Off the shores of
In
Call
me Ishmael, if you like, but whenever I find myself growing grim about the
mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I have
spent too many consecutive months at the computer keyboard, in artificial
light, like some sort of troglodyte, self-imprisoned, pecking out my living, I
account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. I jumped at the assignment
on Pacific Storm. As the voyage was to depart on the third of January, I
made three New Year's resolutions: I would try to be an affable shipmate. I
would strip all the blubber from my prose. I would refrain from making a single
allusion to Herman Melville.
Did
I mention we were after a white whale?
It's true. In the eastern North Pacific population of blue
whales—the group that summers mostly off California and whose migration we were
following south—there is a white blue whale, maybe an albino. An inflatable
skiff from Pacific Storm had satellite tagged this whale off Santa Barbara
four months before, but his tag, number 4172, had ceased transmitting a few
weeks after implantation, and now his whereabouts were a mystery. The
sun-synchronous, polar-orbiting TIROS N satellites could no longer track him,
but he was one of the animals we hoped to see off
When we had settled in on Pacific Storm, Nicklin,
cross-legged on his bunk, set up his Nikon D200, with its Sea & Sea
underwater dome. He squeezed a dab of silicone grease from a small tube onto
his fingertip and ran it around the rim of the dome's blue O-ring. He opened
the back of the camera and gave a similar treatment to the O-ring at the stern.
Nicklin is a new kind of whaler. His job is not to render the oil, but to
capture the essence of cetaceans, and the Nikon is his favorite harpoon.
Pacific Storm put to sea. We sailed a leg due south to avoid the Tehuantepec
winds along the eastward bend of Central America, then turned southwest toward
the temperature anomaly that was our destination.
The Costa Rica Dome is an upwelling of cold, nutrient-rich
water generated by a meeting of winds and currents west of
The blue whale, Balaenoptera musculus, is the
largest creature ever to live. Linnaeus derived the genus name from the Latin balaena,
"whale," and the Greek pteron, "fin" or
"wing." His species name, musculus, is the diminutive of the
Latin mus, "mouse"—apparently a Linnaean joke. The
"little mouse whale" can grow to 200 tons and 100 feet long. A single
little mouse whale weighs as much as the entire National Football League. Just
as an elephant might pick up a little mouse in its trunk, so the elephant, in
its turn, might be taken up by a blue whale and carried along on the colossal
tongue. Had Jonah been injected intravenously, instead of swallowed, he could
have swum the arterial vessels of this whale, boosted along every ten seconds
or so by the slow, godlike pulse.
The great swimming speed of the blue whale, together with
the remoteness of its stronghold—where three of Earth's oceans merge in the
ice-cold waters around
For Bruce Mate and John Calambokidis, the head scientists
aboard Pacific Storm, the irony is deep and poignant. The blue whales
they study, the 2,000 animals that summer off western
Mate, director of the Marine Mammal Institute at
Why would a blue whale depart its feeding grounds at the
end of summer and migrate thousands of miles to spend winter in this tropical
zone of upwelling? Mate and Calambokidis thought they knew. The satellite data
showed that some of the tagged whales lingered five months or more at the dome,
arriving early in the southern migration and departing late—a pattern that, in
other species of baleen whales, is seen in pregnant females and new mothers. It
had never been noted in blue whales, for the best of reasons: No one has ever
witnessed the birth of a blue whale.
Gray, humpback, and right whales—the baleen species that
have been studied at their calving grounds—seem to feed little, if at all, at
those grounds. But there is evidence that the blue whale might be different.
Given its great size and enormous energy requirements, the blue whale may be
forced to find winter grounds where it can do more than snack. The oasis of the
Costa Rica Dome would satisfy this requirement. Plus, the productivity of the
upwelling would help nursing mothers convert schools of krill into the barrels
of milk required by the calves to put on their 200 pounds a day.
Balaenoptera musculus received international protection in the mid-1960s yet, for
reasons not fully understood, has scarcely rebounded. If the greatest of
creatures is to come back, Mate and Calambokidis believe, its demographics and
its movements need to be charted. The largest remaining population of the
species is most vulnerable in tropical waters where it gives birth to dainty,
twenty-five-foot-long, three-ton calves.
As we followed the corridor of the blue whale migration
southward, we took turns standing whale watch on the bridge, searching the horizon
for blows. Whales 5801 and 23043 had already arrived at the dome, according to
the satellite, and number 5670 was nearing it. The scientists were particularly
interested in 23043, because they knew the sex, female, and because she had
arrived at the dome early, as one might expect of a mother-to-be. The white
blue whale, 4172, if he was migrating to the dome this year, was out there
somewhere in the host moving south. The Pacific is a big ocean, however, and we
saw not a single spout.
Now and again, day and night, the ship shifted to neutral,
and the researchers put gear overboard: a CTD sensor, an echo sounder, and a
hydrophone. The CTD sensor recorded conductivity (a measure of salinity),
temperature, and depth. The echo sounder searched for concentrations of krill,
upon which the blue whale subsists almost entirely. "We're doing some
control observation on the way down," Mate explained. "If there's no
krill, will the whales pass through? If there are big concentrations of krill,
will they hang around? We're looking for poop. We'll try to scoop it up, see if
they're feeding. And checking their breath, which is fouler when they've eaten.
I don't find blue whale breath offensive—certainly not in comparison to gray
whale breath, which is really foul—but blue whale breath can be strong."
The hydrophone was to detect blue whale voices. The simple
song of the blue whale bull—the thumping, stentorian, basso profundo pulse of
the A call, followed by the continuous tone of the B call—is the mightiest song
in the sea, theoretically capable of propagating halfway across an ocean basin.
But big baleen whales often run silent. Except for a few dubious snatches of
song, we heard nothing at all.
When we reached the Costa Rica Dome, three days out of
The boats were Coast Guard surplus, a pair of
diesel-powered RHIBs, or rigid hull inflatable boats. Sticking with
meteorological nomenclature, we called the big one Hurricane and the
small one Squall. I generally went out on Hurricane. Its
commander was Bruce Mate. The second mate, and also the second Mate, was Mary
Lou, the expedition videographer and the professor's wife of 40 years. I was
the biopsy guy. My first job was to cock my crossbow, take a biopsy bolt from
the cooler that served as ammunition box, nock the bolt, and then remove the
sheath of aluminum foil protecting the tip from contamination by extraneous
DNA. The bolt, when shot into the whale, would excise a plug of skin and
blubber. About three inches back from its tip, the bolt was blocked by an oblong
ball of yellow rubber that prevented the projectile from going in too deep and
also served to bounce it off the whale.
Mounted on the rubber bow of Hurricane was a metal
bowsprit, the "pulpit," custom-made for this work. Each time we
closed on whales, I would follow Professor Mate up onto the narrow grate of the
pulpit deck. From its holster, which was a transparent plastic tube lashed to
the pulpit rail, Mate withdrew the satellite-tag "applicator," a
long-barreled, red-metal blunderbuss with a wooden rifle stock. This device,
originally a Norwegian invention for shooting line between ships, is powered by
compressed air from a scuba tank. The pop is adjustable. For blue whales, Mate
sets the dial at 85 pounds per square inch of pressure. For sperm whales, which
have very tough skin, he sets the pressure at 120 pounds. Both Mate and I wore
waist harnesses, which we clipped into slings on the pulpit rail, freeing up
our hands for the shooting.
The first we saw of a whale was almost always its blow.
When the sun was behind us, we sometimes saw a prismatic
scatter of color in the explosive expansion of spray and vapor—a few
milliseconds of rainbow—before the color shimmered out and the spout faded to
white.
Whenever a blue whale surfaced to blow nearby, I was
struck by the blowhole—a pair of nostrils countersunk atop the tapering mound
of the splash guard, built up almost into a kind of nose on the back of the
head. Other baleen whales have splash guards too, but not like this. This nose
was almost Roman. It seemed disproportionately large, even for the biggest of
whales. Its size explained that loud, concussive exhalation—less a breath than
a detonation—and its size explained the 30-foot spout. It was a mighty blow,
followed quickly by a mighty inhalation.
The second thing we saw of the whale was its back.
The blue whale is "a light bluish gray overall,
mottled with gray or grayish white," as one field guide describes it, and
the back is often, indeed, this advertised color, but just as often, depending
on the light, the back shows as silvery gray or pale tan. Whichever the color,
the back always has a glassy shine. When you are close, you see the water
sluicing off the vast back, first in rivulets and sheets, and then in a film
that flows in lovely, pulsed patterns downhill to the sea.
If blue whales above water are only putatively blue, then
below the surface they go indisputably turquoise. Balaenoptera musculus
is a pale whale, and when seen through the blue filter of the ocean, its pallor
goes turquoise or aquamarine. This view of the whale, downward through 20 to 50
feet of water, is for me the most haunting and evocative.
If the most beautiful hue of the blue whale is turquoise,
then the most beautiful form, the finest sculpture, is in the flukes. In the
first week of our tagging efforts, the tail always seemed to be waving goodbye.
"Ta-ta," it signaled. "Nice try. Better luck next time."
When a whale showed its flukes—when the two palmate blades poised high in the
air—we would break off the chase, because elevated flukes meant a deep dive.
But sometimes we saw the flukes close under the surface.
They were huge, wider than the boat, and in motion they were hypnotically
lovely. "In no living thing are the lines of beauty more exquisitely
defined than in the crescentic borders of these flukes," Melville writes
in Moby Dick.
The last thing we saw of the whale was its
"flukeprint."
When a whale or dolphin swims at shallow depths,
turbulence from its flukes rises to form a circular slick on the surface: the
footprint or flukeprint. The flukeprints of blue whales are large and
surprisingly persistent. The smooth patch lingers long after the whale is gone.
"It's a measure of how much energy is in the stroke," Mate told me
one afternoon when he caught me staring at one of these slicks. The circle of
the flukeprint is perfectly smooth, except for a few faint curves that mark the
continued upwelling of energy. Eventually the chop of the ocean begins to erode
the slick from the outside inward, but only slowly.
The emphatic flukeprint was another of those discouraging
signs that caused us to call off a chase. "Holy smokes!" Mate said
one afternoon, as we motored into the middle of a huge one. Ladd Irvine, a
research assistant who served as helmsman, laughed in admiration: "We're
not going to see him again for a while."
Out on the pulpit, the professor spread his feet for
balance, rested the butt of his applicator on the grating of the pulpit deck,
and gripped the barrel just below the muzzle-loaded, chiseled tip of his
satellite tag. His quick-dry khaki pants luffed and billowed in the sea wind,
and now and again the breeze brought a powerful smell of staleness and mold,
mixed sometimes with an alarming flatulence. Whew, Bruce! I thought on more
than one occasion. Then one day, as the wind rippled in his khakis and we
closed in on the spout ahead, the professor emitted a blast so powerful,
inhuman, and malodorous that I realized he had to be completely innocent. What
I had been smelling, all along, was not our leader. I had been smelling the bad
breath of blue whales.
For almost a week at the dome, every whale slipped away
from us. On our sixth day our luck changed. We saw three spouts to the
southeast that morning and launched Hurricane.
The first two whales toyed with us, as usual, allowing us
close, then pulling away. The third allowed us to get in perfect position. We
paced the great turquoise shape, keeping abreast of the flukes as the whale
coursed along underwater to starboard. As the animal surfaced to blow, it
angled up from turquoise abstraction into photo-realism.
My instructions as biopsy guy were to wait for the bang of
the tag applicator before firing my crossbow. The smooth flank of the whale
filled my whole field of view; there was no way I could miss. At the bang of
the applicator, I pulled my trigger. The bolt left the crossbow, and a black
hole, small but inky, appeared where I had been aiming. It took a millisecond
for me to understand that I was responsible for it, and I felt a pang of regret
and guilt. I did that? I thought, like a boy whose pop fly has gone through a
stained-glass window.
Then my sense of proportion returned. In relation to the
vastness of this whale, my hole was just a mosquito bite. This was not a crime;
it was a blow for science. On the pulpit, Mate and I unclipped our harnesses
and shook hands.
The blue whale writes a kind of longhand on the surface of
the sea. There is the ovoid slick that forms above the head the moment before
emergence, the long, narrow slick left by the arching back, and the circular
slick of the flukeprint. There are the sputtering white fountains that a blue
whale raises by blowing early, still gliding under the surface—a sequence of
premature spouts. There are bubble blasts. I saw my first of these just ahead
of the bowsprit, about 12 feet deep, as the blowhole of a whale erupted a big
bolus of bubbles. It expanded toward the surface, vitreous and glittery, like a
crystal chandelier falling upward. "Bubble blast," observed Mate.
This particular bubble blast seemed to be commentary
directed at our persistent and irritating little boat—some kind of whale
expletive, probably. It rose above the whale's head like a speech balloon in a
Gary Larson cartoon. Its message was something like "@*#&%√!?!"
Of all the marks of blue whale cursive, the most colorful
was the defecation trail. The first defecation we saw was in a yearling, a
little 50-footer. This whale blew 40 yards away, and behind it the ocean
brightened in a long, red-orange contrail. "We have a defecation,"
The evidence for feeding that we observed firsthand in the
defecation trails was corroborated in the ship's laboratory. On her computer
screen, Robyn Matteson, Mate's graduate student, monitored the echo sounder and
the concentrations of krill it detected at the dome. Krill distribution was
patchier than anyone had imagined, but dense schools of the small crustaceans
were plainly here. Across the lab table, at their own computers, Calambokidis
and Erin Oleson of Scripps Institution of Oceanography studied the dive
profiles recorded by acoustic tags they had succeeded in applying to several
whales. The acoustic tags, deployed by pole and attached by suction cups, stay
on the whale for hours, not months, like the more invasive satellite tags. Here
at the dome, the depth recorders on the tags showed dives to 800 feet and
deeper. The vertical line marking each dive, on reaching its greatest depth,
began to zigzag in the sawtooth pattern characteristic of blue whales when
lunge feeding on krill.
The evidence for calving at the Costa Rica Dome proved
more elusive, but after many fruitless days, it arrived finally, to starboard,
by way of a mother and her calf.
The pair were moving slowly, spending a lot of time at the
surface. The mother surprised us by allowing her calf to turn toward Pacific
Storm. A mother whale often interposes herself between her calf and
potential danger, but this mother was an easygoing, Montessori sort of parent,
and she let her baby explore.
John Calambokidis drove Squall out to snap surface
pictures for photo identification. Nicklin and cameraman Ernie Kovacs grabbed
their gear and went along. On nearing the whales, they pulled on their fins and
slipped overboard. At first they saw nothing through their dive masks but blue.
Then Kovacs, looking for the youngster, was startled to see it pass, maybe five
feet below his fins. This whale was just a baby, yet its blue back seemed to
pass under him endlessly. The calf, gliding by Nicklin, rolled slightly to
bring an eye to bear on him. It peered into the glass orb of the camera
housing, and Nicklin's shutter winked back.
After
21 days at the Costa Rica Dome, we could stay no longer and turned north for
On
the voyage home, we took stock. There had been disappointments: We wished we
had satellite tagged more whales, had seen more calves, had experienced more
underwater encounters with blue whales. We were sorry not to have glimpsed
whale 4172, the white bull. But for the most part we were satisfied.
In
three weeks spent crisscrossing the dome, we had succeeded in finding three
whales satellite tagged in
The
news from the dome is good.
The
grandest creature in all creation has been hunted by our kind, the thinking
ape, to near extinction. Its numbers still are low, but it was hard not to feel
optimistic. In my bunk with Nicklin's laptop, lingering over his digital
portraits of the curious calf, I thought I could read, in its strange visage, a
gargantuan impishness. I found this cheering. The young do give us hope.
On
the voyage home, we found time for reflection, and I understood why the blue
whale's flukeprint so mesmerized me each time I saw it at the dome. That big,
circular slick is the signature of the species, the John Hancock of
flukeprints, outsize and insistent. It jumps out boldly from the parchment. Its
uncanny persistence on the sea's surface, defying the choppiness, is a good
omen. Appearing at the dome, this winter haven, it suggests that the blue whale
might after all defy the chop of history.
"Still here!" the flukeprint says.
Ken
Brower writes on the natural world and lives in
Courtesy: National Geographic March 2009.
