Soundings: Journeys in the Company of Whales: a Memoir by Doreen Cunningham

Author:Doreen Cunningham
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2022-07-12T00:00:00+00:00

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Aġviġit are on the move, gliding through channels and under the puzzle of ice. Their backs leave a trail along the roof of the frozen ocean. Using the pockets and holes where they’ve broken through, they can breathe using tiny gaps because of the blowhole on the summit of their mountainous cranium.

AÄ¡viq is a swimming head. Its mouth, proportionally larger than that of any other animal, gapes like a moving crater in the plankton-dusted streaks of light from above. Whales skim-feeding look serene, but the torque on their jaw when they close it is immense. To maintain body weight an adult swallows up to two tons of food a day, synthesizing the tiny creatures sieved through the baleen into blubber and muscle.

Baleen is the evolutionary invention that allows the great whales to reach their enormous size while they filter-feed and travel vast distances. Bowheads are from the Mysticeti suborder, which lost their teeth and grew rigid plates, made from keratin like our hair and nails, around twenty-five to thirty million years ago. The giant polar whale, aġviq, has approximately 320 plates of baleen in each of two racks on either side of the upper jaw. They grow longer than in any other species, in some cases to more than thirteen feet. Sometimes aġviġit move through surface waters feeding together in an arrow formation like a V. In this way prey may spill from the mouth of the leading whale and be caught by those behind. The whales are extravagant, with white chin and belly markings, beautiful black skin, and blubber that can be half a yard thick. With aġviġit, all the vital statistics are high. Their population is slimmed down though. The lowest pre-whaling estimate put worldwide numbers of bowheads at fifty thousand.7 By the time commercial whaling effectively ended in 1921, fewer than three thousand were left worldwide. The depletion of bowheads and walrus caused horrific famine on St. Lawrence Island in the Bering Sea in the late 1870s.8

The bowheads number approximately twenty-three thousand today.9 Calves grow rapidly while they’re nursing, and the Iñupiat typically used ribs of one-year-old bowheads as fishing net weights because they were so hard and heavy. After the supply of rich milk stops, it’s impossible to sustain the same rate of growth with their short baleen. Until they are five years old, fat and bone from the skeleton are withdrawn to build up their enormous heads and the forests in their mouths. During this time, the ribs can lose 40 percent of their mass. Orcas in the western Okhotsk Sea have profited from this weakness. A drone filmed a pod attacking a juvenile whale three times their size, too big to drown. The matriarch battered its side, crushing the ribs, while others blocked its escape. Juvenile carcasses had been seen with wounds thought to be from orcas, but their tactics were mysterious until the ramming attack was captured on camera. Scars heal white on the black skin of aġviq. More marks consistent

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