a bonobo humanity?

stranded

We’re emerging, or hopefully have emerged, not only from the whaling period, but from the Sea World and Marineland period, when we prized cetaceans for their ambergris and such, and the circus antics we encouraged them to perform, all of which did great damage to their wild populations. The larger baleen whales were particularly affected by human depredations, as the Royal Society essay, linked below, tells us:

Nearly all baleen whale populations were severely impacted by whaling, and only some have recovered to anything like their pre-hunt densities. We expect most mammals to show some degree of flexible responses to ecological conditions, including conspecific density, so we cannot really know the extent to which our current picture of baleen whale sociality is of a markedly shifted baseline as opposed to the conditions under which it primarily evolved.

It remains to be seen whether previous migratory patterns, so disrupted during the whaling period, can be reconstituted. In any case, female bonding, on both a horizontal and vertical level, looks to be key to baleen sociality, as with other cetaceans. Toothed species are more common, and more various in habitat and behaviour, with the smaller species having ‘highly dynamic fission-fusion societies’, but the mother-calf relation is always key. The calf initially tags along with the mother in ‘echelon position’, a kind of diagonal following used in military training and in cycling. This tends to hamper the mother until the calf grows to be a stronger swimmer.

The cetacean sleep pattern is unihemispheric, meaning that one half of the brain is always awake and alert, something that is clearly essential and must have evolved reasonably rapidly to enable an underwater life which also required oxygenation, remembering that they had previously been land mammals. Fish obtain oxygen from the surrounding H2O via their gill filaments, which are full of networks of capillaries, providing a large surface area for the exchange of gases (oxygen and CO2) and other nutrients. Fish essentially breathe in oxygen-rich water, which, after processing through the gills, is expelled, largely depleted of oxygen, through the sides of the pharynx. Whales etc inhale and exhale through their blowholes, meaning of course that they must surface to breathe. Think of it as a nostril, which is tightly closed except when surfacing. For dolphins, the exhaling (first) and inhaling process takes only a fraction of a second. Surfacing, breathing dolphins might be appearing to blow water out of their blowholes, but this is just water blown off from the region around the blowhole.

Anyway, returning to the matter of survival, sperm whales seem to be slowly recovering from the depredations of humans. They’re so named because of the spermaceti, an oily-waxy stuff found in their ginormous heads, which somehow helps with echo-location and navigation. This spermaceti is found in some other whales, but the sperm whale gets its name for the volume of the stuff it carries – as much as 1900 litres per whale. From the 17th century, whales were hunted for this stuff – used in oil lamps, candles and such. Ambergris, produced in the digestive system of sperm whales, and extruded like shit, is prized for its odour, and probably also for its rarity – only a small percentage of sperm whales have been known to produce it, and it only rarely washes up on land.

The major threat to whales in general, now that they’ve gained acceptance, even a degree of worship, by humans, is overfishing, though this is actually affecting top predator fish, such as sharks, tuna and billfish, even more. Sharks in particular, are now one of the world’s most threatened marine creatures.

I suppose you could say that the future of whales is as much in the hands of humans as is an untold number of creatures we share the planet with – elephants, orang-utans, bonobos, chimpanzees, pangolins, leopards, tigers, mountain gorillas, rhinos, turtles, gray wolves, to name a few. Even insects are suffering from our activities, as Oliver Milman’s The insect crisis has revealed.

The human population continues to grow, and some, I hear, are happy to aim for a population of more than 20 billion. Do they think this can be done while preserving life’s variety? Many of the forums on questions like these don’t even consider the impact on other species. My own view is about improving life for the humans now suffering, of which there are millions. Quality of life rather than quantity is surely the key.

References

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fish_gill

Carl Safina, Beyond words, 2015

Oliver Milman, The insect crisis, 2022

https://au.whales.org/whales-dolphins/how-do-whales-and-dolphins-breathe/