Leviathan or The Whale

of southern Ireland, while blue whales are swimming through the Irish Sea, a passageway which once proved fatal for the easy access it allowed to British and Irish hunters, a kind of cetacean shooting alley. Taking advantage of the modern moratorium, the great whales are reclaiming their age-old routes.
    However, this success makes them susceptible to those who consider their populations sustainable; ironically, our enlightened attitudes have exposed the whales anew. To take a thousand minkes has an exponential effect on the rest of the population by destroying complex breeding and social structures; the effect on sperm whales may be even more disproportionate. In 2006 Iceland announced its intention to resume hunting finbacks, although its efforts stalled with the discovery that the levels of mercury in the whales they caught were too high for human consumption; the Inuits of Greenland, who eat beluga and narwhal
muk tak
, are among the most contaminated people on earth, despite living in its least developed and apparently pristine spaces, while the whales in the Canadian St Lawrence waterway have absorbed so many industrial pollutants that one in four die of cancer. Norway, with its deep-rooted historical precedents, resumed commercial whaling in 1992. It never had any intention of abiding by the tenets of the IWC, nor does it see any contradiction in its actions: whales are as much livestock as any domesticated cow, a time-honoured resource for a maritime nation. Meanwhile, the contested moratorium remains in place, only ever a temporary solution, as both sides know only too well.
    It took time for science to recover from Dr Lilly’s extraordinary claims about cetacean intelligence; scientists were as loath to pronounce on the subject as they were to address the existence, or not, of the Loch Ness monster. None the less, it was becoming clear that whales and dolphins have brains matched only by the higher primates and humans, with whom they share the same convoluted neocortex–the characteristic wrinkles and whorls on the top layer of the organ–and which indicate exceptional intelligence. If allowances are made for their thick blubber, the body-to-brain-size ratio (the Encephalization Quotient, or EQ) of sperm whales indicates significant acumen.
    Studies show that cetaceans can solve problems and use tools; exhibit joy and grief; and live in complex societies. Not only that, but they also pass on these abilities in ‘cultural transmission’. Twentieth-century whaling may have destroyed ‘not just numerous individuals’, says Hal Whitehead, ‘but also the cultural knowledge that they harboured relating to how to exploit certain habitats and areas’. The remaining animals also experienced lower birth rates as a result, and although they did not suffer as badly as mysticetes such as the right whale–which were reduced to a mere fraction of their pre-whaling numbers–the slow-breeding sperm whale population is growing at a mere one per cent a year. The 1986 moratorium may have come only just in time for
Physeter
.
    Dr Whitehead–along with scientists such as Jonathan Gordon and Natalie Jacquet–has spent years studying the sperm whale in the wild. There is strong evidence that these whales are ‘cognitively advanced’, he tells me; they just don’t use their brains in the same way as humans do. Their lives, lived in another medium and reliant on entirely different structures and influences to ours, demand other talents which are quite unknown to us.
    Hal Whitehead’s conclusions about the sperm whale are fascinating. He notes that while its brain is huge, it is not so unusual when seen in relative size, compared to other mammals. However, its structure ‘suggests strengths in acoustic processing and intelligence’; it has an unusually large telencephalon, the area of the brain used to produce conscious mental and sensory processes, intelligence and personality, and its neocortex–associated with social intelligence in primates–is also highly developed.
    It is precisely because the animal is so big, because its habitat is so huge, that its very existence provokes intelligence. Always moving, always in social groups, the whale’s life is invariably interconnected, dependent on one another and on each other’s knowledge. Its long, relatively safe life free from predators, and its great numbers have allowed the sperm whale to evolve elaborate social systems and cultures–although we are not