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A remarkable new study
on how whales behaved when attacked by humans in the 19th century has
implications for the way they react to changes wreaked by humans in the
21st century. The paper, published by the Royal
Society on Wednesday [17 March 2021], is authored by Hal Whitehead and Luke Rendell,
pre-eminent scientists working with cetaceans, and Tim D Smith, a data
scientist, and their research addresses an age-old question: if whales
are so smart, why did they hang around to be killed? The answer? They
didn’t.
Using newly digitised logbooks detailing the hunting of sperm whales in
the north Pacific, the authors discovered that within just a few years,
the strike rate of the whalers’ harpoons fell by 58%.
[…] Before humans, orca were their only predators […]. It was a frighteningly
rapid killing, and it accompanied other threats to the ironically named
Pacific. From whaling and sealing stations to missionary bases, western
culture was imported to an ocean that had remained largely untouched […].
——-
Headline and text published by: Philip Hoare. “Sperm whales in the 19th century shared ship attack information.” The Guardian. 17 March 2021.
Catching a sperm whale
during the 19th century was much harder than even Moby Dick showed it
to be. That’s because sperm whales weren’t just capable of learning the
best ways to evade the whalers’ ships, they could quickly share this
information with other whales, too, according to a study of
whale-hunting records.
[…]
“At first, the whales reacted to the new threat of human hunters in exactly the same way as they would to the killer whale,
which was their only predator at this time,” study lead author Hal
Whitehead, a professor of biology at Dalhousie University in Nova
Scotia, told Live Science. “[The sperm whales] all gathered together on
the surface, put the baby in the middle, and tried to defend by biting
or slapping their tails down. But when it comes to fending off Captain
Ahab that’s the very worst thing they could do, they made themselves a
very large target.”
The whales seem to have learned from their mistakes, and the ones that
survived quickly adapted — instead of resorting to old tactics, the
whalers wrote in their logbooks, the sperm whales instead chose new
ones, swimming fast upwind away from the whalers’ wind-powered vessels. […]
The whales communicated with and learned from each other rapidly, and
the lessons were soon integrated into their wider culture across the
region, according to the researchers’ interpretation of the data.
“Each whale group that you meet at sea typically comprises two or three
family units, and the units quite often split off and form other
groups,” Whitehead said. “So, what we think happened is that one or two
of the units that make up the group could have had encounters with
humans before, and the ones who didn’t copied closely from their pals
who had.“
Sperm whales are excellent intel sharers: Their highly observant,
communicative nature, and the fact that each family unit only stays in
larger groups for a few days at a time, means they can transmit
information fast.
As studies show, that information could be news on new threats, new ways to hunt or new songs to sing.
——-
One example of whales’ extraordinary information sharing abilities involves lobtail feeding, in which a humpback whale
slaps its tail hard against the water’s surface, submerges to blow
disorienting bubbles around its prey, and then scoops the prey up in its
mouth. Researchers first observed this tactic
being used by a single whale in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, in 1980,
before it spread throughout the regional population in just 10 years.
Whale
culture also extends far deeper than innovative ways to feed. “Sperm
whales are divided into acoustic cultural climates,” Whitehead said.
“They split themselves into large clans, each with distinctive patterns
of sonar clicks, like a dialect, and they only form groups with members
of the same clan.”
Different
whale clans each have different ways of singing, moving, hunting and
looking after their calves. These differences are profound enough to
even give some clans a survival advantage during El Nino events, according to Whitehead. […]
In the 20th century, whales, especially the 13 species belonging to the category of ‘great whales’ — such as blue whales,
sperm whales and humpback whales — found themselves pursued by
steamships and grenade harpoons that they could not escape. These
whales’ numbers plummeted and they soon faced extinction.
[…] [T]hey
still face the growing destabilization of their habitats brought about by industrial fishing, noise pollution and climate change.
——-
Headline, image, caption, and text published by: Ben Turner. “Sperm whales outwitted 19th-century whalers by sharing evasive tactics.” Live Science. 19 March 2021.