Whales

Intro

The study of whales is called cetology, and the whale family has two branches, the extant branches of which consist of the toothed whales and the baleen whales. Most of the whales you'll probably be familiar with are toothed, like orcas and sperm whales, while the baleen whales are filter feeders like humpback whales. The toothed clade also includes the beaked whales, which we still know very little about because they stick more closely to deep sea habitats,so we rarely spot them and when a carcass washes ashore it is usually already badly decomposed. For this reason, this page is stickin' with what we know, and that's your toothy non-beaked whales and baleen feeders.

That unknowabilty is one of the main reasons humans have been drawn to whales: we loooooove to categorize and analyze and catalog and understand, but what we love even more is something that resists our attempts to do any of that to it. Humans don't like to be held back by our terrestrial origins, but for most of our history our knowledge of the sea has been limited to the layers closest to the surface, or to any sea-dwelling elements that don't survive the watery realms, and either float up to us or are pulled up by us. Until about the 19th century, we mostly could only catch a fairly brief glimpse of live whales, and most of our knowledge came from whalers, who had to learn their behaviors and anatomy in order to hunt them. Your boy Ishmael never had a SCUBA suit, SONAR, underwater cameras or microphones, or submersibles, so until those technologies came about in the latter half of the 20th century, all we had were tantalizing hints and limited peeks at surfacing whales or washed-up corpses to study. The imagination loves nothing more than to be teased, and whales have been romanticized and synonymous with mystery for most of humanity's attempts at science.

They also straddle two worlds: the depths of the sea and the surface of the water. Humans spent millenia puzzling whether to classify them as fish or something else long before we had even close to modern definitions of what a mammal is, and that ambidexterity has long led to imaginings of whales being able to traverse the world we terrestrial bipeds know and those we don't. This is a note to myself to briefly allude to mythology and world religions and then link to that section farther down the page for more explication. These pages span both some of what we know about whales as well as some exploration of the more abstract significances our nebulous understandings of these sea beasts have lent to them. I hope you'll see that in the case of these giants of the deep and their co-existence with us, both elements are vital to our understanding of them.

Social structures and culture

The average human non-zoologist layperson knows that most social animals have, if not a heirarchy or ranking system exactly, roles within their group. With most whales that we know of, roles are assumed depending on the individual's age, sex, and level of ability: the full-grown whales at their prime take on most of the protective roles of the pod, keeping the females with calves and elderly individuals toward the center of the group when a predator attacks, for instance (although note farther down where they have adapted this behavior in response to human whaling in the 19th century). Increasingly, human zoologists are finding more and more social species to pass knowledge and behaviors based on it along from individual to individual, across groups, and down through generations.

Examples via whale "speech": accents and songs

Other examples (hunting techniques, ect.)

Don't forget how they have memes...and add in recent developments in whale "throwback culture"!

Cetacean-Homo sapiens relations

Expanded but still brief history of human attempts to understand whales.

Whaling and its effects on whale populations: both in numbers and behavioral changes.

Human concerns for whalebeing and conservation

I am calling it that and no one can stop me.

Save the Whales and Greenpeace

The guy who made albums of whale songs

Going overboard: the twin cases of Keiko and Blackfish

Behaviors in adapting to humans

Whales smashing yachts!!1a1!A!

A few years ago, orcas were going viral as alleged vandals of yachts in the Strait of Gibraltar, purposely sinking boats of a certain size, and humans, as we do, had to figure out the meaning. As we like to project our own sentiments onto animals, we noticed that the boats were mostly yachts, and with income inequality high and increasingly visible, it was easy to start joking that the orcas were attacking boats owned by the wealthy. More sober conjectures speculated that the whales were avenging themselves of past bad behavior by humans: one theory was a calf killed by a boat or humans, and another was a perilous run-in with fishing line or nets that created a negative association in one particular female who was teaching other orcas to attack boats.

While it turned out there was a particular female prominently involved and passing the behavior along, and that the whales were indeed teaching each other the behavior across pods, it now looks like there were primarily two groups of killer whales partaking: one, the aforementioned female, nicknamed "White Gladis", and her disciples; and the other, a group of juveniles who were described as "bored".

USA Today has a data-filled breakdown of the attempts to analyze what the heck these aggro sea-pandas are doing:

What originally appeared to be attacks on more than 673 boats since 2020 now seem more likely to be a bunch of bored teenage orcas looking for something to do, cetacean expert Alexandre Zerbini said last year. Essentially, the whales started a fad of playing with boat rudders. [...] He imagines a young orca butted its head against a boat’s rudder one time, and when it moved, the orca thought, “This is fun.” After ramming it a few times, a piece of the rudder broke off, and that was even more fun because there was something to play with. “There’s documented evidence of the orcas then playing with the pieces,” he said.

Whale songs!

Taken to be a "fish tale" told by sailors until the World Wars, when humans began studying biogenetic echolocation in dolphins and bats while trying to develop radar and underwater acoustic intelligence-gathering.

When I first heard it I took it for a joke, intended for me to bite at. But one day there was a rehearsing of experiences and I found that the ship's master really believed that whales do sing. Captain Kelley, of the brig Eliza, was the first to discover this singing, but he was laughed at for it. In 1882 several ships lay at anchor under Indian Point. As usual, the masters got together, and in the midst of their conversation Captain Kelley broke in, "There's a bowhead!" Everybody laughed about "Kelley's band," but he insisted that whales were nearby and he was going to give chase. One master suggested that it was the copper on the ship, another that it was seals, another that it was the ice, and so on. But when Captain Kelley took up anchor and set sail every ship followed him. One whale was caught. Soon more singing was heard. The result was the capture of several whales. After having attention thus forcibly called to the singing, it was not long before the masters were on the lookout for it.

Notable whales, real and fictional