Leviathan or The Whale

valleys of the oceanic abyss in which they are effortlessly at home. And as they dive–often in an informal group–they use their clicks to locate and scan, with extraordinary precision, the distance, presence and nature of their prey. It is thought that a whale can ‘see’ into its prey, diagnosing it–even to the extent that it can tell if it is pregnant. The returning clicks are ‘heard’ through the dense, hard jaw bone–the same bone from which Ahab’s false leg is carved–and which acts as a listening device in its own right, conducting sound through bioacoustical oils directly to its eardrums. The whale’s external ear is largely useless; the animal hears through its body itself.
    The deeper it dives, the more effective the whale’s senses are, away from the chatter and interference of the world above. A sperm whale can create a two-hundred-decibel boom able to travel one hundred miles along the ‘sofar’ channel, a layer of deep water that readily conducts noise. It seems strange that such a physically enormous creature should rely on something so intangible; but bull sperm whales, by virtue of their larger heads, generate sounds so powerful that they may stun or even kill their prey. These directional acoustic bursts, focused through their foreheads and likened to gunshots, are the equivalent, as one writer notes, of the whale killing its quarry by shouting very loudly at it.
    In their own researches, Soviet scientists, whose nation’s enthusiastic hunting of the sperm whale in the twentieth century allowed ample opportunity for such study, suggested that in order to hunt in the depths where only one per cent of sunlight penetrates below two hundred metres, the whale uses a ‘unique video-receptor system…which lets the animal obtain the image of objects in the acoustic flow of reflected energy even in complete darkness’. In other words, the sperm whale can see its prey in sound. And just when you think nothing else about this animal could confound you, another theory proposes that the whale’s sonic bursts, and the movement of its head, may cause plankton in the deep water to emit their bioluminescence. In the utter darkness, the leviathan may light its own way to its lunch.
    Even as you leave the Tube station, you remain an underground passenger, conducted through a tiled tunnel before emerging into the shadow of an extravagant cathedral of science. Clinging to the terracotta façade–itself layered to resemble geological strata–is an industrial bestiary: heraldic griffins and scaly medieval fish and, most frightening of all, grinning, toothy pterodactyls, with their obscene storks’ beaks and glaring gargoyle eyes and their leathery wings wrapped about them.
    In the gothic nave, children mill about a blackened diplodocus nonchalantly waving its whiplash tail. A hundred years ago, they would have been greeted by another monster, for here stood the skeleton of a sperm whale, guarded by what appeared to be a Victorian policeman as if it were a prisoner at Pentonville.
    The route comes back like a lost memory. I walk past ichthyosaurs sailing through long-vanished Triassic seas and moth-eaten fauna of the savannah and the jungle, displays out of a dead zoo. Abruptly, the corridor turns into a space more like an aircraft hangar than a museum. There, hanging like one of the model aeroplanes I used to suspend from my bedroom ceiling, is the blue whale, the largest object in the Natural History Museum.
    Contrary to the usual tricks of childhood recollection, it is actually bigger than I remember. Nearly one hundred feet long from the tip of its nose to its twenty-foot flukes, the whale could easily accommodate a large household within its interior. There is something fairy-tale about it, an invention of the Brothers Grimm: its huge mouth has a faint grin, and its disproportionately small eye stares out from its wrinkled socket, part amused, part pleading. Even Linnæus’s name for it is a little Swedish joke:
Balænoptera musculus–Balæna
meaning whale,
pteron
, wing or fin, and
musculus
, both muscular, and mouse.
    I was fooled by this model then, as visitors are now, for this wood and plaster reconstruction is only an approximation of a blue whale, a much more streamlined animal than this bloated model gives credit. Constructed in the 1930s, before anyone had seen an entire living whale in its element, the creators of this whalish effigy relied on carcases hauled out of the water,