a bonobo humanity?

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

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6664132/