alberto Haro Romero, known as Beto, told me of something he saw a month earlier while kayaking off Cabo San Lucas. A group of southward-migrating gray whales were suddenly surrounded and attacked by a pod of pilot whales. Out of nowhere, a group of humpbacks — who, like grays, are baleen whales — appeared and began going at the pilot whales, a highly coordinated counterattack. “It was unbelievable,” Beto said. “One baleen whale coming in on the behalf of another. It was, like, tribal.”
As Beto spoke, I thought of another bit of interspecies cooperation involving humpbacks that I recently read about. A female humpback was spotted in December 2005 east of the Farallon Islands, just off the coast of San Francisco. She was entangled in a web of crab-trap lines, hundreds of yards of nylon rope that had become wrapped around her mouth, torso and tail, the weight of the traps causing her to struggle to stay afloat. A rescue team arrived within a few hours and decided that the only way to save her was to dive in and cut her loose.
For an hour they cut at the lines and rope with curved knives, all the while trying to steer clear of a tail they knew could kill them with one swipe. When the whale was finally freed, the divers said, she swam around them for a time in what appeared to be joyous circles. She then came back and visited with each one of them, nudging them all gently, as if in thanks. The divers said it was the most beautiful experience they ever had. As for the diver who cut free the rope that was entangled in the whale’s mouth, her huge eye was following him the entire time, and he said that he will never be the same.
Charles Siebert, a contributing writer, is the author, most recently, of “The Wauchula Woods Accord: Toward a New Understanding of Animals.”