The Sea Inside by Hoare Philip

Author:Hoare, Philip [Hoare, Philip]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2013-09-17T16:00:00+00:00

Up on the rocky headland that overlooks this spectacle, I sit alongside Marcelo on a wooden stool in his concrete cell. Silently, we watch the waves unroll. A few moments before, from the top of the field behind the vigia, up the grassy path where lizards scatter with every step, I had spotted dark shapes in the sea, moving swiftly. Five or six of them, long and sleek, with dorsal fins set far back. Dashing back to the vigia, I consulted with Marcelo and his charts. I realised there’s only one type of whale that matches this fast-moving group – which has now vanished into the silvery expanse and is nowhere to be seen.

Beaked whales are bizarre animals. Some have heads that resemble a bird’s, while their bodies are spindle-shaped, more like archeocetes, the ancient whales; their sharp beaks evoke even older ichthyosaurs. In 1823, when the French naturalist Georges Cuvier discovered the skull of the beaked whale that would bear his name, he assumed the animal to which it belonged was extinct. It took fifty years for scientists to establish that the species was still alive.

More than any other whale, the family of Ziphiidae elude our scrutiny, swimming in the deep ocean, far from land. Later, in New Zealand, Anton van Helden, a world expert on beaked whales, would show me the skull of a spade-toothed whale, Mesoplodon traversii. The cranium, a scooped-out ski-slope of calciated matter, more abstract sculpture than bone, its lower jaw studded with what look like stumpy tusks, stands on a shelf in a storeroom of the Te Papa museum in Wellington, until now one of only three known specimens; it is the world’s rarest whale, and has never been seen alive. Only recently a cow/calf pair was washed ashore on the Bay of Plenty, giving the first true idea of what these five-metre-long animals look like. In the past two decades alone, three new species of beaked whales have been identified, raising the total to twenty-one, although they’re constantly being revised – six exotic genera in search of themselves, with names as strange as the animals they evoke: Ziphius, Tasmacetus, Berardius, Indopacetus, Hyperoodon, Mesoplodon.

One reason for such obscurity is that beaked whales spend so much of their time below the surface, foraging in the depths where they suck squid through their mouths. So seldom seen, they exist in a category of their own. They are (mostly) defined by their prominent beaks, often with a pair of teeth that jut out even when their mouths are shut. Their slender bodies are perfectly suited to diving; their pectoral fins fit into ‘pockets’ to reduce drag. They’ve found their evolutionary niche, these middling-sized whales; one lying on my garage roof would just about overhang it. As varied as any family of songbirds, they suggest some avian-cetacean hybrid, especially the Cuvier’s beaked whale, Ziphius cavirostris, which I once saw from the unlikely vantage point of a cross-Channel ferry.

As we approached northern Spain over the deep underwater shelf of

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