Leviathan or The Whale

swirls and chevrons, individual fin whales are usually recognized only from ship-strike scars; they are known by humans only by what humans have done to them. One animal, Braid, has what looks like tractor tracks across its back, result of an encounter with a propeller; perhaps Branded would be a better name. Another, Loon, has a white scar reminiscent of a bird with a fish in its beak. As they surge through the water, their sheer length takes your breath away; a magnificence measured by the amount of time it takes for their never-ending bodies to slice through the surface. They are truly the athletes of the sea.
    Humpbacks present a readier target, not least because they spend more time at the surface than almost any other whale. The underside of their flukes bears black and white patterns–partly a birthright, but often with notches and scars acquired during their lives at sea. By these marks, as distinctive as any human fingerprint, individuals are recognized on their return. New identifications are made as females bring their calves back to learn how to feed; only two years after it is first seen–time enough to survive long migrations, disease, or attacks by orcas–is a young whale given a name, inspired by the complex riffs and streaks on its flukes into which shapes are read like faces in flames or countries in clouds; a game which would no doubt appeal to the Prince of Denmark.
    Added to these are other observations, such as dorsal fins spattered with white or extravagantly falcate–that is, sickle-shaped or tall enough to tremble as their owner moves through the water. Sexing the whale is quite another matter. The most obvious clue is the presence of a calf. Otherwise, only when glimpsed in a breach, or lying on its back like a sea lion lazily slapping its flippers from side to side, will a female reveal the gibbous swelling at its genitals; a male merely boasts a slit in which it stows its penis for hydrodynamics’ sake. All these signs make a composite picture, assembled from snatched glimpses seen in or through the water as though through smeary glass, never quite complete.

    Down below on the lower deck, passengers thrill to every fluke. Up above the wheelhouse, furious activity is under way The crucial moment in a naturalist’s encounter with a whale is, paradoxically, its departure. Abruptly and without warning, the humpback flexes its back and, deploying its massive muscles to lever its weight downwards, dives below. The movement is fluid, sinuous, of a piece: the rising and falling rostrum; the arching back and dorsal fin; the curving, sinewy tail and broad flukes, water dripping from their trailing edge, a diamond curtain glittering in the sunlight. The whale is freeze-framed in the act, caught at this tipping point between its world and ours.
    At that instant of leave-taking, the animal presents its graphic ID, the markings on the underside of its flukes. If the view proves elusive, there follows a debate that can last for hours, perhaps even days. The captain is often the first to call a whale. After two decades at sea, Mark Delumba prides himself–despite his phlegmatic manner–on his ability to identify individuals, even at a distance. The Center’s naturalist may be more circumspect. She or he will consult the onboard catalogue, a three-inch-thick file illustrating the flukes of every humpback known here, arranged from mostly white to largely black in an abstract index of archipelagos and deltas and scars.
    Back in the wheelhouse, the plastic-coated pages are scanned like a cop running a check on a young offender. The arguments continue until someone triumphantly stabs a fluke shot and calls out any one of a thousand exotic names: Ganesh, with a white patch resembling the elephant-headed Hindu god; Cygnus–a floppy, lopsided dorsal; or Colt, with her own pronounced fin and a habit of ‘mugging’ boats, remaining alongside for so long that captains call for other boats to lure the whale away so they can take their passengers home. Coral has the regular marks of orca teeth on her flukes, and a regular predilection for breaching and lob-tailing; Agassi has white spots on her fin, while Glostick boasts one white line on a mostly black fluke. Anchor has an eponymous anchor mark on the right-hand fluke; Midnight, a self-descriptively dark tail. Some whales, such as Stubb, Valley and Fulcrum, barely have dorsal fins at all, sliced off in inadvertent encounters with ships; Nile, survivor of