The Sea Inside

states by the way their temperature falls or rises, like a human lie-detector test. As a result they cannot dissemble about the way they feel, as we do. They know if another dolphin is angry or excited. Citing the dolphin’s enlarged amygdala, the primary processing centre of the brain that deals with emotional and social connections and which is proportionally much larger in dolphins than in humans, White suggests that they may actually be more emotionally developed than us, partly as a result of their high level of social activity: they need to get along with one another since they travel in such close proximity and great numbers. This may be even more important among sperm whales, as Hal Whitehead, the eminent cetologist, says, since at any time they could turn their powerful sonar on their neighbour and cause serious damage. Whales must have codes of etiquette, perhaps even morality. Good manners may be as desirable in cetacean gatherings as they are in ours.
    For humans, emotion may be merely a product of our evolved brains, a function of the spindle cells that distinguish us from other mammals. But it has recently been discovered that some cetaceans – including sperm whales – also possess these bundles of nerves, up to three times as many as humans and primates, and evolved them thirty million years ago, twice as long ago as us. Such cells process social organisation, speech, and intuition about the feelings of others; as to what use whales put these emotions, or even if they are anything like our own, we simply do not know, and can only imagine. If it is empathy that marks us out from other animals, what if that same sense of fellow feeling exists among cetaceans? Could that be a reason for their predilection to strand en masse? Hal Whitehead relates an incident in which a single male sperm whale beached itself on a remote shore, while two of its fellow whales swam up and down the bay, becoming ever more distressed. Eventually they too stranded themselves, to die alongside their comrade.
    It is another refinement of our humanity that, unlike other animals, we know we are going to die. Research has shown that cetaceans have a sense of individual self, and are aware of themselves as sentient creatures. What if they shared our existential angst, too? We are unable to interview animals; they leave no autobiographies. Despite our science, their interior lives remain a mystery.
    Below us, the steady searching clicks continue. João listens some more. Then, satisfied with what he’s heard, he predicts the reappearance of ‘our’ whale as his speaker falls silent. Has the hunter found its lunch? Is it even now sucking in squid through its narrow, tubular mouth, swinging open its slender jaw, glistening white, as if to lure them in? Whether it got lucky or not, the whale is ready to return to our world. And we will be ready for it.

    Up on the rocky headland that overlooks this spectacle, I sit alongside Marcelo on a wooden stool in his concrete cell. Silently, we watch the waves unroll. A few moments before, from the top of the field behind the vigia, up the grassy path where lizards scatter with every step, I had spotted dark shapes in the sea, moving swiftly. Five or six of them, long and sleek, with dorsal fins set far back. Dashing back to the vigia, I consulted with Marcelo and his charts. I realised there’s only one type of whale that matches this fast-moving group – which has now vanished into the silvery expanse and is nowhere to be seen.
    Beaked whales are bizarre animals. Some have heads that resemble a bird’s, while their bodies are spindle-shaped, more like archeocetes, the ancient whales; their sharp beaks evoke even older ichthyosaurs. In 1823, when the French naturalist Georges Cuvier discovered the skull of the beaked whale that would bear his name, he assumed the animal to which it belonged was extinct. It took fifty years for scientists to establish that the species was still alive.
    More than any other whale, the family of Ziphiidae elude our scrutiny, swimming in the deep ocean, far from land. Later, in New Zealand, Anton van Helden, a world expert on beaked whales, would show me the skull of a spade-toothed whale,
Mesoplodon traversii
. The cranium, a scooped-out ski-slope of calciated matter, more abstract sculpture than bone, its lower jaw studded with what look like stumpy tusks, stands on a shelf in a storeroom of the Te Papa museum in Wellington, until now one of only three