Leviathan or The Whale

hunted of whales is built for a long life, a longevity indicated by the slow beating of its huge heart at ten times a minute; a shrew, whose heart beats one thousand times in a minute, lives for just a year. It is as if the animal’s life history had been slowed down by virtue of the millions of years its species has existed. At forty-five, a sperm whale is middle-aged, and has achieved its optimum size; like a human, it enters old age in its seventies. Females live into their eighties and perhaps to one hundred years or more, although none is known to have given birth after their forties. Rather, these matriarchs assist other females ‘in ways we do not yet understand’, as Hal Whitehead, one of the great modern experts on sperm whales, says. He calls these older females ‘sages’, raising images of elderly, grey-haired grandmothers, teaching their sons and daughters how to raise their children and passing on memories of good feeding grounds.
    Given their slow breeding and the centuries of hunting they have endured, it is a testament to their evolutionary success that the
Physeter
should remain so ubiquitous throughout the world’s oceans; among mammals, only killer whales and humans achieve such a cosmopolitan reach. Although they adhere to deep water, sperm whales have been seen off Long Island, almost within the city limits of New York, while others swim not far from the coast of Cornwall or Norway. These are generally lone bulls, but other whales may travel in schools of hundreds or even more, numbers ‘beyond all reasonable conception’ to Frederick Bennett. Whalers would suddenly come across huge herds of these enormous animals, like buffalo on the plain. Dr Whitehead too compares them to elephants, roaming the ocean’s savannah, with similar social structures and mutual dependencies–even the same highly modified and very useful noses.
    And as they roam the oceans, whales observe neither night nor day. Like all whales, they are voluntary breathers, and must keep half their brains awake while they sleep, during which–if dogs are anything to go by–they certainly dream. Sometimes they hang perpendicularly like bats, blowholes to the surface, dozing in a drowsy cluster after feeding. Sperm whales exhibit social skills that go far beyond the herding instinct. They enjoy the contact of their bodies, spending hours slowly rolling around one another just below the surface. ‘They seem to love to touch each other,’ says Jonathan Gordon of this underwater ballet. ‘It is not unusual to see animals gently clasping jaws.’
    Such cohesion extends to self-defence. Forever on the move, whales will swim in ranks, like soldiers on parade’, seeking safety in numbers, diving in clusters to feed, synchronizing their soundings as security against predators. Even such fiercely armed animals are vulnerable to attack from orca–more especially so in the three-dimensional hunting ground of the ocean where there is no place to hide, and where a victim can be approached from any angle. Here their only refuge is each other.
    Threatened sperm whales will stop feeding, swim to the surface, and gather to each other in a cluster. Assembled nose to nose around their calves, they form a tactical circle known as a ‘marguerite’, bodies radiating outwards like the petals of a flower. Thus they present their powerful flukes to any interlopers, protecting their young in a cetacean laager. In an alternate version, they touch flukes, heads out and jaws at the ready. Besieged whales will maintain these positions silently, unmoving. If a whale is separated from the circle, one or two of its companions will leave its safety to escort the animal back to the formation, risking their own lives as the killers take great chunks out of the sperm whales’ flesh, foraging like packs of wolves. These are, writes one naturalist, ‘“heroic” acts by almost any definition’.
    Ironically, while such techniques are successful in repelling orca, they also made the animals more susceptible to slaughter by man. ‘The females are very remarkable for attachment to their young,’ Beale observes, ‘which they may be frequently seen urging and assisting to escape from danger with the most unceasing care and fondness.’ If one were attacked, ‘her faithfull companions will remain around her to the last moment, or until they are wounded themselves’. This was known as ‘heaving-to’ by whalers, who capitalized on their prey’s fatal