Kissing grey whales, those giant stirrers of ocean fertility.

Lots of cool stuff about grey, humpback, and blue whales.

Events: I will perform my comedy circus biodiversity classi, Fly Thru Time with Leapin’ Louie, at the Clinton Street Theater, 2:00 April 20, 4/20 to you.  Last time in Portland for a while. Tickets and info here: https://bit.ly/4akPwmZ

A month ago two whale researchers on a boat off the coast of New England thought they had found a critically endangered Atlantic Right Whale but it turned out to be a grey whale. This became a news story because grey whales have been extinct in the Atlantic for 200 years.

Gray whales are one of the largest animals who have ever lived. They are highly intelligent filter feeders who live off of tiny amphipods they glean from kelp and water, especially at river mouths.  Unlike other whales, gray whales live their whole life within a couple of miles of the shore. Most gray whales migrate from lagoons in Baja Mexico to the gulf of Alaska, and back every year, one of the longest migrations of any mammal. These are the whales that you see commonly off the coast of Oregon, Washington, and California. There are only about 14,500 gray whales on the planet, the population of one small human town, yet somehow grey whales have survived this lifestyle for 20 million years. They gather every winter in shallow lagoons in Baja where they mate, and then 12 months later, give birth and teach their calves how to live. They are a conservation success story on the West Coast of North America, having returned back to something like their pre-industrial whaling numbers.

In Baja California a year and a bit ago I had a chance to spend a couple of hours seeing grey whales up very close in the wild, petting them and even kissing them off the side of the boat. They’re called grey whales but up close they are mottled black and white and covered with one-inch wide barnacles.. In Baja the tour operators don’t need to chase the whales, they just get themselves into an area near a lot of whales and wait for the whales to approach.  Some groups of whales come right up to your boat to get petted, adored and they look you in the eye. They enjoy when the humans get excited.  Mama’s push their calves towards boats to get petted. They rub their backs on the bottom of the boat.  We could see hundreds of grey whales spouting and spy hopping in the distance in all directions. All thes

This friendly wild whale behavior is more extraordinary when you remember that humans on the west coast almost hunted grey whales into extinction twice. Grey whales were easier to find than other large whales since they stayed close to shore although they had a reputation for fighting back when harpooned.  In 1857 a whaling captain out of San Francisco named Charles Scammon discovered the lagoons in Baja where large numbers of grey whales mate and birth calves in small bodies of water.  Within a few years the whales were gone. But a few survived and by 60 years later their numbers had bounced back.  So whaling restarted and almost drove them extinct again. In 1949 grey whales were finally protected by the International Whaling Commission that had been founded three years earlier. The grey whales had long before been wiped out on the Asian side of the Pacific and the Atlantic. 

(Mama grey whale and cub)

We continued to hunt other species of whales. In the 1960’s the American Biologist Roger Payne started to investigate reports from the US Navy of songs in the sea.  The navy was listening very intently for Soviet submarine and battleship propeller sounds but they kept hearing strange song-like sounds. Payne discovered that these songs were principally made by the 5000 or so humpback whales still in existence. Payne recorded and released 33 RPM records of the whale’s eery and complex songs and they became very popular. The songs sounded to some like a cry for help.  A shared consciousness stirred and the anti-whaling protests of a few passionate proponents soon became a mass movement.  In 1986 large scale commercial whaling of all species was banned worldwide.  Humans make big mistakes with this world but we do have the capacity to learn from our mistakes.

We’ve learned lots more about humpback whale songs since then.  They sing for long periods of time at a low frequency that can travel a few hundred miles.  Humpback whales at the same breeding grounds sing nearly identical songs. Individuals change the song, sometimes gradually, sometimes suddenly and the new songs will be imitated by others.  Each calving pack ends up with its own distinctive song which changes from year to year. Researchers have found recently that over a couple of years, new songs will spread from one distant pack to another.  In a study published August of 2022, Ellen Garland, a marine biologist from the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, found that a new song created by humpback whales off Eastern Australia spread in a year 6000 miles to whales in French Polynesia and then a year later to whales off Ecuador in South America.  Humpback whales have a worldwide culture of song.  Humpback whales can also be seen off the Northwest North American shore.  humpback-whale-songs-cultural-evolution

I think whales were an excellent group of animals to focus on for the early environmental movement. (Another was peregrine falcons and eagles, see my last email) Besides being enormous, intelligent, highly social mammals with much in common with humans, they play a key role in ocean fertility.  Much of the world-wide ocean is nutrient poor and like a blue desert.  Where currents pick nutrients off the ocean floor or rivers pour in nutrients or winds blow minerals off deserts, in these places large populations of ocean life flourishes.  Whales too are a source of ocean fertility. They are so large that they stir nutrients off the bottom and their poop is a major cycler of nutrients in the ocean.  It’s called the whale pump.

Blue Whales are the largest animal to have ever lived as far as we know.  There were an estimated 250,000 blue whales (scientific guess-timation) before industrial whaling.  Their extinction was narrowly avoided when blue whale hunting was banned in 1966 and they have recovered to somewhere between 10,000 and 25,000 individuals.  The wide range is because we know so little about the largest animals on earth.  We don’t know their routes of travel, or where most of them calve.  We don’t know why they haven’t recovered to higher populations.  We have fished out the large predator fish all over the world and we have little idea what effects that is having on ocean ecosystems, especially  the phytoplankton that is the bottom of the ocean food chain.  We know only that the fish stocks that we fish have plummeted around the world.  We don’t know much about how ocean warming or acidification caused by global warming is changing the ocean ecosystems either. Two thirds of the earth is covered by ocean and because of the ocean’s great depth, the oceans represent a much larger percentage of all habitable space on the planet.  But much of what takes place in the oceans is still a mystery to us.

The 10 largest animals on earth:

1. Blue Whale - 98 feet

2. Fin Whale - 90 feet

3. Sperm Whale - 67 feet

4. Right Whale - 60 feet

5. Bowhead Whale - 59 feet

6. Humpback Whale - 52 feet

7. Sei Whale - 52 feet 

8. Gray Whale - 49 feet

9. Bryde’s Whale - 46 feet

10. Minke Whale - up to 35 feet

Re-wild the world! Let’s make nature-based carbon capture!

At the United Nations Biodiversity Conference (COP15) 196 nations agreed to set aside 30% of land and ocean for conservation by 2030.

What I’m reading:  A Life on Our Planet, by David Attenborough.  The best short summary of our environmental situation IMO and a life witness statement by Sir Attenborough. Or watch the wonderful film version: https://www.netflix.com/title/80216393

Thanks, please send a note on substack. And subscribe for free:  https://bit.ly/3TVxJwR