[OANNES Foro] Sperm whales in 19th century shared ship attack information and made vital changes to their behaviour

[Mario Cabrejos]

When facing a human attack, sperm whales abandoned the defensive circles
used against orca and swam upwind instead.

*Sperm whales in 19th century shared ship attack information*

Philip Hoare

17 Mar 2021

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/mar/17/sperm-whales-in-19th-century-shared-ship-attack-information?utm_source=Nature+Briefing&utm_campaign=fad63894c2-briefing-dy-20210317&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_c9dfd39373-fad63894c2-45511414



A remarkable new study on how whales behaved when attacked by humans in the
19th century has implications for the way they react to changes wreaked by
humans in the 21st century.



The paper, published by the Royal Society on Wednesday, is authored by Hal
Whitehead and Luke Rendell, pre-eminent scientists working with cetaceans,
and Tim D Smith, a data scientist, and their research addresses an age-old
question: if whales are so smart, why did they hang around to be killed?
The answer? They didn’t.



Using newly digitised logbooks detailing the hunting of sperm whales in the
north Pacific, the authors discovered that within just a few years, the
strike rate of the whalers’ harpoons fell by 58%. This simple fact leads to
an astonishing conclusion: *that information about what was happening to
them was being collectively shared among the whales, who made vital changes
to their behaviour*. As their culture made fatal first contact with ours,
they learned quickly from their mistakes.



“Sperm whales have a traditional way of reacting to attacks from orca,”
notes Hal Whitehead, who spoke to the Guardian from his house overlooking
the ocean in Nova Scotia, where he teaches at Dalhousie University. Before
humans, orca were their only predators, against whom sperm whales form
defensive circles, their powerful tails held outwards to keep their
assailants at bay. But such techniques “just made it easier for the whalers
to slaughter them”, says Whitehead.



It was a frighteningly rapid killing, and it accompanied other threats to
the ironically named Pacific. From whaling and sealing stations to
missionary bases, western culture was imported to an ocean that had
remained largely untouched. As Herman Melville, himself a whaler in the
Pacific in 1841, would write in Moby-Dick (1851): “The moot point is,
whether Leviathan can long endure so wide a chase, and so remorseless a
havoc.”



Sperm whales are highly socialised animals, able to communicate over great
distances. They associate in clans defined by the dialect pattern of their
sonar clicks. Their culture is matrilinear, and information about the new
dangers may have been passed on in the same way whale matriarchs share
knowledge about feeding grounds. Sperm whales also possess the largest
brain on the planet. It is not hard to imagine that they understood what
was happening to them.



The hunters themselves realised the whales’ efforts to escape. They saw
that the animals appeared to communicate the threat within their attacked
groups. Abandoning their usual defensive formations, the whales swam upwind
to escape the hunters’ ships, themselves wind-powered. ‘This was cultural
evolution, much too fast for genetic evolution,’ says Whitehead.



And in turn, it evokes another irony. Now, just as whales are beginning to
recover from the industrial destruction by 20th-century whaling fleets –
whose steamships and grenade harpoons no whale could evade – they face new
threats created by our technology. ‘They’re having to learn not to get hit
by ships, cope with the depredations of longline fishing, the changing
source of their food due to climate change,’ says Whitehead. Perhaps the
greatest modern peril is noise pollution, one they can do nothing to evade.



Whitehead and Randall have written persuasively of whale culture, expressed
in localised feeding techniques as whales adapt to shifting sources, or in
subtle changes in humpback song whose meaning remains mysterious. The same
sort of urgent social learning the animals experienced in the whale wars of
two centuries ago is reflected in the way they negotiate today’s uncertain
world and what we’ve done to it.



As Whitehead observes, whale culture is many millions of years older than
ours. Perhaps we need to learn from them as they learned from us. After
all, it was the whales that provoked Melville to his prophesies in
Moby-Dick. “We account the whale immortal in his species, however
perishable in individuality,” he wrote, “and if ever the world is to be
again flooded … then the eternal whale will still survive, and … spout his
frothed defiance to the skies.”

<https://www.avast.com/sig-email?utm_medium=email&utm_source=link&utm_campaign=sig-email&utm_content=webmail>
Libre
de virus. www.avast.com
<https://www.avast.com/sig-email?utm_medium=email&utm_source=link&utm_campaign=sig-email&utm_content=webmail>
<#DAB4FAD8-2DD7-40BB-A1B8-4E2AA1F9FDF2>
------------ próxima parte ------------
Se ha borrado un adjunto en formato HTML...
URL: <http://lista.oannes.org.pe/pipermail/oannes-oannes.org.pe/attachments/20210318/ef33601c/attachment.html>