‘They’re amazing animals,’ replied Scott. ‘There are lots of different kinds – something like 300 species altogether – and they range in size from a tiny Antarctic squid that could sit on the end of your finger to giant squid that reach phenomenal lengths of 17 metres (56 feet) or more. They’re intelligent, too – among the most intelligent of all the world’s invertebrates [animals without backbones]. They even have three hearts. I couldn’t imagine studying anything else.’
One of the squid in the pen attached itself to his leg.
‘They are formidable predators,’ he continued. ‘These guys hunt cooperatively – quite an extraordinary feat for an invertebrate – and they attack almost anything they don’t recognise, as well as many things they do.’
The largest animal on the planet, diving and blowing.
Very little is known about Humboldt squid. They are difficult animals to study, living at great depth in the open ocean and rarely surviving more than a few days in captivity.
But it’s vitally important to understand them, as Scott explained.
‘We’ve fished out all their main predators – sharks, tuna, swordfish, marlin and suchlike. Now they’re in seventh heaven. Their numbers are exploding and they are growing bigger and bigger. Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, are caught commercially every year, to provide calamari for the world’s restaurants, yet nothing seems to be stopping them in their tracks.’
‘Does it really matter? asked Stephen.
‘Well, I think it’s quite frightening,’ said Scott. ‘They are starting to dominate this corner of the Pacific and we have no idea what impact that is likely to have. We simply have to find out.’
One of the first things I learned in science at school was this: if it stinks, it’s chemistry; if it doesn’t work, it’s physics; and if it’s green or wriggles, it’s biology.
Using the same basic principle, if it’s almost as long as a Boeing 737 and lives in the sea, it’s a blue whale.
It’s impossible to prepare someone for their first encounter with a blue whale. It is stupendously, astonishingly, breathtakingly, bloody enormous. It is so large, in fact, that it stretches the imagination and boggles the mind.
We’re talking about an animal with an average length – average, mind you – of more than 25 metres (82 feet). The longest ever recorded was landed by whalers in 1909 on South Georgia in the South Atlantic, and measured no less than 33.58 metres (110 feet) from the tip of its snout to the end of its tail.
The average weight is roughly 90–120 tonnes (88.6–118 tons). No blue whale has ever been weighed ‘whole’, of course. Sadly, all known weights were extrapolated during the whaling days, either by cutting them into smaller pieces or by adding up the total number of cookers filled with the meat, bones and blubber of individual whales at shore stations or on floating factory ships. But in this way the heaviest ever recorded was killed in the Southern Ocean, in 1947, and weighed a mind-boggling 190 tonnes (187 tons).
That’s roughly the same as the entire population of the Scilly Isles (2,000 people).
Imagine a set of weighing scales. Big ones, naturally. Then put an average-sized blue whale on one side of the scales.
How much do you think you would have to put on the other side to balance the scales?
Well, you would have to put all of the following: half a dozen African elephants, a black rhino, five Tyrannosaurus rex, a couple of whale sharks, a hundred world-class Sumo wrestlers, the entire England football team and their respective wives and girlfriends, and my car. That lot together equals the weight of an average-sized blue whale.
Almost every aspect of the blue whale provides another superlative, another footnote for the record books.
A baby blue, for instance, measures at least 6 metres (20 feet) long when it is born. Biologists have made estimates about its first year of life: it drinks nearly 200 litres (44 gallons) of milk a day, adding 3.8 kg (8.4 lbs) of weight per hour or 90 kg (198 lbs) per day (that’s the equivalent of putting on my total weight every single day). By the time the calf is weaned, when it’s about eight months old, it is close to 15 metres (49 feet) long and weighs about 23 tonnes (22.6 tons).
Adult blue whales have the largest appetites on the planet – yet, in relation to body size, they eat the smallest prey. They feed on tiny, bright-red pelagic crabs and shrimp-like creatures called krill. The largest blues probably eat as many as five or six million of these tiny animals in a day. That’s roughly 5 or 6 tonnes (4.9–5.9 tons) – equivalent to eating a fully grown African elephant. Fortunately, they have sufficiently voluminous mouths to cope with such a feast – big enough for a man to hold a dinner party for a dozen friends inside.
There’s another related record, albeit an unofficial one, concerning food and feeding. It has no scientific basis whatsoever – it’s based on nothing more than my own personal observations – but I’m absolutely convinced that blue whales have the smelliest droppings of any animal. And to add to the overall impact, they are nothing less than bright pink.
I’ve collected blue whale poo for research (just small samples – the largest animal inevitably does the largest poo), and the stench is utterly, mind-bendingly overwhelming. How some people do this kind of thing for a living I’ll never know (I’ll bet most people embark on a career in zoology imagining a lifetime spent observing tropical butterflies, or living with a family of elephants, or counting whales. Few would envisage years spent collecting and studying the smelliest poo on the planet).
Anyway, just to make myself perfectly clear: if you ever get the chance to do research work on blue whale diets, don’t take it.
The low-frequency booms made by blue whales also break records. When vocalising across enormous stretches of ocean, their calls have been measured at up to 188 decibels, making them the loudest sounds emitted by any living source. The sounds themselves are infrasonic (below the range of human hearing), but, using specialist equipment, they’ve been reliably detected from a distance of 3,000 kilometres (1,864 miles) away. It is unclear whether they are for long-distance communication or whether they form part of a long-range sonar navigation system, but biologists have established that blues calling off the coast of Newfoundland, in Canada, can be heard throughout the western North Atlantic and possibly as far as the Caribbean.
Imagine giving birth to a baby 6 metres (20 feet) long.
Blue whales have the smelliest droppings of any animal known to science.
It almost goes without saying that seeing the largest and most impressive animal on earth is every naturalist’s dream.
But it is a surprisingly difficult animal to find. You’d have thought something the size of a passenger jet would be impossible to miss, like looking for a sofa in the living room, but blue whales are frighteningly rare and these days there are few places in the world where they turn up with any regularity.
One of the grimmest blue whale facts is that more than 360,000 of them were killed by whalers during the 20th century alone. Can you imagine 360,000 blue whales? It beggars belief. It’s one of the most dreadful and terrifying conservation failures in history.
The blue whale’s size and speed saved it in the days of sail-boat whaling, but with the invention of explosive harpoons and fast catcher boats it quickly became the most sought-after species.
Blue whales were hunted so relentlessly that almost all populations were drastically reduced in size – some by 99 per cent.
The whaling was (and still is) unbelievably cruel, too. It is virtually impossible to kill whales humanely – especially ones as big as blues. They die slow, agonising deaths after explosive harpoons have blown huge, gaping holes in their bodies.
As one ex-whaler commented: ‘If whales could scream, whaling would have stopped many years ago.’
The hunting of blues has been banned since the mid-1960s, but most populations have never recovered. Now there is serious concern about the future of these remarkable giants.
There is one population, howeve
r, that seems to be thriving. A splinter group of about 2,000 survived against all the odds and it divides its time between central and southern California, the Pacific coast of Baja, the Sea of Cortez and a place called the Costa Rican Dome (an upwelling of cold, nutrient-rich water off the coast of Central America).
I really wanted Stephen to see a blue whale. Plus I’d dug myself a little hole – having waxed lyrical about it for over a year, and whipped him into a frenzy of excitement, I had to make sure we found one.
‘I can honestly say that was one of the best weeks of my life’ said Stephen.
So I persuaded a couple of old friends to lend us a hand.
Sandy Lanham is a pilot – one of the best I’ve ever flown with – who runs a non-profit organisation that conducts aerial surveys for underfunded conservationists and researchers in Mexico and the United States. She flies over everything from pronghorn antelopes and geese to sea turtles and whales.
We used to do aerial surveys of the blue whales in Baja together, many years ago.
Sandy very kindly flew her 1958 Cessna 182, called Emily, all the way from her home in Tucson, Arizona, to La Paz especially for a recce. Tim and I met her at the little airport (Tim by now had very nearly been forgiven for the mule debacle) and we spent a truly magnificent morning flying over the whale sharks in La Paz Bay and out into the Sea of Cortez to look for the elusive blues.
Within twenty minutes we had found one, right in the entrance to the bay. We could see the entire whale as it surfaced immediately below us – so large that it appeared to be moving in slow motion. With the window wide open, and the wind rushing through the cramped cockpit, Sandy expertly flew spine-tinglingly tight wheels and turns over the whale as we took pictures and film.
Sandy in Emily.
We continued north into the Sea of Cortez and found another, then another. In one little patch of water, off the northern tip of San Jose Island, we found a grand total of five different blues.
I felt an incredible surge of relief.
The next day I was back with Stephen and we were on the Horizon heading north, in the hope that our handful of whales would still be there.
Just in case, Sandy had offered to fly again and she appeared overhead the moment we spotted our first big blue. We chatted briefly on the radio, getting the precise location of some other blues she had seen a little way away, before she did a Red Arrows-wave goodbye and set off towards home.
It was a Monday morning. We hadn’t even had breakfast and there were no fewer than seven gargantuan blue whales in sight at once. The sea was glassy calm, the sun was shining and the whales were spouting, their explosive columns of spray and vapour rising rhythmically towards the cloudless sky.
One particular whale came right alongside the boat and, looking through the blue filter of the ocean, its normally bluish-grey body turned unforgettably and startlingly turquoise. It surfaced to take a mighty breath – more of an explosion than an exhalation, followed by a noisy inhalation – and, for the first time, we could judge its length. We estimated 25 metres (82 feet), or roughly the length of the boat. It lifted its enormous flukes right in front of us and, as water poured off the trailing edge of its tail like an enormous waterfall, disappeared from sight.
‘I wonder what the rest of the world is doing today?’ I asked Stephen.
‘Exactly what I was thinking,’ he replied, smiling. ‘I wouldn’t swap places with anyone.’
We spent the entire day on deck, in the company of some of the grandest creatures on the planet, until the light faded and the sky filled with the kind of dazzlingly pink sunset that makes you marvel at the world and contemplate the meaning of life.
‘Wow!’ said Stephen. ‘I think, for the first time ever, this may be the moment we can convincingly apply America’s most popular word. Awesome.’
The next day we met up with another friend of mine, Diane Gendron, a French-Canadian blue whale biologist. She has the career that pretty much every marine biology student I’ve ever met would die for (except for the bit requiring detailed smelly poo analysis – proving that there is, after all, a downside to every job).
We met Diane at a place called Aqua Verde, just south of Loreto, where she was doing her studies from a bright yellow research boat. She was on the trail of a blue whale mother and calf, and, with research assistant Malie Lessard-Therrien hastily writing notes, was busy recording every intimate detail of their daily lives. If they took a breath or dived, turned left or turned right, Diane wanted to know about it.
She had spent more time with the 500 or so blue whales in the Sea of Cortez than anyone else in the world, but she was still as passionate and enthusiastic as ever. Every time the two whales reappeared she was noticeably more animated and excited than when they were hidden beneath the ocean waves.
Every time they dived – Mum lifting her flukes high into the air and baby trying to copy but failing to lift them high enough – we rushed over to collect some whale dandruff. Malie leaned over the side of the boat and scooped it up from the water surface with a child’s fishing net. Then, like a surgeon performing a delicate operation, she picked the skin sample out of the net with a pair of tweezers and carefully transferred it to a test tube. DNA from the skin will help to unravel some of the many mysteries and get to the bottom of some of the unanswered questions about the world’s largest animals.
We had spent six days and nights on the Horizon altogether, but it was nowhere near enough.
‘Well, you promised it would be fun,’ said Stephen on the very last day. ‘But I can honestly say that was one of the best weeks of my life.’
China should have been the final stop on our world tour. We had hoped to go to the most populous country in the world to look for a blind, reincarnated princess otherwise known as the Yangtze river dolphin.
But in autumn 2007 we received the news we’d been expecting, but dreading, since we first started planning our travels together: the Yangtze river dolphin had officially been declared extinct.
Losing something as precious as a dolphin was quite a momentous event in the history of the world. There should have been a day of international mourning, some form of tribute to one of the most enigmatic and beguiling animals on earth.
But the passing of the Yangtze river dolphin went virtually unnoticed. It slipped away, quietly, while the rest of the world was apparently oblivious or entirely unconcerned.
Maybe I’m being unfair. Perhaps it’s just that our senses are dulled as the inevitable and seemingly endless stories of doom and gloom about endangered wildlife become little more than background noise. Japanese whaling, the Canadian seal hunt, rhino poaching, rainforest destruction and so many other conservation issues have become as familiar a part of daily life as incompetent and dishonest politicians. We’ve heard it all before, so such revelations are less shocking than they once were.
But battle fatigue doesn’t alter the fact that losing a dolphin is like losing the Crown Jewels or the Taj Mahal. In fact, I think it is even worse: we could rebuild the Crown Jewels or the Taj Mahal.
The Yangtze river dolphin, or baiji as it is often known, was unique to China. Once revered as the ‘Goddess of the Yangtze’, it was believed to be the reincarnation of a princess who had refused to marry a man she did not love and, for shaming the family, was drowned by her father.
A beautiful bluish-grey dolphin, it had a low, triangular dorsal fin, broad flippers and a long, narrow, slightly upturned beak.
It also had remarkably tiny eyes. There was little need to see in the turbid waters of its riverine home, where visibility can drop to just a few centimetres: if you were to snorkel in the Yangtze you would barely see the end of your nose. Its eyes were functional, but only just. So, like a bat finding its way in the dark, it relied on a sophisticated form of echolocation to build up a ‘sound picture’ of its surroundings, emitting sequences of tiny clicks and listening for the returning echoes.
Once upon a time, there were loads of dolphins living along
a 1,700-kilometre (1,056-mile) stretch of the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River, from the magnificent Three Gorges all the way to the river mouth. The river used to be ‘teeming’ with them, according to Guo Pu, a scholar of the Jin dynasty who wrote about some of his local wildlife more than 2,000 years ago.
Douglas Adams and I went in search of them in 1988. We explored a small part of the Yangtze, which runs for 6,380 kilometres (3,964 miles) through the heart of China, but we failed to see a single baiji in the wild.
During our travels, though, we were overwhelmed by its phenomenally high profile in China. We drank Baiji beer and Baiji cola, stayed in the Baiji Hotel and used Lipotes vexillifer toilet paper (in case you’re wondering, Lipotes vexillifer is the Yangtze river dolphin’s scientific name). We even came across Baiji weighing scales and Baiji fertiliser.
Lending its name to so many things, it was very much a celebrity – the aquatic equivalent of the giant panda.
But it never really stood a chance.
First, it couldn’t have lived in a more unwelcoming place. The Yangtze River basin is home to an astonishing one-tenth of the entire human population. With heavy boat traffic, agricultural runoff, industrial pollution, untreated sewage, riverbank development, dam construction and overfishing, the past fifty years have been a nonstop battle against the odds for its increasingly endangered wildlife – not just river dolphins but everything from alligators to paddlefish.
The final nail in the coffin was the Three Gorges Dam, the largest hydroelectric dam ever built, which has dramatically changed water levels, currents and sandbanks. Smaller dams along other parts of the river fragmented dolphin populations, blocked their migration routes and made important feeding and breeding areas completely inaccessible.
Will we learn any lessons from the loss of the Yangtze river dolphin?
You couldn’t have come up with more threats if you had tried.
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