To quiet the world’s waters, though, we all need to raise our voices. That’s what Sonic Sea is all about: increasing awareness of this growing threat and building a worldwide community of citizen advocates to help us turn down the volume on undersea noise.
Beneath the surface of our oceans lies a finely balanced, living world of sound, most of which we never hear topside. But to whales, dolphins, and other marine life, sound is survival, the key to how they navigate, find mates, hunt for food, communicate over vast distances, and protect themselves against predators in waters dark and deep.
Our oceans, though, have become vast junkyards of industrial noise — often louder than a rock concert — from commercial shipping, military sonar, and seismic blasts that test for oil and gas. The seas have become so loud, in places, that these great animals are drowning in noise that threatens their health, their future, and their very lives.
PETROGLYPH dune amplifier — a Basque code: coloured flags, burning straw — whale piano — did the other animals make it transparent? — shallow and getting shallower
THE OOOO-ERS Eden — close, but no touching — swimmerets — the first thing with faces, being only faces — between thing and kin — again, numerousness — holy shiver — dry dreams — augenblick
BLUE MUSEUM whales inside out — whales with knees — forewarning: scantling — a body without a voice and a voice without a body — past outside of memory — sand
CHARISMA dreams, being screen-coloured — faking solitude — cold, hard numbers — the agony of loving the disappearing — endlings — the less we see, the more aura it has — a half-head dream
SOUNDING first, signal interference — two voices in one bowhead — blue whales drop three white keys on a piano — voices with no origin — aurora — soft mountains
KITSCH INTERIOR out-of-placeness — spiralling — horse latitudes — middleness — the gyre is invisible — its skin is changed — white flag — the things afloat that will never sink — dumped desire — and hope
SCANTLING egg and eye — kraken, owl — their heads, being too small to nourish their tails — Virginia Woolf reports he is constantly seen — whales: are they islands? — the swarm, the squirm, the sucker, the spiral — self as circus
—Words & phrases drawn from chapter headings & summaries in Rebecca Giggs, Fathoms: the world in the whale (Scribe, 2020)
Many of us have seen the photos of plastic refuse in the ocean, the large islands of bags and waste that collect at tidal crossroads. Yet when scientists took a survey of the ocean earlier this year, they found a suspicious amount had disappeared. Was it just our good luck that pollution was decreasing? Hardly. It had simply been sinking, breaking apart and embedding itself…
I’ve made whale shark and stars washi tape, an acrylic charm, and now I’m excited to announce that I’ve made a sticker sheet! You can add this to your whale shark and stars collection, or just grab one because they’re fun and cute. The sheet features 9 different stickers – 4 different whale sharks and 5 styles of stars– to fit your scrapbooking or crafting needs. Or you can use it to decorate your sketchbook, locker, binder, or whatever you’d like to style!
The sheet is 4"x6" with a glossy finish and made of durable vinyl.
A remarkable new study on how whales behaved when attacked by humans in the 19th century has implications for the way they react to changes wreaked by humans in the 21st century. The paper, published by the Royal Society on Wednesday [17 March 2021], is authored by Hal Whitehead and Luke Rendell, pre-eminent scientists working with cetaceans, and Tim D Smith, a data scientist, and their research addresses an age-old question: if whales are so smart, why did they hang around to be killed? The answer? They didn’t. Using newly digitised logbooks detailing the hunting of sperm whales in the north Pacific, the authors discovered that within just a few years, the strike rate of the whalers’ harpoons fell by 58%. […] Before humans, orca were their only predators […]. It was a frighteningly rapid killing, and it accompanied other threats to the ironically named Pacific. From whaling and sealing stations to missionary bases, western culture was imported to an ocean that had remained largely untouched […].
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Headline and text published by: Philip Hoare. “Sperm whales in the 19th century shared ship attack information.” The Guardian. 17 March 2021.
Catching a sperm whale during the 19th century was much harder than even Moby Dick showed it to be. That’s because sperm whales weren’t just capable of learning the best ways to evade the whalers’ ships, they could quickly share this information with other whales, too, according to a study of whale-hunting records. […]
“At first, the whales reacted to the new threat of human hunters in exactly the same way as they would to the killer whale, which was their only predator at this time,” study lead author Hal Whitehead, a professor of biology at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, told Live Science. “[The sperm whales] all gathered together on the surface, put the baby in the middle, and tried to defend by biting or slapping their tails down. But when it comes to fending off Captain Ahab that’s the very worst thing they could do, they made themselves a very large target.”
The whales seem to have learned from their mistakes, and the ones that survived quickly adapted — instead of resorting to old tactics, the whalers wrote in their logbooks, the sperm whales instead chose new ones, swimming fast upwind away from the whalers’ wind-powered vessels.[…]
The whales communicated with and learned from each other rapidly, and the lessons were soon integrated into their wider culture across the region, according to the researchers’ interpretation of the data.
“Each whale group that you meet at sea typically comprises two or three family units, and the units quite often split off and form other groups,” Whitehead said. “So, what we think happened is that one or two of the units that make up the group could have had encounters with humans before, and the ones who didn’t copied closely from their pals who had.“
Sperm whales are excellent intel sharers: Their highly observant, communicative nature, and the fact that each family unit only stays in larger groups for a few days at a time, means they can transmit information fast.
As studies show, that information could be news on new threats, new ways to hunt or new songs to sing.
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One example of whales’ extraordinary information sharing abilities involves lobtail feeding, in which a humpback whale slaps its tail hard against the water’s surface, submerges to blow disorienting bubbles around its prey, and then scoops the prey up in its mouth. Researchers first observed this tactic being used by a single whale in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, in 1980, before it spread throughout the regional population in just 10 years.
Whale culture also extends far deeper than innovative ways to feed. “Sperm whales are divided into acoustic cultural climates,” Whitehead said. “They split themselves into large clans, each with distinctive patterns of sonar clicks, like a dialect, and they only form groups with members of the same clan.”
Different whale clans each have different ways of singing, moving, hunting and looking after their calves. These differences are profound enough to even give some clans a survival advantage during El Nino events, according to Whitehead. […]
In the 20th century, whales, especially the 13 species belonging to the category of ‘great whales’ — such as blue whales, sperm whales and humpback whales — found themselves pursued by steamships and grenade harpoons that they could not escape. These whales’ numbers plummeted and they soon faced extinction. […] [T]hey still face the growing destabilization of their habitats brought about by industrial fishing, noise pollution and climate change.
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Headline, image, caption, and text published by: Ben Turner. “Sperm whales outwitted 19th-century whalers by sharing evasive tactics.” Live Science. 19 March 2021.
“This striking object is a cross between a whale and a shoe with a high heel. It lacks only the opening for the foot. In fact, it is actually a bottle made of leather: the tail is the stopper. Because of its shoe shape, the bottle is thought to have been a showpiece or masterpiece for a cobblers’ guild.”
From a project on the Azores and their historical whaling trade (two things that I’ve sort of accidentally become very well-informed about), a spread and a spot illustration. This was my first attempt at painting the ocean on any sort of large scale with watercolors, and I think it turned out not half-bad.
If you don’t happen to know much about the nutty story of whale evolution, you should watch this video about one of the most amazing transitions in mammalian history.
