Leviathan or The Whale

inauspicious name: the
right
whale to catch; a ponderous, literal pun, borne with fortitude. With forty per cent of their body as fat, right whales are highly buoyant, spending most of their time at the surface; even more conveniently, they floated when killed. Along with their propensity to hug the shoreline–hence their other epithet, the urban whale–right whales suffered most of all from the centuries of unnatural predation. They were the first whale to be hunted, by Basques in the Bay of Biscay–a dubious honour commemorated by their proprietorial French name,
baleine de Biscaye-
but fewer than four hundred now remain in the North Atlantic.
    With its baroque, glossy body encrusted with callosities, its paddle-shaped flippers and its bizarre, yawning mouth filled with baleen,
Eubalæna glacialis
is both grotesque and wondrous, the stuff of ancient engravings. It is the very definition of a whale, as supplied by Ishmael’s sub-sub-librarian, who informs us that the word itself came of Scandinavian roots:
hvale
, meaning arched or vaulted in reference to its jaws, but also a reflection of the animal’s rolling roundness, its architectural structure.
    Like the sperm whale, the right whale was a victim of its strange physiology. Not only did it boast plentiful blubber, but its particularly long baleen, when heated, could be moulded into shape for umbrellas, corset stays and venetian blinds, or used as bristles for brushes. If whale oil was the petrol of its day, then whalebone was its plastic. Harvested in clumps higher than a man, their pliable blades were once arrayed in quayside plantations like giant sheaves of Jamaican sugar cane.
    What made these the right whales to kill now makes them modern targets. Almost unbelievably, one of the world’s rarest species chooses to frequent its most populous shores and busiest shipping routes. Here they fall victim to the tactics they deploy with their predators, remaining silent and still at the surface. An orca might be fooled into thinking the right whale was an inanimate object; an insensate freighter cares less. Although the right whale became the first cetacean to be protected from hunting in 1935, its numbers in the North Atlantic have remained static, despite legislation moving the shipping lane further north, and strict instructions that vessels should stay five hundred yards away from any whale. The result–so few breeding whales–is that the animal’s gene pool is now so restricted that it is unlikely to survive the century.
    The irony is that the right whale is such a fertile, if not fecund creature. Weighing nearly a ton, the male’s testes are the largest of any animal. These, along with its eight-foot penis, allow it to take part in sperm competition in which males assert their supremacy by multiple matings rather than fighting for favours (although they may use their callosities as a kind of weapon). Females will even permit more than one partner to enter them at the same time, after sessions of delicate foreplay in which the courting animals use their flippers to stroke each other with inordinate gentleness; like all whales, their skin is incredibly sensitive, and the pressure of a human finger can send their entire body quivering. Despite this vigorous approach to sex, there are only eight matrilineal lines left in the northern species–the visible legacy of centuries of whaling.
    Stormy saw his first right whale when he was a sixteen-year-old boy out fishing on Stellwagen Bank with his father; they were almost legendary animals by then, already close to extinction. ‘People knew there were some left,’ he recalls, ‘but nobody knew where most of them were.’ His youthful interest evolved into an adult passion, and having helped found the Center for Coastal Studies in Provincetown in 1976, Mayo began collecting data on right whales. He also became the first person to be licensed by the government to rescue entangled whales; more than sixty per cent of right whales have been caught in fishing line. Ship strikes, too, are killing more than hitherto suspected, many of them females of calf-bearing age. At this stage of the species’ history, to save just one fertile female could make a difference between extinction or survival. It is hard not to see Stormy and his colleagues as new heroes of anti-whaling, flown interstate at short notice on operations costing thousands of dollars.
    Indeed, the same techniques that were once used to hunt whales