Fluke: Or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings

as shit and won't get out of the way when they hear a ship coming." Hell, I almost wreck when a squirrel runs in front of my car, and there're millions of them. I can't imagine trying to keep a supertanker from going in the ditch while swerving to avoid one of the last remaining right whales.) Recent surveys estimate (and they can only estimate, because scientists can't find enough of the animals to actually count – I guess when you find one, you just have to count the bejeezus out of him, then extrapolate with algorithms and computer projections) that there may be fewer than three hundred North Atlantic right whales left in the world.
    But on a happier note, some of the populations are recovering, and although the Japanese government appears to be a bunch of nimrods (and who are we to talk?), the Japanese people seem more interested in watching whales than eating them, so the pressure to extend the hunt may relent.
    The kicker to all this is probably that habitat loss and pollution, not hunting, present the greatest threat to marine mammals. (Wha…? Habitat loss, don't they have the whole ocean?) For the most part our oceans are great, wet deserts, with millions of square miles in which life is very sparse. Predictably, human populations have started to compete with marine mammals for the food sources, and, under increased demand and improved fishing methods, many once rich fishing grounds are becoming as barren as a clear-cut forest. Hydroelectric dams that restrict the migration of salmon and other species to their freshwater breeding grounds are already having an impact on the populations of marine mammals that feed on the adult salmon.
    As industrial pollution and agricultural runoff take toxic chemicals to the ocean, it would seem that the enormous volume of seawater would dilute these chemicals to harmless levels, and that's what happens until the chemicals are gathered up by a mechanism called the food chain. Recent studies of tissue samples of some toothed whales (killer whales and dolphins, who feed fairly high up on the food chain) show levels of man-made toxins so high that the animal's blubber actually qualifies as toxic waste. Studies are now going on to determine if declining marine mammal populations on the west coast of North America may not be caused by the lower birth rates and the compromised immune systems of animals who feed on toxic fish. (Oh yeah, guess who else is at the top of the seafood chain?)
    You want to help? Pay attention. Caring about the condition of our oceans does not make you a psycho, tree-hugging, bleeding-heart liberal, it just makes you smart. The health of all life on this planet depends on the health of the oceans. It's just good business. (Even a supply-sider has to admit that if you fish a population to extinction, there will be no supply, so there will be no demand. It's bad economics from the right or the left.) So watch what you eat, and don't eat fish that are being over-fished (like Chilean sea bass, for instance). And don't pour the used oil from your oil change down the storm drain unless you want your next shrimp platter to taste like Quaker State and you sort of like the idea of having your own children born with flippers.
    And go look at some whales. Not captive ones, wild ones. It all comes down to economics, and as long as it's more profitable to have whales around to look at, we'll have them around to look at. If you don't live near water and can't get to any, rent a whale video. It all comes around.
    Barring that, just yell at people randomly to stop killing whales. It could catch on. Really.
    ("Would you like fries with that?"
    "Shut up and stop killing whales!"
    "Thank you. Drive through, please.")

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
    First, my thanks to the home team: to Charlie Rodgers, as usual, for thoughtful reads and cogent comments; to my editor, Jennifer Brehl; and to my agent, Nicholas Ellison, who a couple of years ago said, "Hey, how about a book about whale song? I don't know – like there's meaning in it or something. You figure it out." Blame or credit goes to Nick for that. As always, thanks to Dee Dee Leichtfuss for being my "reader without an agenda." Thanks, too, to Galen and Lynn Rathbun, for taking time away from studying the hose-nose shrew to fill me in on the home life of the field biologist and for putting me in touch with the people at NOAA.
    My thanks also to Kurt Preston for geological information, to Dr. David Kirkpatrick for information on