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The first time I really listened to the sound was at 3AM as I carefully peed on the tide line (per our guide's instructions) in a place called Magdalena Bay. We were camped on an island surrounded by an estimated 500 or so grey whales, mostly females with their young.
You know the routine: you're sleeping soundly in your sleeping bag in a nice warm tent when that last beer pushes your bladder from Full Slumber into Alert mode. So, I trundled out of the tent onto the sandy beach, found the prescribed tide line, and began to spell out my name in the sand.…
The night was starry and beautiful. In the distance a grey whale surfaced, grabbed a misty breath and then sank again below the dark water, all just 100 yards from where I stood. It struck me how much the whale breath sounded like a person surfacing during a swim; a sudden exhale and then sucking in the fresh air. It sounded so…human. Whales, of course, are in fact mammalian.
Cher
Traendly © 2007 |
And, in fact, I have many facts floating around in my consciousness. Indeed, my definition of an epiphany is when those facts line up together in such a way as to give them all new meaning. And so it was that, as the dregs of that last beer made their way out to sea, I had an epiphany!
My epiphany was hearing the whale breathe as I breathe - suddenly, I felt closer to her; related in some visceral way - blood cousins, if you will.
I am envious of these relatives, who, some 15 million years ago, made the brilliant decision to go back into the water . Whales are not fish. They are land creatures - air breathing mammals like us - and, though it's easy to speculate, we'll never really know why they opted to forfeit life on land to make their existence as air-breathers in the sea.
Standing there on the beach, scanning the water for the outline of my fellow being, I wondered: do they remember their past? Do whales sing of the days of a reverse Atlantis? A sea lost to land? Do they retain some vestigial memory of being legged creatures? Do they envy me anywhere near as much as I envy them?
The next morning we were ready for a second day of whale-following. After a fine camp-breakfast our panga (a small hired boat) showed up with its native driver, 10 of us piled in, and headed out to the bay.
Soon enough we caught up with a mother whale and her baby. Honestly, all we wanted to do was to watch and experience a few brief moments of their lives. It was thrilling just to be there; to see these leviathan mothers raising their young.
We were moving along at the leisurely pace of the pair: mommy would surface, breathe, and dive; then baby would surface, breathe, play a bit, and dive; baby would surfaced again, breathe, play some more and dive; then mom and baby would surface together. This is the basic pattern we observed - it wasn't hard to figure out that baby can only hold her breath about a third as long as mommy.
But then, unlike all of the other whales we had followed, mommy - all 40 feet of mommy - all 60,000lbs of mommy - stopped, and positioned herself vertically in the water so that just her mouth & nose were poking up.
And, she just hung there, waiting for us to come to her.
Which, of course, we did…
Do you know that gray whales are notorious for protecting their babies? Whalers used to call them DevilFish because of their violent defensive maneuvers. So, it's worth mentioning again - this momma was with her baby - and yet she made no motions to protect her young from us. In fact, it felt a bit like class time for baby.
In any case, baby swam around and frolicked and momma proceeded to visit with each person in turn. Gently, she moved herself around so that everyone had a chance to see and to touch her, keeping herself perfectly vertical in the water all the while. The boat driver, who she seemed to know, was given a long pause so that he could rub her chin.
As the whale made her rounds the people cooed and laughed, they talked to each other, and to the momma whale. But Momma Whale's hearing is water-based - she doesn't have ears like we do. Instead, she "hears" sound through bone conduction. Can you guess which bone?
If you guessed correctly you said the jaw bone. That's right, the jaw bone, which Momma Whale has been placing right up close to us all the while. Was she listening to us?
She was most certainly playing with us. After visiting each person she then began to "play" with the boats. She would swim beneath the hull and release a burst of bubbles as she passed. Our guide told us that when the baby whales play with their mommies they will do the same thing and it's rumored that the adults, though fully grown, will play hide and seek with each other, also using bubbles as part of the game.
What is one to make of this experience? This creature, with the mass of 6000 people and a brain roughly 4 times larger than a typical human, decided to stop and spend time with us. She clearly visited and then played a bit. Then, she and her baby went on with their lives, having forever changed ours…
You can see an excellent video of this experience here, courtesy of Ed Ellsworth, a videographer who was with us on this trip
As remarkable as this story is; it turns out, friendly whales are fairly common. An experience similar to ours probably happens once a day -- or more. Magdalena Bay is full of mother whales and their babies and a not a day goes by without a fleet of panga's, filled with adoring whale watchers, following them to and fro.
Now, hold onto that image…
After you've watched the video, read the rest of this paragraph and then go back and watch the video one more time. The second time, look carefully at the outboard motors on the boats. Pay attention to the bubbles and the smoke pouring out of the engines.
You'll notice that the panga drivers keep their motors running all of the time. This is because they have to be ready to maneuver to avoid other boats as well as to position themselves properly to avoid being capsized by the waves.
The engines they use are 2-cycle outboard motors and, unlike their 4-cycle counterparts, 2-cycle engines have oil mixed in with the gasoline and when the gasoline burns so does the oil; creating thick black smoke. Needless to say, these exhaust fumes are noxious, disgusting, and can quickly make one quite sick.
Yet, these whales, especially the baby whales, are inhaling these fumes - every day. From the moment these babies are born in Magdalena Bay until they begin their first journey (at about 3 months of age), they are constantly followed by pangas with outboards belching out poisonous fumes. The baby's first breaths are imbued with carbon monoxide courtesy of all of us - the well-meaning whale lovers.
Now, if this were the good old US of A, we might have a chance of getting our congressperson's ear to legislate a cure for this travesty (in fact there are MANY laws in the U.S. prohibiting the use of 2-cycle motors). But in Baja California, the solution, if there is to be one, will have to be much more elegant and pragmatic.
And simple…
And this is it: let's buy the old motors from the panga drivers and give them new clean burning 4-cycle engines. How hard can that be? I estimate that there are not more than 30 panga boats in Magdalena Bay . The price of a new 75 HP 4-cycle outboard is between $5,000 and $7,500; so we're talking about roughly $200K. That may seem like a lot of money, but let's say that we put a little button at the bottom of a web page with this story and every person who reads it can click on the button and donate $50 towards solving the problem.
That would take about 4,000 clicks. This is a reasonable expectation to make of the World Wide Web: especially since after every 150 clicks we can buy another engine and immediately begin to reduce the problem.
My thinking is to first put out some feelers for feasibility. While I know the Web fairly well, I do not know the culture surrounding Magdalena Bay well enough to formulate the best approach to the problem - or for that matter even to assess whether or not this is a reasonable goal.
Plus, it would be nice to have some verified metrics to back up my presumptions.
And so, before we go forth and seek donations, it's time to see if anyone is willing to donate their intellectual abilities to this problem and contribute their ideas and information.
Therefore, please give this some thought and if you have any ideas or pertinent information to contribute, just reply to this email. Also, let me know if you would like to be on a discussion list for this project. This is such an exciting opportunity for us to do something so simple but so meaningful in the lives of our 60,000 pound sea-dwelling cousins. I look forward to hearing your input soon.
Best regards,
Kirk Hurford
kirkh@heartcompass.com
P.S. We have a website named www.amistosa.org dedicated to this project. It's blank at the moment, but hopefully we will soon have at least a place marker in service.
1. If there ever was an opportunity for alliteration, this is it.
2. To be fair, there is some question as to this detail. Please refer to http://www.talkorigins.org/features/whales/ for the thinking behind my opinion on this.
3. The original Panga design was created about 30 years ago, as a project financed by the World Bank. The purpose of this project was to provide an economical, seaworthy craft for the commercial fishermen of the Third World.
4. There are two cooperatives working the bay - all of the panga boats are associated with one cooperative or the other. We can get an accurate count by just getting this information from them.
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