Browsing Posts tagged Whales

by Brian Duignan

The following article, originally published on Advocacy for Animals on June 4, 2007, has been updated to reflect recent developments.


Harpooning a minke whale, © Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert—Corbis

Harpooning a minke whale, © Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert—Corbis


by David Henkin, Staff Attorney, Earthjustice

Our thanks to the organization Earthjustice (“Because the Earth Needs a Good Lawyer”) for permission to republish this article, which was first published on April 15, 2015, on the Earthjustice site.

Whales, dolphins, sea turtles, and many other marine mammals, not to mention everyone here at Earthjustice, are celebrating a court ruling that promises relief from harmful Navy weapons and sonar testing in the Pacific Ocean.

Image courtesy Huntington Ingalls Industries/Earthjustice

Image courtesy Huntington Ingalls Industries/Earthjustice

On March 31, a federal judge ruled that the National Marine Fisheries Service broke the law when it approved the U.S. Navy’s five-year Pacific weapons testing and training plan. The agency had concluded that the Navy’s use of sonar, explosives, and vessel strikes would threaten thousands of ocean dwellers with permanent hearing loss, lung damage, and death—but approved it anyway. continue reading…

by Gregory McNamee

Language, by one conventional definition, is an open system of communication that follows well-established conventions—a grammar, that is—while still admitting the description of novel situations.

Beluga, or white whale (Delphinapterus leucas)--E.R. Degginger/EB Inc.

Beluga, or white whale (Delphinapterus leucas)–E.R. Degginger/EB Inc.

By a somewhat less rigorous definition, it is “a system of arbitrary vocal symbols by means of which a social group cooperates.” Either way, according to this point of view, one with which even the Encyclopaedia Britannica agrees, language is something reserved to humans, who alone, it has long been presumed, have the ability to generate it.

Yet, the more students of communication look into the problem, the more it seems our definition ought to be extended to systems of animal communication. Arguably, the howl-and-grunt systems of chimpanzees, for instance, have a grammar, while they certainly are made up of apparently arbitrary vocal symbols that help chimps hunt, groom, and engage cooperatively otherwise. One rather Machiavellian definition of language adds the proviso that only human language can express counterfactuality or be used to lie, but studies of ravens suggest that a bird isn’t above a fib; another suggests that only humans have a sense of the future and the means to express it, a matter that would seem to be countered sufficiently by the fact that the ant, if not the grasshopper, stores food for the winter and discusses that fact with its fellows.

The real rub lies in the possibility of nesting times within other times: By the time you have finished reading this system, I will have written several thousand other words. Recently, when I was thinking about the matter of language, I wished that I had paid closer attention to anti-Chomskyan theories of grammar in the 1970s. And so forth. That ability to embed units of meaning within other units of meaning—well, that’s the real thing that separates humans from other species.

But now we are learning that whale song is capable of structuring expression in the hierarchies that we describe by diagramming sentences. The song of the humpback whale, for instance, follows a repetitive pattern whose units would seem to be fixed—thus, a grammar, at least of a sort—but that can be reordered to express different actualities. Some scales of repetition are short, with six or so units, which might be thought of as an analog to human words, while others can be as long as 400 units, a veritable novella. Combining these units lends a whale song its structure; the whale equivalent, that is to say, of what linguists call syntax in human language.

That combination of units can happen in innumerable ways. The sperm whale, for example, makes patterns of clicks called codas. These patterns can be mixed, and they seem to vary regionally across the world—serving, that is to say, as accents, the things that distinguish speakers from Birmingham, Alabama, and Birmingham, England. (Between January and April, by the way, you can hear humpback songs streamed live from their winter breeding ground off Hawaii at the Jupiter Foundation Web site.)

Blue whale surfacing in the ocean©

Blue whale surfacing in the ocean©

A sperm whale from the Pacific will vocalize differently from one from the Caribbean, although all sperm whales speak what cetologists call “Five Regular”: five evenly spaced clicks that seem to say, “I am a sperm whale.” Blue whales speak different dialects but share common phrases; whales in the eastern Pacific use low-pitched pulses, whereas, says a researcher at Oregon State University, “Other populations use different combinations of pulses, tones, and pitches.”

Why should a sperm whale, say, have made such an adaptation? Scientists know that baby sperm whales “babble,” issuing undifferentiated sounds just because they can. Eventually, as we school our young in language, adult sperm whales teach the babies what is meaningful and what is not. This proves to be of central importance in enabling creatures that may be miles apart in difficult, opaque water to tell who is a friend and who is not. That is especially true when the water is densely polluted with the noise of passing ships, which have so often proved fatal to whales of every species. continue reading…

by Gregory McNamee

The last thing Australia needs is something venomous, given all the various death-dealing sea snakes, worms, serpents, and insects the continent harbors—to say nothing of the venomous platypus, which, though not so dangerous to humans, can be an annoyance.

Platypus swimming on the surface of a waterway--© susan flashman/Fotolia

Platypus swimming on the surface of a waterway–© susan flashman/Fotolia

Yet Australia now boasts a new venomous critter, thanks to the discovery in Western Australia of a kind of jellyfish. At the width of a human arm, Keesingia gigas is a strapping creature as sea jellies go, and it poses a mystery, since it’s so poorly documented that most existing photographs suggest that it has no tentacles—an improbability, given the structural rules governing its kind.

With or without them, the giant jellyfish is most definitely something to avoid. Swimmers off the coast of Wales had best hope that Keesingia doesn’t take after its barrel and lion’s mane cousins, which turned up in record numbers off the country’s southern coast last year. Reports the BBC Wales news service, a survey conducted by the Marine Conservation Society indicates that last year was a record year for jellyfish sightings, and this year promises to be a contender. And why should their numbers be on the rise? Because they thrive on warm, polluted waters that are inhospitable to other forms of sea life, and such waters are increasingly the norm.
continue reading…

by Gregory McNamee

Uruguay is a nation that others would do well to study, and for many reasons. Its president refuses most of the blandishments and perquisites of his position, frustrating those who would corrupt the office. turtleThe nation is the first on the globe to legalize marijuana, freeing up resources to combat truly harmful drugs while, again, denaturing the forces of corruption that so profit from both the drug trade and its interdiction. And, practically alone in the world, Uruguay has allowed truly meaningful steps to be taken to protect whales, populations of which frequent the mouth of the Rio de la Plata and the Atlantic coast.

Much of this latter work is undertaken by the Organización para la Conservación de Cetáceos (Organization for the Conservation of Cetaceans), which has established the “Route of the Whales” to mark the migratory passage of the Southern Atlantic right whale. The Route of the Whale website, established by journalism students at the University of Oregon, chronicles the sites along the route and the activities of conservationists along the way. I’m very pleased to say that the group, whose advisor, Carol Ann Bassett, is a friend of many years, recently won the Society of Professional Journalists Mark of Excellence Award, honoring the fine content the students have gathered and its artful presentation. continue reading…

© 2015 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.