RIGHT WHALES DECODED

(Southern right whale. Credit: © Brian J. Skerry / National Geographic Stock. Via the World Wildlife Fund.)

An interesting new paper in MEPS (Marine Ecology Progress Series) on the southern right whales of New Zealand and Australia.

Background: All right whales, north and south, were taxed hard and early by human whalers—the "right" whales to hunt because their high blubber content made them likely to float after death and because they frequented near-shore waters.

That made them easy to get to even in the days of rowing.

(A painting, artist unknown, showing the hunting of right whales. La Baleine. The Whale, circa 1840. Credit: Wikimedia Commons.)

Some 150,000 Southern Hemisphere right whales (Eubalaena australis) were killed by 19th-century whalers and by illegal 20th-century Soviet whalers—driving the species to the brink of extinction.

Around Australia and New Zealand, hunting peaked in the 1830s-1840s, after which the species was commercially extinct.

(Geographic range of the southern right whale. Via the Red List.)

The latest IUCN estimate of southern right whales dates back to 1997 when they calculated a population of 7,500 individuals. 

At that time, several breeding populations (in Argentina/Brazil, South Africa, and Australia) showed evidence of strong recovery, with a doubling time of 10-12 years.

Which means there might be a fair few more than 7,500 whales today.

(Southern right whale with calf. Credit: John Atkinson. Via Marine Science Today.)

According to the authors of the MEPS paper, no right whales were seen in the waters around mainland New Zealand for 35 years between 1928 and 1963. A few slowly returned. Yet as recently as 2005 less than 12 sexually mature females were found there.

But another group, known as the New Zealand subantarctic group, has a more robust population estimated at about 936 whales today. Forebears of this group were likely present in some small numbers even in the bleakest killing years.

(Credit: E. Carroll, et al, via MEPS.)

The authors of the MEPS paper wondered about the levels of relatedness between those two whale stocks in New Zealand, as well as among whales in Australia.

They used mitochondrial DNA and microsatellite genotypes to identify 707 individual whales and test them for genetic differentiation. You can see the breakdown of that analysis in the graphic above.

Their data, combined with historical evidence, led the researchers to hypothesize that individuals from the NZ subantarctic are slowly recolonizing mainland New Zealand waters, where a calving ground was obliterated in the 19th century.



(Southern right whale. Via.)

The genetic evidence also suggests that the whales of southeast Australian are a remnant stock—different from the whales of southwest Australia:

At the onset of whaling, southern right whales, in particular cows with calves, were found across the southern coast of Australia during the austral winter (IWC 1986). There was no real discontinuity in distribution or catch records to suggest subdivision of calving grounds in this region (IWC 1986). Based on the timing of catches at shore whaling stations during the 19th century, Dawbin (1986) proposed that southern right whales undertook 2 distinct patterns of migration along the southern coast of Australia during the austral winter. The southern right whales that migrated north along the east coast of Tasmania [the small island off the southeast tip of Australia, as seen in the graphic above] moved in a northeasterly direction up the coast of Victoria and New South Wales, while those that migrated north along the west coast of Tasmania moved from east to west along the southern coast of South and Western Australia. The latter pattern is still extant, based on the movement of photo-identified southern right whales and has been termed the 'counter-clockwise' migratory pattern (Kemper et al. 1997, Burnell 2001).

(The Southern Ocean. Credit: Connormah via Wikimedia Commons.)

They also found evidence that New Zealand and Australian right whales mingle in higher-latitude summer feeding grounds each austral spring—making the health of those cold Southern Ocean waters as important a component of recovery as the whales' breeding efforts.

And what epic efforts they are. Imagine a 12-foot-long penis—known colloquially as a sea snake—plus a tons' worth of testes per male. Mating becomes a sport of endurance. And sperm competition.

But you don't have to imagine it. As usual, just for us, David Attenborough respects the privacy of none.

Carroll, E., Patenaude, N., Alexander, A., Steel, D., Harcourt, R., Childerhouse, S., Smith, S., Bannister, J., Constantine, R., & Baker, C. (2011). Population structure and individual movement of southern right whales around New Zealand and Australia Marine Ecology Progress Series DOI: 10.3354/meps09145

THE PELAGIC ZONE

PIELAGO from Rafa Herrero Massieu on Vimeo.

Here's some of the most beautiful footage of one of my favorite worlds—the bottomless blue waters far offshore known as the pelagic zone. Life here shines.

Whether you've had the good fortune to visit this realm or not, you're in for a treat with this short film by Rafa Herrero Massieu, shot in the waters around the Canary Islands. 

A few highlights to look out for, with timecodes:

• Rare underwater footage of a beaked whale (not sure which species): 01:10
• Common dolphins showing their gorgeous colors: 01:16
• An Atlantic spotted dolphin emitting signature whistles: 01:26
• Bryde's whale (I think, or else a Sei whale): 03:23

(Loggerhead turtle. Credit: ukanda via Wikimedia Commons.)

Because big life is relatively sparse in the pelagic zone, encounters between individuals tend to generate a lot of curiosity. 

You can see how all these species investigate the novelty of a person in their world—particularly the pilot whales at 03:00 and the triggerfish at 03:21.

For more of Rafa Herrero Massieu's films, visit his blog: NacidasDelMar (Born of the Sea), or his Vimeo page.

(Strata of the pelagic zone. Measurements in meters. From here.)

DEEPWATER HORIZON'S UNCOUNTED VICTIMS

(Killer whales. Photo by Pittman, courtesy NOAA, via Wikimedia Commons.)

A new paper in Conservation Letters calculates that the numbers of whales and dolphins killed in BP's Deepwater Horizon disaster could be 50 times higher than the number of carcasses found. 

The authors—a high-powered list of renowned cetacean researchers from Canada, the US, Australia, and Scotland (including Scott Krause, who I filmed years ago for a documentary about North Atlantic right whales)—write of a general misperception of the Deepwater Horizon impact:

Many media reports have suggested that the spill caused only modest environmental impacts, in part because of a low number of observed wildlife mortalities, especially marine mammals.

(Atlantic spotted dolphins. Photo by Bmatulis, via Wikimedia Commons.)

Compared to the 1989 Exxon Valdez, with its iconic oiled otters and high body counts, the Deepwater Horizon seems, well, not so bad.

The authors point out that "only" 101 dead cetaceans (whales, dolphins, and porpoises) were found in the Northern Gulf of Mexico as of 7 November 2010. The number's misleading though.

The issue arises when policymakers, legislators, or biologists treat these carcass-recovery counts as though they were complete counts or parameters estimated from some representative sample, when in fact, they are opportunistic observations. Our study suggests that these opportunistic observations should be taken to estimate only the bare minimum number of human-caused mortalities.

(Humpback whale. Photo by Whit Welles Wwelles14, via Wikimedia Commons.)

So how many more whales, dolphins, and porpoises actually died? That problem is tough to figure to begin with and is compounded by a dearth of data in the Gulf—a fact that will work greatly in BP's favor when the time comes to levy fines.

The Gulf of Mexico is a semi-enclosed subtropical sea that forms essentially one ecosystem with many demographically independent cetacean populations. Some of these cetacean populations, such as killer whales (Orcinus orca), false killer whales (Pseudorca crassidens), melonheaded whales (Peponocephala electra), and several beaked whale species, appear to be quite small, are poorly studied, or are found in the pelagic realm where they could have been exposed to oil and yet never strand. Small, genetically isolated populations of bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus) could have experienced substantial losses either inshore or offshore.

(Mother and calf bottlenose dolphins. Photo by M. Herko, courtesy NOAA, via Wikimedia Commons.) 

Two methods of extrapolation could shed light on how many cetaceans BP's disaster killed:

1. Compare abundance before the disaster to abundance after—but since we don't know the population size of whale and dolphins species in the Gulf before hand we're unlikely to notice anything short of "the most catastrophic decline" and maybe not even that.
2. Count the number of carcasses recovered—knowing that many will evade our count, having sunk, decayed, been scavenged, or drifted away. So adjust the counts upward to estimate total mortality. This approach is used to estimate bird deaths at power lines, where, in at least one instance, we now know that bird body counts underestimate total actual deaths by a whopping 32 percent.
   

The authors worked the two methods as best they could and added something more.

Given the magnitude of the spill and complexity of the response, quantifying the ecological impacts will take a long time. To contribute to this effort, we examined historical data from the Northern Gulf of Mexico to evaluate whether cetacean carcass counts in this region have previously been reliable indicators of mortality, and may therefore accurately represent deaths caused by the Deepwater Horizon/BP event.

(Sperm whale. Photo courtesy NOAA, via Wikimedia Commons.) 

Their methods and analysis suggest that an average of 4,474 cetaceans died in the northern Gulf every year between 2003 and 2007 from all causes, human and natural. Yet since an average of only 17 bodies were found in those years, the body count represented only ~0.4 percent of total deaths.
 

Consider, for example, one sperm whale being detected as a carcass, and a necropsy identified oiling as a contributing factor in the whale’s death. If the carcass-detection rate for sperm whales is 3.4%, then it is plausible that 29 sperm whale deaths represents the best estimate of total mortality, given no additional information. If, for example, 101 cetacean carcasses were recovered overall, and all deaths were attributed to oiling, the average-recovery rate (2%) would translate to 5,050 carcasses, given the 101 carcasses detected.

Those are chilling numbers. Period. But also in light of the relatively tiny populations of cetaceans in the Gulf. Especially since most if not all cetaceans are highly social, and since oil and chemical dispersants likely injured, sickened, or killed entire clusters, schools, pods, matrilines, or groups at the same time—and may still be doing so.

The authors describe the near-lethal affect of the Exxon Valdez disaster on one well-known and well-studied pod of killer whales in Alaska.

In the first year after the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill, the AT1 group of "transient" killer whales experienced a 41% loss; there has been no reproduction since the spill. Although the cause of the apparent sterility is unknown, the lesson serves as an important reminder that immediate death is not the only factor that can lead to long-term loss of population viability.

(Pilot whale mother and calf. Photo by Clark Anderson via Wikimedia Commons.)

The paper:

Rob Williams, Shane Gero, Lars Bejder, John Calambokidis, Scott D. Kraus, David Lusseau, Andrew J. Read, & Jooke Robbins (2011). Underestimating the damage: interpreting cetacean carcass recoveries in the context of the Deepwater Horizon/BP incident Conservation Letters : 10.1111/j.1755-263X.2011.00168.x

SUNDAY POETRY: "AT MELVILLE'S TOMB"

Sperm Whale Encounter from Howard Hall on Vimeo.

AT MELVILLE'S TOMB

by Hart Crane 

Often beneath the wave, wide from this ledge

The dice of drowned men’s bones he saw bequeath

An embassy. Their numbers as he watched,

Beat on the dusty shore and were obscured.

And wrecks passed without sound of bells,

The calyx of death’s bounty giving back

A scattered chapter, livid hieroglyph,

The portent wound in corridors of shells.

Then in the circuit calm of one vast coil,

Its lashings charmed and malice reconciled,

Frosted eyes there were that lifted altars;

And silent answers crept across the stars.

Compass, quadrant and sextant contrive

No farther tides ... High in the azure steeps

Monody shall not wake the mariner.

This fabulous shadow only the sea keeps.

*Thanks to my friends Howard and Michele Hall for sharing their amazing sperm whale video on Vimeo.

SUNDAY POETRY: "I ONLY AM ESCAPED ALONE TO TELL THEE"

(Destiny. 1900. John William Waterhouse.)

I ONLY AM ESCAPED ALONE TO TELL THEE

by Howard Nemerov

I tell you that I see her still

At the dark entrance of the hall.

One gas lamp burning near her shoulder   

Shone also from her other side   

Where hung the long inaccurate glass   

Whose pictures were as troubled water.   

An immense shadow had its hand   

Between us on the floor, and seemed   

To hump the knuckles nervously,   

A giant crab readying to walk,   

Or a blanket moving in its sleep.

You will remember, with a smile   

Instructed by movies to reminisce,   

How strict her corsets must have been,   

How the huge arrangements of her hair   

Would certainly betray the least   

Impassionate displacement there.   

It was no rig for dallying,

And maybe only marriage could   

Derange that queenly scaffolding—

As when a great ship, coming home,   

Coasts in the harbor, dropping sail

And loosing all the tackle that had laced

Her in the long lanes ....

                                       I know

We need not draw this figure out.

But all that whalebone came from whales.   

And all the whales lived in the sea,   

In calm beneath the troubled glass,   

Until the needle drew their blood.

I see her standing in the hall,

Where the mirror’s lashed to blood and foam,   

And the black flukes of agony

Beat at the air till the light blows out.

GO EAST, YOUNG WHALE

(Photo from here.)

A 13-year-old western Pacific gray whale (Eschrichtius robustus) is shining some light on the travels of his kind.

Flex—as he's called by researchers—was tagged on 4 October on his summer feeding grounds in the Okhotsk Sea off Sakhalin Island, Russia. 

(Sakhalin Island. Image courtesy NASA's Earth Observatory.)

Western Pacific gray whales are among the most endangered whales on Earth, with a population of only 113 to 130 individuals. In contrast, the gray whales who migrate along the western coast of North America—known as the eastern Pacific gray whales—comprise a population estimated at between 15,000 and 22,000 individuals.

The good news is that as recently as 1972 Flex and the western grays were believed extinct. 

Still, the margins are thin. The IUCN Red List categorizes the western grays as critically endangered—the last stage before extinction: 

[B]ased on an extinction probability exceeding 50% within three generations, or a projected continuing decline of the subpopulation in combination with a mature population size less than 250. In addition, the small absolute subpopulation size, and the estimate of at most 35 reproductive females means that the subpopulation would easily qualify as Endangered.

(Gray whale. Photo by Jim Borrowman, Straitwatch, courtesy NOAA.) 

Until now, no one has known where Flex and his kin go after leaving the Okhotsk Sea. At this time of year the eastern grays have migrated south to the breeding lagoons along Mexico's Baja Peninsula.

But the western whales—or at least Flex—show no signs of heading for warmer water.

(Image courtesy the Marine Mammal Institute at Oregon State University.*)

You can see in the inset map Flex's journey for the first 101 days after tagging. In the last two weeks he's swum halfway across the Bering Sea.

As of 13 January 2011, Flex's transmitter had  sent 1,427 messages along a journey of 4,840 kilometers/3,007 miles. That's 47 kilometers /28 miles a day. But the story is actually way more interesting than that. From the Marine Mammal Institute site: 

"Flex" departed the Kamchatka coast on 3 January and took one week to cross most of the Bering Sea before arriving at the slope edge of the eastern Bering Sea shelf on 9 January. Since 3 January, he has covered 1,689 kilometers/1.049 miles in 238 hours for an average of 7.09 kilometers/4.4 miles an hour. Since attaining the slope edge, he has trended to the south, toward the Pribilof islands. During the last several days we have obtained individual transmissions during several orbits, so we know the tag is still attached and functioning, but not enough transmissions to obtain reliable locations. Some of this may be due to regional bad weather.

(Photo courtesy NOAA.)

But based on the disturbing Nature paper this week revealing the unacceptably high cost of tagging penguins—both in terms of mortality for penguins and skewed data for researchers—the question arises: Is there any harm to a whale weighing many tons from a tracking device the size of a small cigar? Might this tiny tag be skewing Flex's behavior in any way? From the abstract of the king penguin study:

Over the course of a 10-year longitudinal study, banded birds produced 39% fewer chicks and had a survival rate 16% lower than non-banded birds, demonstrating a massive long-term impact of banding and thus refuting the assumption that birds will ultimately adapt to being banded. Indeed, banded birds still arrived later for breeding at the study site and had longer foraging trips even after 10 years. One of our major findings is that responses of flipper-banded penguins to climate variability (that is, changes in sea surface temperature and in the Southern Oscillation index) differ from those of non-banded birds. We show that only long-term investigations may allow an evaluation of the impact of flipper bands and that every major life-history trait can be affected, calling into question the banding schemes still going on. In addition, our understanding of the effects of climate change on marine ecosystems based on flipper-band data should be reconsidered.

(Photo by SeanMack, courtesy Wikimedia Commons.) 

UPDATE: Bruce Mate, Director of the Marine Mammal Institute, fills me in on the gray whale tagging program:

The tagging of western gray whales was preceded by an efficacy study on the much more common eastern gray whales in 2005 and 2009. The latter was on the "resident" summer gray whales feeding here in the Pacific NW, with lots of follow-up photographs to look at "wound healing". These photos have been reviewed by a group of three marine mammal specialist veterinarians, who felt there were no major impacts and that what they saw caused them "no concern, These results were reviewed by whale specialists at the IWC and IUCN, who approved the results before we tagged western gray whales.

Meanwhile, stressors on western gray whales are growing. The Anchorage Daily News reports that in the past four years five females have died entangled in fishing gear.

And just yesterday the World Wildlife Fund announce that Sakhalin Energy Investment Company—partly owned by Shell—has announced plans to build a major oil platform near crucial feeding habitat of the western grays in waters  already besieged by multiple oil and gas exploration and development projects. The company will conduct a controversial seismic survey this summer. WWF states their concerns:

"We still do not know how badly the whales were affected by major seismic activity last summer—and will not know until the whales return to their feeding grounds again this year and scientists can determine if any are malnourished. It is totally inappropriate for Sakhalin Energy to plan another seismic survey in 2011 before we have the opportunity to examine the health of the animals," said Doug Norlen, Policy Director at Pacific Environment. 

(Photo from here.)

Other concerns regarding another offshore platform:

• Potentially disrupting the whales' feeding behaviours 
• Increasing the chance of fatal ship strikes
• Increasing the risk of an environmentally catastrophic oil spill on the whales' feeding grounds

You can follow Flex's travels here. The site is updated weekly.

The paper:

Saraux, C., Le Bohec, C., Durant, J., Viblanc, V., Gauthier-Clerc, M., Beaune, D., Park, Y., Yoccoz, N., Stenseth, N., & Le Maho, Y. (2011). Reliability of flipper-banded penguins as indicators of climate change Nature, 469 (7329), 203-206 DOI: 10.1038/nature09630

*This research was conducted by A.N. Severtsov Institute of Ecology and Evolution of the Russian Academy of Sciences (IEE RAS) and Oregon State University Marine Mammal Institute; in collaboration with the University of Washington, Sakhalin Research Institute of Fisheries and Oceanography, and Kronotsky State Nature Biosphere Reserve. The research was contracted through the International Whaling Commission (IWC) and International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) with funding from Exxon Neftegas Ltd. and Sakhalin Energy Investment Company Ltd.

MYSTERY OF THE ICE WHALES

(The whale within the iceberg. 1884. By George R. Halm. From the New York Public Library Digital Gallery.)

Believe it or not, whales sometimes end up frozen in glaciers, some of which may then calve out with icebergs to float around the ocean for a spell. 

The illustration above, by New York artist George R. Halm (1850-1899), tells a visually compelling story—though the words to this tale have been forgotten, as best I can tell.

So what could the picture be about? Well, the engraving includes images of men at work on the sea. Maybe whalers.

Handwritten at the bottom of the print is the word "Whaling"—perhaps a catalogue notation from an early librarian.

The detail in the lower left might be an image of a sunken ship. Maybe a whale-wrecked ship. With nothing left afloat but the crow's nest? I'm not sure. Was there once a story of a wronged whale and a haunted iceberg on an intercept course with a few doomed sailors?

Moby Dick was published 33 years before George R. Halm's engraving—priming the public mind for tales of vengeful behemoths.



moby dick intro from Carys Banks on Vimeo.

Interestingly, in his description about the the blubber of sperm whales, Herman Melville included an eerie reference to ice seamen:

For the whale is indeed wrapt up in his blubber as in a real blanket or counterpane; or, still better, an Indian poncho slipt over his head, and skirting his extremity. It is by reason of this cosy blanketing of his body, that the whale is enabled to keep himself comfortable in all weathers, in all seas, times, and tides. What would become of a Greenland whale, say, in those shuddering, icy seas of the North, if unsupplied with his cosy surtout? True, other fish are found exceedingly brisk in those Hyperborean waters; but these, be it observed, are your cold-blooded, lungless fish, whose very bellies are refrigerators; creatures, that warm themselves under the lee of an iceberg, as a traveller in winter would bask before an inn fire; whereas, like man, the whale has lungs and warm blood. Freeze his blood, and he dies. How wonderful is it then—except after explanation—that this great monster, to whom corporeal warmth is as indispensable as it is to man; how wonderful that he should be found at home, immersed to his lips for life in those Arctic waters! where, when seamen fall overboard, they are sometimes found, months afterwards, perpendicularly frozen into the hearts of fields of ice, as a fly is found glued in amber.

For another ice whale story only slightly less mysterious, I found a 1959 paper in Nature, about the 1958 discovery of a whale entombed in a glacial moraine beyond which the glacier had retreated in Svalbard (also known as Spitzbergen), north of mainland Norway.

(The Isefiorden, Spitzbergen, Norway, c. 1890-1900. From the Library of Congress' Flickr photostream.)

Disappointingly, I can only read the abstract, since even with my exorbitantly expensive personal subscription to Nature I am not entitled to read back issues from 1959. (O, ♥less policy.)

The abstract is tantalizing:

THE preservation of Pleistocene or Recent land mammals in the Siberian permafrost has long been known, but the literature does not appear to include mention of marine mammals preserved in ice. Particular interest, therefore, is attached to the discovery in 1958 of part of a whale carcass entombed in the ice-cored moraine of Sveabreen, Ekmanfjord, in Vestspitsbergen. The north-eastern lateral moraine of Sveabreen projects into the fjord about two miles beyond the ice-front, and the find was made by members of the Birmingham and Exeter Universities Spitsbergen Expedition near the seaward tip.

(Bowhead whale. Photo by Ansgar Walk, courtesy Wikimedia Commons.)

 What species of whale was it? Were they able to determine? 

There was a huge whaling and walrusing industry in Svalbard beginning in 1604—a piratical affair between British, Dutch, Danish, and French mercantile companies, who built forts to defend their commercial interests.

(Photo from the BBC.)

Their primary targets were bowhead whales—the real ice whales.

(The whale-oil factory of the Amsterdam Chamber of the Greenland Company on Amsterdam Island near Spitzbergen. 1639. Cornelis de Man.)

In 1996 a bowhead whale melted out from another Svalbard glacier, bringing with it a few juicy clues about its past... including a death date circa end of the Little Ice Age... perhaps from the time of the earliest commercial whalers.

Here's the abstract of the 1997 paper in Polar Research:

An 8 m long carcass of a bowhead whale (Balaena mysticetus) melted out from remnant glacier ice in the lateral moraine of the Jemelianovbreen glacier in August 1996. Folded and sheared sediment bands in the ice suggest that the whale was incorporated during an advance of the glacier. The whale's longitudinal axis was oriented parallel to the direction of the ice-flow, with the thinnest posterior part dipping upflow. The posterior section was best preserved with muscles and blubber, although the entire skin surface was strongly decomposed and only a thick fibrous surface was left of the blubber. The abdominal wall was holed, most likely by marine organisms, and partly filled with a compacted mixture of well-sorted gravelly beach sediments and fat. the whale seems to have been incorporated into the glacier together with glaciomarine sediments and carried by the flowing ice to an altitude of ca. 15 m. Jemelianovbreen is a tidewater glacier with two known surge-episodes. The first and most extensive of these occurred ca. 1900 AD and reached ca. 7 km outside the present coast-line. Radiocarbon dating of a fragment of a caudal vertebra yielded 345 ± 40 ¹⁴C years BP (1535-1660 cal. AD), suggesting that the whale lived some time during the last part of the cold period known as the Little Ice Age.

(Antarctic toothfish, Dissostichus mawson, a Nototheniid. Photo by Paul Cziko, courtesy Wikimedia Commons.)

Whales aren't the only mysteries trapped in ice. A 1962 paper in the Polar Record recounted all kinds of entombed marine life found by early Antarctic explorers. The abstract:

In February 1902, members of Scott's Discovery expedition found the remains of a fish 18 in. long on the surface of the "pinnacled ice" near the ice front of the Ross Ice Shelf in McMurdo Sound. In 1903, a party under Wilson found three Nototheniid fishes, sponges, shells, and seaweeds among similar ice on the floating section of the Koettlitz Glacier. The fishes, which were up to 48 in. in length, were all headless. They resembled a specimen caught in a seal blow-hole near the Discovery winter quarters, whose head was bitten off by a seal before it could be landed, but whose body weighed 40 Ib. and was 46 in. long. This fish was a Notothenia, close to N. colbecki Boulenger. In 1911, a party under Taylor found another large headless fish, which may have been as much as 4 ft. long, embedded in the ice of the Lower Koettlitz Glacier some 5 miles from its seaward end, and among the pinnacled ice near the Dailey Islands the same party found corals, shells, sponges, patches of sediment, and about a dozen small fish. The ice in this region was so rich in sponges that it was difficult to get spicule-free ice for cooking.

(The pinnacled ice of McMurdo Sound, photographed by Reginald Skelton for the British National Antarctic Expedition—aka Scott's Discovery expedition—1901-1904. From the Royal Collection.)

A news story out of Greenland in 1985 aroused the mystery again, along with a new round of theorizing:

A dead whale frozen in an iceberg 13 feet above the surface of the frigid waters off south Greenland is mystifying scientists and curious residents of a tiny Greenland settlement. No one can figure out how the 59-foot sperm whale died or how it ended up in an icy grave high above the water drifting a few miles off the tiny settlement of Alluitsup. First came speculation the beast was a prehistoric creature buried for eons in the ice cap that makes up 85 percent of Greenland. But examination showed that the whale, the size of which indicates it was a male, was identical to contemporary sperm whales. And it emitted a rank smell, making fossilhood unlikely... Close inspection reveals the whale may have been the victim of a hunter`s harpoon. In its neck is a cylindrical hole 15 inches in diameter and three feet. But that does not explain how the beast came to rest in an icy grave bobbing 13 feet above the water. One theory is that it sprang into the air and landed unluckily on a large iceberg, perhaps stuck in a narrow crevice. Marine biologists in Greenland theorize the whale may have been attacked by killer whales, or, stranded in a shallow area, became disoriented and died. They believe the whale, weakened or dead, could have drifted over the submerged portion of an iceberg and become an involuntary hitchhiker when the iceberg separated and a submerged portion rose under the whale.

Cutting Room Floor: "Deep at Sea" from Tristan Bayer on Vimeo.

(The filmmaker describes: "This cut is made with unused footage that we shot in Dominica which would otherwise be left on the 'Cutting Room Floor.''')

The papers:

• D. L. Dineley and P. A. Garrett. Whale Remains in Glacier Ice. Nature. 183. 272 (1959). DOI: 10.1038/183272a0.
• Ida Lønne and Eva Fuglei. Carcass of a bowhead whale (Balaena mysticetus) found in the lateral moraine of the Jemelianovbreen glacier, eastern Svalbard. Polar Research. (1997). DOI: 10.1111/j.1751-8369.1997.tb00723.x.
• M. W. Holdgate. Faunal remains on the Ross Ice Shelf in McMurdo Sound. Polar Record (1962), 11: 40-42. Cambridge University Press. DOI: 10.1017/S0032247400052554.
  
  

THE EVOLVING EYE

(Beached wale near Beverwijk, 1601. Jan Saenredam. 1602. Image courtesy Wikimedia Commons.)

This 1602 engraving by Dutch artist Jan Saenredam records the actual beaching of a sperm whale at Beverwijk on 19 December 1601. Crowds of curious onlookers are gathering—some arriving by foot, some by horse and carriage, some splashing through the shallows offshore. 

 

The scene heaves with the industry of Lilliputian townsmen scaling the impromptu mountain with hobnails, hands, and knees. In this close-up you can see two men probe the whale's eye with a sword.

Saenredam's engraving records in Latin the whale's measurements: 60 feet long by 14 feet high, with a circumference of 36 feet, the flukes 14 feet wide and the lower jaw of 12 feet long.

That's the uppermost known size of sperm whales. In life, he might have weighed some 60 tons.
 

The artist pictures himself in the left foreground sketching the whale. His assistants are creating a windbreak from his outstretched cloak. 

In front of Saenredam's self-portrait you can see the whale's shredded tongue—a characteristic signature of killer whales. Some orcas seem to favor tongue above all other whale meat and might only consume that and leave all the rest untouched. 

The state of the tongue in this picture indicates the sperm whale was probably dead before beaching. 

The small inset view of the dead whale also shows the peeled skin characteristic of the work of killer whales.

The whale wears what looks like a tow line around his tailstock. So maybe some townspeople rowed him ashore. Or are they planning to row him offshore (since he appears to be getting stinky already)? 

Seems like the two men behind the tailstock are taking the measurements. Maybe they're planning to divvy the whale up. Even if the meat's rotting, it would be of value to, say, swine farmers. 

The spermaceti oil alone would provide a huge windfall for the town—or whoever "owned" the carcass. Would love to know how they worked that out. A large bull sperm whale might possess three tons of waxy spermaceti. Here's some of what I wrote about that in Deep Blue Home:

This was the treasure lusted after by whalemen of old, an elixir for nineteenth-century medicine and technology as ubiquitous as petroleum products are today and used for many of the same purposes: lubricants and rust-proofing in watches, lenses, and scientific instruments; oils for transmissions and engines; waxy elements in lotions, ointments, glycerines, pomades, detergents; as well as additives to vitamins and medicinal compounds. Spermaceti was, in the words of the eminent whale researchers Hal Whitehead and Linda Weilgart of Dalhousie University, Nova Scotia, the oil that lubricated the Industrial Revolution.[i] It was also the finest fuel for candles and such a standard of its day that candlepower—once an official unit of illumination—was calibrated against the light emitted in the course of an hour by burning a spermaceti candle.

Meanwhile, these two jaunty fellows are arriving on scene with a flensing knife, ready to disassemble the remains. 

Though these two flensers seem to have gotten there ahead of them.

We know about the whale's decay thanks to the man at the centerpiece of Saenredam's engraving—the figure of the Count of Nassau-Dietz, a hero in Holland's war of independence against Spain. 

Handkerchief held to war-weary nose, he stands alongside the whale's unsheathed penis, averting his eyes. A delicate hero, outsized.

According to BibliOddyssey (warning: prepare to disappear down an absorbing blogger-hole), Saenredam's engraving is actually a disaster allegory:

This elaborate illustration... belongs to a narrow genre of disaster allegories—of which Saenredam's print is perhaps the finest example—that found a receptive audience, chiefly in the 17th century. Beached whales were regarded as significant... because beachings were a part of the folklore, seen as bad omens and associated with disasters and tragedies... In a series of slightly obscure vignettes, Saenredam alludes to other circumstances that are associated with or thought to be attributable to the whale's appearance on the coast. In the far background we have both solar and lunar eclipses which occurred shortly after the whale's appearance and, like comets and other irregularly occurring natural phenomena, were seen by contemporary observers as harbingers of doom. An unhappy face has been caricatured onto the moon(s). An angel bearing the coat of arms of Amsterdam, watched over by the ominous looking father time, is shot by death and falls from the sky, and may represent the epidemic of plague fatalities in the capital in the first couple of years of the 17th century. In the cartouche below the lion, the cartographic wind symbol can be seen blowing the land away in reference to an earthquake that occurred at the beginning of 1602.

The Latin verse at the foot of the print is by the Dutch poet Dirk Schrevel. I've started to work through a Google translation but it's going to take me a while.

If you want to explore this image further, there's a high-resolution zoomable view of it at Beeldebank.

For a modern image of a sperm whale, complete with radically evolved thinking since 1601, check out this video of Bryant Austin's powerful work.

Trailer: In the Eye of the Whale from MMCTA on Vimeo.
 

[i] From Whitehead's and Weilgart's, The Sperm Whale: Social Females and Roving Males, in Cetacean Societies: Field Studies of Whales and Dolphins, edited by Janet Mann, et al. ISBN: 9780226503417.