Last Chance to See

by Mark Carwardine

  Human words just don’t do it justice.

  I glanced around the deck. Every single person – director, cameraman, soundman, assistant producer and the entire boat crew – had stopped what they’d been doing. We were all perfectly still and quiet, listening together.

  It was several minutes before Tim, the Director, snapped to attention, our brains had re-engaged and we were able to discuss for the camera exactly what we were listening to – in suitably hushed and respectful tones.

  The humpback’s song is the longest and most complex song in the animal kingdom. It can last for half an hour or more. All the whales in one area sing broadly the same song but, astonishingly, they are constantly refining and improving it. One whale adds a few new notes and all the others think ‘Crikey! That sounds pretty good! I’m going to do that as well.’ And so they incorporate each other’s improvisations as they go along, as if they are writing and re-writing the music together.

  This means that the song being sung one day is quite different from the one being sung several months later – to such a degree that the entire composition changes over a period of about five years.

  It’s hard not to read something into this remarkable process of reworking and fine-tuning. Does it suggest a degree of artistic sensitivity? Maybe. We don’t know.

  It would be great at this point to say that even the most elaborate bird songs are uniform and unchanging. But that wouldn’t be true. Many songbirds change their songs as they grow older. During its first nesting season, for example, a young male indigo bunting sings a weird and wonderful song unique to itself. But gradually it begins to obey the unwritten rules of being an indigo bunting and comes to sound more and more like its neighbours.

  Humpbacks living in different parts of the world sing very different compositions. They probably all croon about the same trials and tribulations in life, but it is as if the ones living around Hawai’i sing a sort of Polynesian jazz, while those living off the coast of Australia, for example, sing with a didgeridoo accompaniment, and the ones in the Caribbean sing a reggae version of the song. I’m exaggerating, of course, but you know what I mean. They are all singing the humpback whale song – it’s just that they are singing variations of the same theme.

  The differences are so distinctive that whale experts, like wine connoisseurs, can tell where – and even when – a humpback was recorded simply by listening to the intricacies of its unique and special dialect.

  Again, the same thing happens with many songbirds. Indigo buntings living in one area sing their own version of the official indigo bunting song, while those living in another area sing a noticeably different version.

  So maybe there isn’t much artistic sensitivity, after all. But it’s a nice thought.

  It is only the male humpback whales that sing. They close their eyes and hang upside down in the water, heads pointing towards the sea bed and waving their enormous outstretched flippers up and down like conductors in front of an orchestra. Their aim is believed to be twofold: to serenade the females and to warn off unwanted competition from other males.

  They croon day and night, sometimes repeating their songs over and over again, taking only brief, one-minute pauses for breath.

  Our whale was still out of sight beneath the boat, but we could feel its presence through the haunting sounds still wafting around the deck.

  We finished our piece for the camera and everyone lapsed back into reverential silence. We stood there for ages, quietly contemplating the secrets of the whale’s world and wondering if we could extend our trip by an extra couple of days.

  ‘Look out for a big black Cadillac with a major radiator problem’ is how a naturalist friend introduces humpback whales on his whale-watching trips in Hawai’i.

  They are, indeed, big – and predominantly black. Whether or not their bushy blows, or spouts, are like overheated radiators is a matter of opinion.

  Actually, the humpback is best known for its outrageously long flippers, which can grow to nearly a third of the length of its body (5 metres/16 feet or more) and look more like wings than pectoral fins. Viewed from the air, a group of humpbacks looks surprisingly like a formation of jumbo jets.

  If you wanted to design the perfect whale for whale-watching you couldn’t do much better than a humpback. It’s not too difficult to find, nice and easy to identify, shamelessly inquisitive (if humpbacks had net curtains they would spend hours every day peeping through the gap in the middle) and capable of performing some of the most spectacular acrobatic displays on earth.

  Mark and Stephen like dolphins. This is a bottlenose.

  As if lobtailing weren’t enough – this is tail breaching.

  Herman Melville, who mentioned them in Moby Dick, knew what he was talking about when he described them as ‘the most gamesome and lighthearted of all the whales, making more gay foam and white water generally than any of them.’

  The next day was a baking-hot Saturday and we were still drifting off the southern tip of Baja, over an area called Gorda Bank. There were literally dozens of humpbacks in sight, including a tightly packed group swimming almost flipper-to-flipper in the whale equivalent of a chorus line.

  We were incredibly lucky. Like flicking through pages in a book about whales, we witnessed almost every imaginable form of behaviour.

  One whale was lying upside down on the surface, with its great flippers pointing towards the sky, like a sunbather reading a book on a sun bed; after a while, it slapped one flipper, and then the other, onto the water, rolled over and dived. Another turned upside down, literally reversed out of the water and repeatedly smacked its enormous tail onto the surface; it was making such a phenomenal splash that it was hard to see the whale itself through all the foam and spray.

  As if for a grand finale, one particularly active humpback breached – leapt out of the water – right in front of us. Flying through the air no more than 100 metres (328 feet) from the boat, the huge whale arched its back, turned slightly and then fell backwards. It seemed to happen in slow motion and, briefly, waving its flippers in the air, it looked like a giant, overfed parrot. It hit the water with a thundering splash, as if someone had dropped a submarine from a great height, and disappeared below the surface.

  It is possible to tell one humpback whale from another by looking at the unique black and white markings on the underside of their tails.

  Why do whales breach? Well, the answer is the same as for many questions about whales: we don’t know, but there are lots of interesting theories. It may be a form of signalling, because the noise of the splash can be heard for long distances above water, and even further underwater; it could be a way of dislodging parasites, such as whale lice or barnacles; or it might be a way of saying ‘hello’ or ‘goodbye’.

  Quite possibly, it could be something the whales do purely for fun. If I weighed nearly 40 tonnes (39 tons), and could leap out of the water like a fleet of juggernauts, I think I would probably do it just for fun.

  Interestingly, many humpbacks seem to find breaching infectious: when one animal leaps others often join in, just like people giggling.

  The whale breached again. Stephen whooped and cheered and slapped me on the back. He started to laugh – the kind of hysterical laugh people do when their brains are overwhelmed and can’t quite compute the magnitude of what is happening. I started laughing, too. Then the crew laughed. They put down the camera, the microphone and all the other paraphernalia that comes with filming, for the umpteenth time in a few days, and suddenly we were all slapping one another on the back and doing all the things that normal, quiet, unflappable people are not supposed to do.

  A bloodied male humpback whale after a bit of a scrap over a female.

  We watched the whales and their antics for several hours and soon began to recognise certain individuals.

  We are able to recognise one another by our faces. Take skippers and marine biologists, for example: some have red noses, others have long, straggly beards, a few are complete
ly bald and several wear make-up. And that’s just the men. Very quickly we can learn to tell them apart.

  But humpbacks don’t have faces – at least, not the kind that make individuals instantly recognisable. Instead, biologists use the unique black and white markings on the underside of their tails. These range from jet black to pure white and include an endless number of variations in between. No two humpbacks have identical markings and, with experience, it is possible to tell one animal from another simply by peering underneath as they lift their tails high into the air in preparation for a deep dive.

  Biologists have been identifying animals as part of their research for many years. Jane Goodall used facial patterns to recognise chimpanzees in her classic study in Gombe Stream National Park, Tanzania. She found that each member of the group had a distinctive hairstyle, as well as a recognisable mouth and nose, and unique eyes and ears. Other studies have used striping patterns in zebras, the arrangement of whiskers in lions, and even the shapes, nicks and scars of elephants’ ears to tell one individual from another.

  Happy families? Not quite. Here is a female and her calf being harassed by a randy male.

  A humpback whale breaches so close to the boat Mark and Stephen almost swallow their tongues.

  In fact, many field biologists have become so proficient at recognising individuals that ‘their’ animals might as well be carrying passports.

  Whale researchers often give the animals names, which are usually mnemonic. Cat’s Paw, for example, has a jet-black tail interrupted only by a white paw print on the left-hand side; Fracture also has a black tail, but with a distinctive line down the middle; and Seal’s tail – as you might imagine – has an image of a seal on the underside.

  There are two basic rules in the humpback whale naming game. You are not allowed to use human names, like Bert or Beryl, because they are considered too anthropomorphic; and you’re not allowed to use names that assume the sex of the animal, like Dr Spock or Lady Chatterley, because it is usually impossible to tell the difference (unless, of course, the whale turns up with a calf – in which case even I could tell that it is a female). Otherwise, anything goes.

  Purists might argue that the use of names encourages biologists to become too attached to their study subjects. But imagine finding a group of whales off the southern tip of Baja and then trying to remember, with a complete absence of visual clues, whether you are looking at number 673 or 464. Worse still, try racking your brain to distinguish between WP14ZF and XY55PT. It simply wouldn’t work – unless you have a retentive memory like Stephen Fry, of course.

  Come to think of it, Stephen would make a terrific humpback whale researcher. He wouldn’t need to resort to photographs or computer catalogues, like the rest of us. He could just remember the distinguishing marks, numbers and names of every whale he sees.

  The purists, by the way, are missing the point: it’s almost impossible not to become emotionally attached to humpback whales. So names are okay.

  I remember going on a half-day whale-watching trip off the coast of New England. We were very close to two humpback whales when a couple of women in their late thirties, with matching outfits and jangly beads, were hopping and skipping around the deck. I had noticed them before and, while they seemed relatively normal at first, they had been acting increasingly strangely ever since our first close encounter with the whales. When they had finished their dance, they moved to opposite sides of the boat. One sat cross-legged on the deck and murmured a wild, half-sung, half-yodelled mantra, while the other leant over the railings and whirled a short piece of hosepipe around in circles.

  I was bursting to ask them two questions: ‘What were they doing?’ and ‘What the heck were they doing?’. When I finally plucked up the courage to broach the subject, they talked about mystical experiences, golden energy fields, cerebral navigation, elevating vibrational levels and filling the vortex of life.

  I still have no idea what they were talking about.

  The same whales then surfaced a few metres in front of an elderly lady, who was sitting alone in a quiet corner of the deck. She watched intently as they put on an extraordinary show, this time one that seemed almost choreographed. One whale blew a tall column of water vapour high into the air, and the other blew a split second later; one dived beneath the surface, flukes pointing skyward, and the other dived a split second later.

  The woman’s face revealed nothing and she never said a word. But every time the whales took a joint curtain call, and disappeared from view, she clapped politely.

  Later that morning, she confided that it had been the most wonderful and humbling hour of her life.

  We took a last look at our whales. After several hours of unremittingly boisterous activity, the breeding group dispersed and, one by one, moved away.

  Swimming alongside the boat, the last to leave arched its back, lifted its flukes and disappeared from sight. All that was left was an enormous ‘flukeprint’ – a large, perfectly formed circle of smooth water made by the swish of its tail close to the surface. Looking rather like an oily slick, and 3 or 4 metres (10–14 feet) across, it is the nearest a whale can get to a footprint.

  We watched the flukeprint linger and fade, ever so slowly, until it was completely eroded and swallowed by the sea, and then we turned north into the Sea of Cortez.

  An unfriendly Humboldt squid.

  ‘Here’s that sick squid I owe you,’ said Stephen, who was funny most of the time.

  ‘Sorry, sorry,’ he added. ‘It would have been remiss of me not to say it. B-boom.’

  We were with squid-wrangler and researcher Scott Cassell, floating off the coast of Santa Rosalia, to meet some of the strangest animals on the planet.

  Scott was struggling into what looked like medieval armour – a protective steel-mesh suit, complete with hood and gloves, consisting of hundreds of thousands of electronically welded rings. Normally used by shark divers, it fits over a wetsuit and prevents a shark’s teeth from penetrating the diver’s skin.

  ‘Seems a bit melodramatic,’ Stephen whispered to me, as we watched him getting ready.

  Something out of an early episode of Doctor Who (the squid, not Scott Cassell).

  ‘The squid are only about 50 or 60 centimetres (20–24 inches) long,’ I agreed. ‘It’s like using a shark cage to dive with a manatee.’

  We had caught six squid, with the help of a local fisherman and a very long fishing line, and they were swimming about in a pen at the back of the boat. Scott was preparing to join them and had strongly advised us not to get in with him.

  ‘You don’t have chainmail suits,’ he pointed out, ‘and you haven’t been handling squid all your working life.’

  ‘I don’t want to get in the pen with them anyway,’ retorted Stephen.

  Humboldt squid, or jumbo squid as they are often called, grow up to 2 metres (6 feet 8 inches) long and can weigh as much as 45 kg (100 pounds). Unfortunately, all we had managed to catch were some relative tiddlers.

  They are named after the cold current in which they are found, which flows along the west coast of South America and then out into the eastern North Pacific. And they are among the few animals we encountered during our travels together that are actually getting increasingly common.

  We watched as the squid swam around the pen, rippling their diamond-shaped fins when they were merely pottering about or using jet propulsion to really shift (they suck water in through a siphon and then shoot it out again). Their skin colour changed constantly, from white to deep purplish red and back to white, like people blushing and recovering their composure in the blink of an eye.

  ‘Mexican fishermen call them red devils,’ said Scott, ‘because they flash red and white when they are struggling on the end of a line.’

  Incidentally, there is another kind of squid, called the Japanese firefly squid, which lights up like the Blackpool illuminations. Every year, from March to May, hundreds of thousands of these five-centimetre-long (2-inch) squid gather to spawn i
n a bay on the west coast of the Japanese island of Honshu. They are probably the most exuberantly bioluminescent creatures on the planet and they make the water flash, sparkle, shimmer and glow. The spectacle attracts visitors from around the world. Just thought you’d like to know.

  ‘So why are you in a shark suit?’ asked Stephen, going straight for the jugular.

  ‘Because Humboldt squid are aggressive,’ answered Scott. ‘These are too small to do too much harm – although they could easily draw blood – but there are reports of larger ones attacking divers right here in the Sea of Cortez. They even attack one another, cannibalising injured or smaller squid in their own shoal. Just look at the weaponry on this thing.’

  Scott grabbed a squid from the corner of the pen and held it up for us to see. It had eight arms, two tentacles and lots of suckers armed with sharp teeth. It looked like something out of an early episode of Doctor Who.

  Mark, Stephen, Scott and a red devil.

  ‘It uses those teeth to grab fish,’ explained Scott. ‘Then it drags them towards that impressive, parrot-like beak to be ripped to shreds.’

  The squid had huge eyes and stared back. I suppose it was understandable, given that it didn’t have eyelids. It’s hard not to stare without eyelids. Squid eyes are very similar to those of many higher animals, and they can see pretty well, so I wondered what it made of the man in the chainmail suit.

  Scott put the squid back into the water and it squirted a cloud of dark ink.

  ‘That’s to confuse its predators,’ he told us. ‘The ink actually forms a cloud about the size and shape of the squid itself, to fix the predator’s attention while it escapes.’

  ‘Why do you get so excited by squid?’ I asked, perhaps a little rudely.