Archive for the ‘cetaceans’ Category
other minds, other ways: killer whales etc
So in my quest to find inspiration as a wannabe female supremacist, I’ve been learning bits and pieces about octopuses (fascinating but way too bizarre and solitary to be role models), elephants, coyotes, lions, killer whales, lemurs, and of course bonobos. So in this piece I’ll focus on cetaceans, and killer whales in particular.
I’m coming close to the end of Carl Safina’s book Beyond Words: what animals think and feel, which is just what the matriarch ordered. Not that all the social animals he describes are matriarchal, but they’re all intelligent, complex and very much worth reflecting upon and valuing, especially considering how much we have done to them and to the environments they rely on.
So cetaceans are all complex ocean-dwelling mammals. There are about 90 species and they’re generally divided into whales, dolphins and porpoises. Safina introduces killer whales as ‘the world’s largest dolphins’, and quotes a remark from Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, ‘Exception might be taken to the name bestowed upon this whale… for we are all killers’. Humans particularly. Safina’s first chapter on them is called ‘Sea Rex’, and introduces them so:
Feared in our own time by even the sea’s greatest whales, killer whales exert power without peer since dinosaurs sighed out, sixty-five million years ago. But the killer’s subtle, sensitive side makes a hunter with complex notes that T rex could never have hoped to emulate: intelligent, maternal, long-lived, cooperative, intensely social, devoted to family. They are, like us, warm-blooded milk-makers, mammals whose personalities are really not much different from ours. They’re just a lot bigger. And notably less violent.
I knew before reading this book that these whales were also called orcas, and in fact thought the ‘orca’ term was a replacement, a less pejorative term, but maybe not, as it’s a latin reference to a demonic underworld. The Latin name is Orcinus orca, and there are various other names bestowed on them by sea-faring cultures. Safina prefers the term ‘killer’, always bearing in mind human capacities in that regard.
They’re matriarchal, the females being, as with elephants, the knowledge-keepers and the guides for the pods in their long migratory travels. And they’re very sexual, always a big interest of mine. In describing a party-style gathering that combined three pods, Safina noted the ‘x-rated’ style of their play. Male-male sex play is particularly notable, due to those things males have – ‘three-foot wangers draped over each other’, was one description re the adult males, and as for the youngsters, ‘soon after they stop nursing, there’s a lot of rolling around with their little snakes out’. This sex play is common to many dolphin species, and according to Safina, bottlenose dolphins engage in more same-sexual behaviour than any other known creature. Clearly bonobos need to lift their game.
Unsurprisingly, Safina makes comparisons with elephants:
As with elephants, each killer whale family’s elder decision-making matriarch has memorised the family’s survival manual, maintaining knowledge of the region, the routes and island passes, the rivers where salmon concentrate in their seasons, and so on. She’s often out in front.
But one glaring difference is that killer whales kill, even other, much bigger whales, while elephants are strictly vego. And they’re quite ruthless killing machines, though they’ve never been known to kill humans, in or out of the water – they’re too intelligent for that.
But their relations with humans are even more interesting, if the stories told to Safina are to be believed – stories told about various dolphin species. For example, killer whale pods (the term given to particular extended-family groups that hunt and play together, as I understand it), appear able to distinguish between vessels carrying nice humans and those nasty ones out to hunt or capture them. At a time just before laws were introduced to prevent organisations like Sea World from capturing baby whales, whole whale pods would hang around observer boats that they knew to be friendly and safe. Another story told of a whale pod guiding a small whale-friendly boat out of Puget Sound in a dangerously thick fog. Safina relates other stories told to him of captive dolphins (killer whales also being dolphins) engaging in highly intelligent trickery to wangle extra food from their captors. So much of this and other behaviours indicate that we’ve barely begun to comprehend the minds of these creatures, adapted to environments so far removed from our own.
Of course, with such ‘other-worldly’ creatures, it may be hard to tell myth from reality. They have saved dogs from drowning – plausible, they would have noticed dogs hanging around humans, and would not recognise them as potential food. Other behaviours, from playful to life-saving, towards humans they know to be whale-friendly, are more mysterious and perhaps simply indicate that we’re a long way form understanding minds so differently adapted from, and yet comparably complex as, our own. I’ve just started reading Dennett’s now 30-year-old Kinds of Minds, wondering if whales-dolphins will be looked at. I suspect not, or not much.
Finally, is there a way to associate those cetacean species that are female dominant as being different from those that aren’t? Or is their water-world so alien to us that it’s, so far, difficult to tell? And yet, their ancestry is terrestrial…
Wikipedia lists 94 species, all of which are uniparous (giving birth to one child at a time) as far as we know, and maternal care of offspring is intense and long-lasting, with paternal care being minimal at best – though pods are generally close-knit. Reproductive rates are low. This quote from a Royal Society paper, ‘Causes and consequences of female centrality in cetacean societies’, linked below, might help:
… every cetacean calf is a significant investment, and offspring care is central to female fitness. Here strategies diverge, especially between toothed and baleen whales, in terms of mother–calf association and related social structures, which range from ephemeral grouping patterns to stable, multi-level, societies in which social groups are strongly organized around female kinship. Some species exhibit social and/or spatial philopatry [remaining in same group or place, or returning there for breeding] in both sexes, a rare phenomenon in vertebrates. Communal care can be vital, especially among deep-diving species, and can be supported by female kinship. Female-based sociality, in its diverse forms, is therefore a prevailing feature of cetacean societies. Beyond the key role in offspring survival, it provides the substrate for significant vertical and horizontal cultural transmission, as well as the only definitive non-human examples of menopause.
The paper goes on to emphasise what Safina also points out, that ‘we know almost nothing about the social structure of most…. cetacean species’. What Safina does provide is a fund of pretty convincing anecdotal evidence of the complex understanding of human behaviour displayed by those species we’ve had contact with, in the wild and in captivity. And considering the obvious importance of females in those cetacean societies we’ve observed, I’m heartened by the paper’s emphasis on my own great topic of interest:
This [understanding of female roles in cetaceans] has important implications for understanding socio-cultural changes in modern human societies, where, for example, a comparative understanding of female social roles can guide thinking about sources and solutions to the problem of underrepresentation of women in positions of leadership.
So I haven’t yet fully digested this lengthy paper, so I’ll leave it to my next piece to report on it.
References
Carl Safina, Beyond words: what animals think & feel, 2016
a bonobo world 62: more species, and then back to the point of it all
male aggression – it’s everywhere
Canto: Okay, let’s look at other cetaceans. There are 89 species, so we can’t cover them all. There are toothed and baleen types, but all dolphins and porpoises are toothed. There are river dolphins and oceanic dolphins, and in terms of size, cetaceans range widely, so that we have names like northern right whale dolphin, southern right whale dolphin, false killer whale, pygmy killer whale and various types of humpback dolphin as well the humpback whale. So it might be that they’re as culturally various as humans. I’ll limit my examination, then, to four or five well-known species, with no pretence that any of them typify the whole.
Jacinta: Yes, when we talked about dolphins before, it was the common bottle-nose dolphin, right?
Canto: Essentially yes, and I’ll pick some of the best known cetaceans, avoiding those most endangered, because they’ll probably be the least studied in the wild. First, the humpback whale, which is a rorqual. Rorquals represent the largest group of baleen whales, and of course humpback whales are an iconic and fairly well researched species, as whales go. And one immediately interesting fact is that the females are on average slightly larger than the males.
Jacinta: Size usually matters.
Canto: And they can live up to 100 years. But let’s talk about sex, or courtship as the Wikipedia article on humpbacks charmingly describes it. You’ll be happy to know that humpbacks are polyandrous – that’s to say, females mate with many males during their breeding season. This is generally seen as the opposite of polygyny – one male mating with many females. In fact polyandry is more often seen in insects than in any other life forms. Humpbacks have even been known to have it off with other species. Wikipedia calls it hybridisation. There’s apparently a humpback-blue whale hybrid out there.
Jacinta: I assure you that when females rule the world – in nevereverland – any attempt to employ ‘euphemisms’ for fucking will be punished by instant castration.
Canto: Well you’ll also be amused to know that males fight over females.
Jacinta: How very unsurprising. But at least they sing, which almost compensates.
Canto: Yes, males and females vocalise, but the long, complex and very loud songs are produced by males. It’s believed that they help to produce estrus in the females.
Jacinta: The correct term is fuck-readiness.
Canto: In fact, researchers only think that because only males produce the complex songs. It’s a reasonable inference, but it could be wrong. Some think that the songs might be used to prove the male’s virility to the female, to make him more attractive. This supposedly happens with birdsong too.
Jacinta: Trying to think of human equivalents. Rocks in the jocks?
Canto: Oh no, too chafing. Being a good cook helps, I’ve found. But what with the obesity epidemic, that’s a balancing act. Anyway, those humpback boys put a lot of energy into their songs, which sometimes last for over 24 hours. Animals of one population, which can be very large, sing the same culturally transmitted song, which slowly changes over time. All interesting, but probably not much of a model for us. I can barely swim.
Jacinta: Well yes, it’s hardly sing or swim for us, but let’s turn to other cetaceans. What about blue whales?
Canto: Well it’s interesting to find that most websites don’t even mention their social life – it’s all about their ginormity, their big hearts, and their feeding and digestion. It took me a while to discover that they’re solitary creatures, which I suppose is common sense. Hard to imagine a superpod of blue whales out in search of a collective meal. They do sometimes gather in small groups, presumably for sex, and of course there’s a mother-calf relationship until maturity. As with humpbacks, the females are a bit larger than the males. What would that be about?
Jacinta: Well, some researchers (see link below) have discovered that male humpbacks favour the largest females, so there’s presumably sexual selection going on. And of course, they fight over the biggest females.
Canto: Well you can’t blame them for being macho. It be nature, and what do please gods.
Jacinta: Oh no, let’s not go there. Anyway, the largest females produce the largest and presumably healthiest offspring. They also found that the older females make the best mothers, which I’m sure is generally the case in humans too, mutatis mutandis.
Canto: So in conclusion, these mostly solitary creatures, whether they be cetaceans or primates, can’t be said to be patriarchal or matriarchal, but the males still manage to be more violent, or at least more cross with each other, than the females.
Jacinta: But it doesn’t have to be that way, hence bonobos.
Canto: Yes, but that makes me think. I hear that bonobos use sex to ‘ease tensions’, among other things. Tensions hints of violence, or at least anger. I’m wondering if that anger comes mostly from the males, and if the use of sex to dissipate that anger comes mostly from the females.
Jacinta: That’s a good question. There’s a site, linked below, which sort of looks at that question. It cites research showing that female bonobos gang up on male aggressors. The researchers found an absence of female-on-female aggression (perhaps less so than in the human world). According to this site – which may not be wholly reliable, as it’s really about humans and nightlife behaviour – female bonobos bond in small groups for the specific purpose of keeping males in line. How do they know that? They might be arguing from girl nightlife behaviour. I mean, who’s zoomin who?
Canto: The general point though is that among bonobos, males are more aggressive than females. Which isn’t to say that females can’t be aggressive, and not just in a defensive way.
Jacinta: This website also mentions something which is the general point of all our conversations on bonobos and humans and sex and well-being. It’s worth quoting in full:
Anthropological data analyzed by neuropsychologist James Prescott suggests societies that are more sexually open are also less likely to be violent. The key to understanding this correlation, however, is that it’s the society as a whole that is more sexually open and not just a small percentage of individuals.
Canto: That’s a good quote to get us back to humans. We need to look at this matter more closely next time. And the next and the next.
References
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cetaceans
https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna29187881
how did blue whales get so big?
a baby blue
Cetaceans came into being when a group of mammals left the land some 55 million years ago, to return to the oceans (creatures first left the oceans for the land some 375 million years ago). The closest land species to whales are the artiodactyls or even-toed ungulates, a large group which includes sheep, goats, cattle, giraffes, camels, llamas, pigs and deer, but another artiodactyl species, the hippo, is most closely related to cetaceans. But, of course, since returning to the oceans, the creatures who finally evolved into cetaceans were able to become ‘super-sized’. The blue whale, likely the largest creature ever to exist on this planet, can tip the scales at over 170 tonnes, and can measure well over 30 metres. The largest dinosaur unearthed so far, Argentinosaurus, a titanosaur sauropod (that’s to say a really effing big dino – named for the ancient mythical titans – with a long neck and tail and a comparatively small head, like the brontosaurus of my youth, now sadly out of favour) weighed around 75 tonnes.
Cetaceans have managed to fill a diverse range of ecological niches. Some of the best-known are the blue whale (a filter-feeding baleen whale or rorqual), the orca (often called a killer whale, but in fact it’s the largest species of dolphin) and the sperm whale, the largest of the toothed whales. Their success, and especially that of rorquals, may owe much to the abundance of krill in the oceans. Some researchers have also attributed the great growth spurt of the blue whale over the past few million years to this ready supply of food. It’s been estimated that, in the southern oceans alone, the krill biomass may be as much as 500 million tonnes, twice the biomass of humans on the planet.
Of course the behaviour of humans has had a massive impact on blue whales, especially in the century of so before 1966, when they came under international protection. The Antarctic population before whaling has been estimated at between 200,000 and 300,000, possibly as much as ten times the current population, though numbers are difficult to determine. You can’t help but wonder what would have happened to whale – and krill – populations without human depredations.
Researchers and analysts point to two main and perhaps complementary reasons for whale ginormity; the abundance of food, and the lack of restraint on size in an oceanic medium. I’ll focus on the second reason first. This presumably has to do with physics, my weakest subject, so I want to get it straight in my mind.
Allometry is the study of the size of organisms and what it means in terms of growth, behaviour, environment and other constraints and factors. Allometry helps explain how a large oxygen-breathing mammal can survive in and transport itself through its chosen medium. Whales are ‘neutrally buoyant’ – that’s to say, their body’s density is equal to the density of the water around them. This means that they don’t have to expend the energy that land animals have to in counteracting the effects of gravity – scuba divers have to learn the correct breathing underwater to achieve this neutral buoyancy. Every step we landlubbers take involves a lifting up of our bodies against the gravitational force pinning us to the earth. The endless gentle push of gravity is what makes us wrinkle and sag over our lifetime. Okay, let’s not think about that anymore. Locomotion in the water has much to do with allometric scaling, because the rate of oxygen consumption per gram body size decreases consistently with increasing body size. Other factors include shape and type of movement, which influence the laminar or turbulent flow around the organism. All of this is very complicated and can be worked out with equations – the Reynolds equation, which relates turbulence to velocity, being of prime importance, though hard to work out in nature, especially with cetaceans, who seem to break all the rules. That’s to say, there’s much about their physiology and how it’s adapted to water that we still don’t know.
Of course, aquatic mammals have to pump blood around their bodies and get air into their lungs just like land mammals. Interestingly, mammals have much the same heart-body mass ratio, whether they’re mice or elephants, land or aquatic. That of course means that the blue whale has the biggest heart of any mammal, and that also goes for a number of other organs. Scaling is much the same, for example, for lungs, and for lung capacity, and for blood, which represents around 5.5% of body mass. So, for mammals of similar form, larger ones can travel more quickly, because it requires the same expenditure of energy to move a body length. The large body length of a blue whale enables it to move great distances in search of food or for other purposes at less metabolic expense. It also enables them to dive for much longer than other cetaceans. Whales have a lower heart rate and can carry more oxygen through their bloodstream than smaller marine mammals. These are just some of the advantages of size in the oceans.
Of course, greater mass requires greater volumes of food to sustain it, but krill seems to have provided just about all a blue whale needs in that department, though it’s also partial to a class of small crustaceans called copepods, and it’s happy, too, to consume any other stray crustaceans and little fishes it catches up in its lunge dives through the krill – described recently as ‘the largest biomechenical event on earth’. Its feeding system and technique is adapted to these small but vastly numerous life forms. For all its size, a blue whale’s throat opening won’t allow it to swallow anything larger than a beach ball, yet it can eat up to 40 million krill a day. It’s jawline is huge, extending over halfway down its body, and the jaws can open to almost a ninety degree angle during lunge diving, allowing it to scoop up about 100 tonnes of krill-infested water in about ten seconds. The water is then squeezed out through the baleen with the help of its ventral pouch and massive tongue.
So it’s understandable why the blue whale has grown to this size, which raises the question – has it ended its growth spurt? There’s a bit of an argument going on about this. Obviously the present moment is but a snapshot, and we can never be certain about where evolution is heading, but often growth spurts in species occur at a rapid clip, and then things stabilize. The blue whales are relatively recent, judged as having split from an ancestor at around 10-15 million years ago, but it may be that they grew to their present size quickly after the split. We have no way of knowing as yet, unless we find a massive blue whale fossil dating back more than 10 million years, which is unlikely. However, other ways of knowing might crop up. There’s also an argument that these rorquals have reached their limit due to feeding limitations and oxygen supply limitations. Lots of interesting research questions to ponder over.