Spying on Whales by Nick Pyenson

Author:Nick Pyenson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2018-06-26T04:00:00+00:00

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Typically, humpback whales migrate from the tropical latitudes of Hawaii to the panhandle of Alaska every year. They rest, mate, and give birth in the tropics during the winter, then navigate—by stars, by the Earth’s magnetic field, by acoustic or visual recognition or a combination of those, we still don’t really know—to the outer and inner coasts of the Alexander Archipelago, off Alaska. They arrive in the spring and gorge themselves on the herring runs. It’s a long trip, but it seems to be worth it; today, no longer on the U.S. endangered species list, they reliably show up in large numbers.

One spring Ari and Jeremy invited me to join their team of researchers on a humpback-tagging expedition aboard the Northern Song. Humpbacks in Alaska have been known to hunt together using bubble nets—literally a curtain of air bubbles emitted at depth by one or more individual whales moving in a tight circle. As the bubbles rise, they corral a school of fish in a cylinder; humpbacks then gorge themselves by lunging upward inside the cylinder, about as close as they can get to feeding on fish in a barrel. These coordinated feeding groups of whales aren’t particularly stable—they’ll assemble and disassemble randomly—but the behavior is certainly learned and transmitted from humpback to humpback across ocean basins. Tagging was one way to capture some basic information about this amazing and mysterious behavior, which some scientists even describe as a kind of humpback culture.

Beyond a valuable opportunity for tagging, the expedition was also an opportunity to put my phone away, ignore e-mail, and spend the entire day talking, mostly about science. (Mostly.) The trip was the opportunity to push at the questions sitting on the edges of our disciplines, at the intersection of Ari’s understanding of behavior and local ecology, Jeremy’s grasp of physiology and biomechanics, and my background in paleontology and Earth history. The basic questions about how whales do what they do require all these fields of understanding, and I’ve always thought the best way to answer them was through this Venn diagram of disciplines and personalities.

This expedition had an additional perk for me: it was my turn to tag. Jeremy assembled and handed me a carbon-fiber pole equipped at the end with the latest tag, a piece of neon-pink plastic with cameras on the front and back, able to record everything going on in multiple directions at the same time—including other whales nearby. The pole felt heavy and ungainly. I felt like I was sweeping the air with a twenty-foot-long broom that held a five-pound weight suspended at the end. The next step was to somehow stand off the bow of a boat as an eighty-thousand-pound wild animal moved in the water a pole’s length away, and affix a tiny piece of plastic to it. I was nervous, like a rookie before a game-time debut. Ari smiled and tried to reassure me with slow, deliberate instructions.

We didn’t really need to do much chasing. The whales, having ended a feeding run, simply stalled and bobbed at the surface.

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