Whale Tales

The blues are migrating through the Azores and I am here clinging to a little boat bobbing in the Atlantic Swells listening to Portuguese chatter from Antares, our spotter, on shore under the volcano on Pico Island in the center of the Azores archipelago. I cannot understand Portuguese but his tone tells volumes as he begins yelling and the words Balleia and Blue seep into my consciousness and I know there is a Blue whale out there and we are going to probably find it. The blows, almost 20 feet high, will give it away as it needs to breathe after anything from 8 to 20 minutes pass under water. While diving, the Blues and all the other Baleen whales are feeding by straining tiny sea creatures called Krill living in the nutrient rich waters below us. The fact that the largest animal on earth lives on tiny creatures like Krill makes perfect sense. All animals including humans get energy from eating and so we all reside somewhere in a food chain. The catch is that every level you advance up that chain leaves only 10 percent of the energy that was available in the level below it. The rest is incorporated into the bodies of the eaters or goes into the environment as waste or heat or becomes unavailable in other ways. So it makes perfect sense that the largest animal on earth stays low on the chain, feeding on step number 2 where the zooplankton (tiny animals including krill) live and feed on the first layer the phytoplankton (tiny plants). Any higher and too much energy would have been lost for such a massive creature to survive in large numbers.

Our rubber whale watching craft slams into the Atlantic swells and chop from the wind driving down the island from the West . Over it all looms Pico the volcano wreathed in clouds. we look up and realize the sun is shining above the clouds on the peak. I imagine standing on the peak in sunshine looking down on a sea of clouds with just a glimpse here and there of ocean and waves shining in the sun below.

A shout from our guide and we turn to see a large blow near the boat. Our driver revs up his engine and our small boat careens towards an animal 5 times its size. The Blue seems oblivious to our presence.  Boats follow certain procedures around giant cetaceans in the Azores.  They can parallel the whale’s path but never cut them off or come directly at them.  This could be interpreted as a threat and your especially do not want to threaten a hundred foot long Baleen or a 60 foot long Sperm Whale, the largest predator on earth.  You also do not want to harass animals that are feeding, storing fat for their long journey, or caring for young.  Our first day out we saw a Fin Whale (second largest after the Blue whale) with a calf only a few months old.  It stuck very close to its mother and they would dive together in synchrony.  we also saw six Sperm Whales, three of which were calves. They swam in tight formation with the calves surrounded by adults. Sperm whales are very social and there were 12 total playing on the surface that day. Their food source is down in the deep ocean thousands of feet below the surface where they feed on squid including giant squid who can put quite a fight.  The bulging head of a Sperm Whale is covered with scratches from their deep sea battles with Giant Squid.

The Blue is closer now and we can see the head with its giant double nostrils and the small dorsal fin at the other end.  The submerged part of the animal appears a beautiful aqua blue while the exposed back above the water is a smooth gray color.  Blues get their names from this spectacular blue color they acquire only under water.  And spectacular is a good description of a Blue whale.  They are the largest animal that ever lived with a heart the size of a small car and blood vessels that a human could swim through (although I don’t recommend it).  The Blue steams along next to the boat, seemingly oblivious to our presence and then dives smoothly below the surface. the last thing we see is the sharp dorsal fin disappearing beneath the surface.  Our guide tells us that unlike the playful Humpback Whales we would see later in the week, the Blues rarely show their tails when they dive.

The tour company is owned by an Italian scientist, Enrico Villa, who studies whales. So the guides on our whale watching trips all week are constantly taking notes, recording the latitude and longitude of the sighting and notes on the type of whales present.  He tells me that he chooses to do the less invasive observational science rather than trying, for instance, to attach tracking devices to whales as some Universities are doing. There is more data about Blue whales in the Pacific than in the Atlantic but no one knows where these giants go to mate and breed. The ones I saw migrate from the waters around Iceland to somewhere in the tropics and back each year. But no one knows where they gather to mate and have their young. How can we lose track of such large animals? But of course the Ocean is a very large place and the tracking devices tend to fall off fairly quickly because the animals are constantly diving to great depths to feed. I have so many questions about these animals, some scientific and some sheer speculation.  Enrico and I talked about what kinds of questions he studies. They are not always the ones I wonder about the most, but they are ones that science can answer.

I have so many questions about these animals, some scientific and some sheer speculation.  Enrico and I talked about what kinds of questions he studies. They are not always the ones I wonder about the most, but they are ones that science can answer.  For example, a scientist might ask how does the Spring plankton bloom correlate with the migration of the Blue and Fin whales.  This question can be answered by careful observation and record keeping. If your hypothesis is that there is a positive correlation, since the plankton and Krill help the Giants stock up food during their annual migration, you would find a lot of data to support that idea.  So far that seems to be a good explanation for why the whales come to the Azores. But although the question is testable it can never be proven.  Perhaps some year the great whales will not come for the plankton bloom and this possibility means that we can never prove our hypothesis although we can disprove it.  Hypotheses are only falsifiable, not provable. The deep water around the islands, which are perched on the mid-Atlantic ridge, provides the perfect environment in the Spring for Plankton blooms and an ocean buffet for the great whales.  On the other hand, my favorite question,”what are they thinking?”, is not within the realm of science because it is not testable.  When I asked Enrico that question he did not even try to answer it. Maybe someday we will be able to talk to dolphins as some marine biologists predict.  Then we could gossip with them about what the Great Whales think of us. But it would still be outside the realm of science.

You will find more about the tentative nature of science in The scientific Method and Automobile Repair in chapter 2: Science is Like a Weather report

Photo: A blue whale blows in the Atlantic beneath Pico Volcano, Pico Island, Azores – photo by M. Bahr.