<div dir="ltr"><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size:14pt;font-family:Arial,sans-serif">When facing a human attack, sperm whales abandoned the
defensive circles used against orca and swam upwind instead.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><b><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size:20pt;font-family:Arial,sans-serif">Sperm whales in 19th century shared ship attack information</span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size:14pt;font-family:Arial,sans-serif">Philip Hoare</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size:14pt;font-family:Arial,sans-serif">17 Mar 2021</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size:14pt;font-family:Arial,sans-serif"><a href="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" style="color:rgb(5,99,193)">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></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size:12pt;font-family:Arial,sans-serif"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size:12pt;font-family:Arial,sans-serif">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.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size:12pt;font-family:Arial,sans-serif"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size:12pt;font-family:Arial,sans-serif">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.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size:12pt;font-family:Arial,sans-serif"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size:12pt;font-family:Arial,sans-serif">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: <u>that information about what was
happening to them was being collectively shared among the whales, who made
vital changes to their behaviour</u>. As their culture made fatal first contact
with ours, they learned quickly from their mistakes.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size:12pt;font-family:Arial,sans-serif"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size:12pt;font-family:Arial,sans-serif">“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.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size:12pt;font-family:Arial,sans-serif"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size:12pt;font-family:Arial,sans-serif">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.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size:12pt;font-family:Arial,sans-serif"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size:12pt;font-family:Arial,sans-serif">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.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size:12pt;font-family:Arial,sans-serif"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size:12pt;font-family:Arial,sans-serif">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.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size:12pt;font-family:Arial,sans-serif"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size:12pt;font-family:Arial,sans-serif">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.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size:12pt;font-family:Arial,sans-serif"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size:12pt;font-family:Arial,sans-serif">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.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size:12pt;font-family:Arial,sans-serif"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size:12pt;font-family:Arial,sans-serif">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.”</span></p></div><div id="DAB4FAD8-2DD7-40BB-A1B8-4E2AA1F9FDF2"><br> <table style="border-top:1px solid #d3d4de">
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