Leviathan or The Whale

quite sure what they are. And while Whitehead’s research has found no direct evidence as to its intelligence–principally because so much of that life is unknown to us–the whale’s complex social behaviour suggests a system of communal recollection, passing on information on feeding grounds and other memories. In an ever changing environment, there is an importance to the elderly, a kind of life insurance for the species.
    It may be that whales remember more than we suspect; like the proverbial elephant, they may never forget. Research on humpback brains has also discovered the presence of spindle neurons, otherwise confined only to primates and dolphins. These cells–important in learning, memory and recognizing the world around and, perhaps, one’s self–first appeared in man’s ancestors fifteen million years ago. In cetaceans, they may have evolved thirty million years ago. This discovery places humpbacks with the odontocetes–sperm whales, orcas and dolphins–as sharing complex social skills of ‘coalition-formation, cooperation, cultural transmission and tool usage’.
    Hal Whitehead speaks of sperm whales as not only possessing a culture–the ability to learn information as a result of social interaction–but having used it ‘to adapt successfully to the ocean’s demanding environments’. ‘There is a growing recognition that culture is not an exclusive property of humans.’ Such research suggests entire communities of whales, ocean-wide clans moving in distinctive patterns and ‘speaking’ in distinctive repertoires of clicks, like humans sharing the same language. Separate groups of the same species will act in different ways, foraging for food in different manners–methods learned maternally, passed on from generation to generation. Similarly, Clan membership is comparable to nationality in humans; two clans off the Galápagos, although genetically similar and geographically close, ‘talk’ in different dialects.
    Dr Whitehead organizes the sperm whale’s clicks into four functional groupings: usual clicks, about two a second, made by foraging whales; creaks, a regular, more rapid succession of clicks which he describes as sounding like the rusty hinge on an opening door, and which indicate a whale homing in on its prey, or scanning other whales at the surface; the communicative sequence of codas–such as click-click-click-pause-click–a kind of cetacean Morse code which suggests ‘conversations’, although ‘we do not know what information is being transmitted’. Most mysterious of all are the slow clicks or clangs made by mature males and which Whitehead compares to ‘a jailhouse door being slammed every seven seconds’.
    As scientists become aware of the complexity of sperm whale societies–which hunting may have fatally undermined by removing its matriarchs and, with them, essential knowledge needed to support the species, and by culling the large bull males with whom the females mate–those same societies face signal new threats. Even as we are able to predict the weather, it becomes unpredictable; as we find out more about whales, they start to disappear. Natural history may soon become simply that: history.
    The earth’s flora and fauna are vanishing at an average of one hundred a day. A process of extermination, first envisioned by Baron Cuvier two hundred years ago as man began to examine the nature of the whale, will be accomplished. Between beginning this book and finishing it, one species of cetacean, the Yangtze River dolphin, has been declared extinct. By the end of the century, half of all animal species–including the right whales of Cape Cod Bay–may follow the same route.
    The sperm whale, too, has an uncertain future, so slow to breed that it also may eventually perish as a delayed effect of hunting. What man started, in the purposeful culls of the two great periods of whaling, his heirs may succeed in finishing off, almost by accident. Dr Whitehead and his fellow researchers may never know the truth about the whale; although in his most astonishing suggestion–all the more so for coming at the culmination of the most detailed scientific surveys, mathematical models and precise plottings, the result of a lifetime spent studying this one species–Whitehead proposes that we may yet discover that sperm whales, the oldest and possibly most evolved of any cetacean, have developed emotions, abstract concepts and, perhaps, even religion.
    If sperm whales