Leviathan or The Whale

Another, at Lee-on-Solent, was interred at a site in the New Forest.
    In her open-plan office, Sophia Exelby shows me her gallery of stranded whales. It is a gruesome car-insurer’s album, each cetacean crash more ghastly than the last. A pilot whale lodged in Devon rocks, caught in the kind of boulders over which children clamber looking for rock pools. A finback washed up at Ventnor, its blubber dripping like wax in the sun, its separated head yards down the shore. A sei whale, one of the rarer rorquals–and one of the fastest–lying on Morecambe Sands, victim of its deceptive tides. A humpback in Kent, slumped on its white flippers like an airliner in an emergency landing. An orca in the Mersey.
    Whales where they should not be.
    Many may be accidents, such as ship-strikes, or the result of entanglements or disease. Mass strandings–more familiar on the beaches of Cape Cod or New Zealand–are less easily explained. Freak tides, bad weather, sand bars and ailing whales inadvertently leading their fellows to disaster have all been cited as possible causes; in his notes on strandings, Sidney Harmer remarked that they often occurred when the sea temperature was abnormally high or low, due to an influx of water from colder or warmer latitudes, and that a localized wind was blowing onto the shore.
    Another theory is that whales align themselves to the earth’s invisible power lines by means of magnetosomes in their bodies; ferro-magnetic material has been found in the tissues of cetacean organs to support this idea. Ever aware of their position–birds may use a similar technique in their migrations–they orientate themselves to magnetic contours as though possessed of personal GPS systems. But sometimes there are anomalies in this unseen map, lines running at right-angles rather than parallel to the land, or places where the coast has changed and no one has updated their system.
    For a marine mammal, such a mistake can be fatal. The Cape’s sands–laid down since the ice age–are a case in point. Deceived by their own senses, pilot whales and dolphins are led onto shore rather than through deep water. Spurn Point–a kind of Cape Cod in miniature at the mouth of the Humber–may have the same effect. Even more recent research shows that increases in standings may also coincide with solar activity which disrupts the magnetic field. Studies of sperm whales stranded in the North Sea over the past three centuries indicate that ninety per cent occurred when the sun’s activity cycle was below average–a finding that raises the notion that those seventeenth-century Dutch omens of catastrophe might have a meteorological, as well as an eschatological basis.
    Other reasons put forward for mass standings raise intriguing questions about the whales themselves. One biologist believes that such behaviour is a genetic memory of their evolutionary past: that stressed and ailing whales seek to return to the land because they know that at least they will not drown there. Some see a Malthusian instinct for the preservation of the greater species: mass strandings as a kind of population control at times when the whale numbers in a certain area have reached their sustainable limit. The fact that standings increased after the end of commercial whaling is given as evidence for this rather drastic self-restriction.
    However, decidedly unnatural forces may act as siren voices. It is increasingly certain that whales are affected by powerful military sonar, developed since the 1960s to detect newly silent enemy submarines. Standings have been noted near naval exercises, during which sounds twice as loud as a jet engine are created. Toothed whales, reliant on their own sonar, are particular victims of this distortion of their natural soundscape; worst affected are beaked whales, which must normally rise slowly after their deep dives. The loud pulses panic them into surfacing, and gas bubbles form in their bloodstream, inducing compression sickness. Necropsies also indicate massive hæmorrhaging around their brains and spinal cords.
    Anthropogenic noise may be the reason for the frequency of modern standings on the British east coast, where seismic soundings for oil surveys not only cause localized distress, but may disturb the whales in their ancient sonic routes, causing them to take a wrong turn into the unsuitably shallow North Sea where they fail to find adequate food. Or it may be (as ever with whales, there are so many maybes