Review: Among Whales

[livingdeb]

I decided to read Robert Payne's Among Whales after reading The Calls of Distant Whales at Krusty on Chrissy. An odd book, partly autobiographical, partly about whales, party about other creatures (albatrosses are fascinating), partly about environmentalism, partly about philosophy, partly about whaling, and with a really nice appendix on underwater acoustics. Seriously--if you don't really understand sound waves and wish you did, you should read this book on whales.

I love many parts of the book. For example he tells us "Baleen whales are masters at fasting--they can probably starve for longer periods than any other mammal. They can wait patiently for eight months or more until the krill [their food] start their mating swarms again." And then he explains "Being large is the only way a warm-blooded animal can starve for long periods" because their surface area is small in relation to their volume, so they're not losing heat as quickly.

He also generalizes. "With size comes tranquility. For a whale a passing thunderstorm is but the footfall of an ant, and a full gale an annoying juggling of its pleasant bed. If you were a whale, all but the grandest things would pass beneath your notice. As the largest animal, including the biggest dinosaur, that has ever lived on earth you could afford to be gentle, to view life without fear, to play in the dark, to sleep soundly anywhere, whenever and however long you liked, and to greet the world in peace--even to view with bemused curiosity something as weird as a human scuba diver as it bubbles away, encased in all that bizarre gear. It is this sense of tranquility--of life without urgency, power without aggression--that has won my heart to whales."

Here's a little something about elephant seals he happened to notice:

"For the most part the females in these harems lie asleep in every imaginable posture of indolence, scattered about on the strand like cushions, each with a throw pillow--a small black pup--alongside. If you approach too closely, you will discover that she has been observing you through partly closed eyes. She now opens her eyes wide, lifts her head, and produces a series of long, shockingly rude belches designed to make you go away. The harem master bulls are much larger and far more aggressive. They make the same noise the females make only louder, lower, and ruder--gargantuan eructations designed to intimidate any intruder; an after-dinner noise of such exquisite vulgarity that even the most hardened eleven-year-old boy could not fail to be stunned with delight by the endless possibilities offered by such extravagantly crude sounds."

It's not easy to learn things about whales.

"I've long suspected that the sailors' stories of the Sirens had their origins in humpback whale songs. When sailors heard humpback whales sing, it seems to me it would have been exceedingly unlikely that they would have realized that it was a whale making the sounds. This is because when a whale is underwater singing you cannot see it, and when it is at the surface alternating breathing with singing, you hear nothing whatever of the song through the air. In order for you to hear even the faintest rendition of a song, the whale must be submerged and your boat stationed almost directly above the singer. But in that position, you are actually hearing the sound coming through the hull of the boat, which gives you no indication at all of the direction of the source. When you are swimming you will hear the sound loudly through the water, even though you may be quite far from a singing humpback. ... I suspect that our generation is the first to swim up to whales underwater, but even if earlier generations had done so, they wouldn't have been able to see the whales clearly without goggles. And even if they somehow mastered that and could see a singing whale clearly, a singing whale shows no movement whatever of its mouth or throat, unlike a bird, which opens its beak to sing, and so you cannot see that it is singing--and to make maters worse, as you approach a singing whale it goes silent."

Some chapters I did not enjoy such as "Whaling and Other Delights" and "Killing Whales Accidentally" where you get the gory details on human ignorance and human ingenuity.

"Back in the 1940s, when the Convention for the Regulation of Whaling was being written, one of the scientists present suddenly realized that if he wanted to collect specimens, he would have first to apply for permission to do so through the International Whaling Commission, and since it might take several years for such an application to be processed it could interfere deeply with his work. As a result he proposed that each country be allowed to issue permits to their own scientists without general approval from the commission--a suggestion that was accepted.... So when the moratorium [on whaling] was passed [much later] we all at once had the spectacle of Norway, Iceland, and Japan suddenly burning with scientific curiosity and expressing with great zeal the desire to do huge amounts of deeply relevant research on whales. Needless to say, the research they did had the unfortunate side effect of producing whale carcasses, and when you have all that meat and oil cluttering up your 'research ships,' well, I suppose you might as well do something with it ...."

Then it just turns weird where the author explains how whales can save us by teaching us how to live in harmony with other creatures.

Overall, I highly recommend the first two thirds of the book and the appendix.

Quote of the Day

Grandpa - So, how did you like that whiskey I gave you?
Henry - It was just right.
Grandpa - Just right? That was the worst whiskey I ever tasted!
Henry - If it was any better, you wouldn't have given it to me. And if it was any worse, I couldn't have drunk it.