The Sea Inside

known specimens; it is the world’s rarest whale, and has never been seen alive. Only recently a cow/calf pair was washed ashore on the Bay of Plenty, giving the first true idea of what these five-metre-long animals look like. In the past two decades alone, three new species of beaked whales have been identified, raising the total to twenty-one, although they’re constantly being revised – six exotic genera in search of themselves, with names as strange as the animals they evoke:
Ziphius
,
Tasmacetus
,
Berardius
,
Indopacetus
,
Hyperoodon
,
Mesoplodon
.
    One reason for such obscurity is that beaked whales spend so much of their time below the surface, foraging in the depths where they suck squid through their mouths. So seldom seen, they exist in a category of their own. They are (mostly) defined by their prominent beaks, often with a pair of teeth that jut out even when their mouths are shut. Their slender bodies are perfectly suited to diving; their pectoral fins fit into ‘pockets’ to reduce drag. They’ve found their evolutionary niche, these middling-sized whales; one lying on my garage roof would just about overhang it. As varied as any family of songbirds, they suggest some avian-cetacean hybrid, especially the Cuvier’s beaked whale,
Ziphius
cavirostris,
which I once saw from the unlikely vantage point of a cross-Channel ferry.
    As we approached northern Spain over the deep underwater shelf of the Trevelyan escarpment, which plunges to four thousand feet and thence towards the Azorean plateau, three brownish shapes appeared. Through my binoculars I could see the scratches on their backs, the results of battles with one another and with squid; one even breached in front of the prow. But more striking than anything – and more tantalising – were their heads, oddly pinkish as if veiled with an amniotic caul, and distinctly bird-like in shape. It was easy to see why its common name is the goose-beaked whale, a chimerical confusion that invokes tales of barnacle geese born of molluscs.

    Like the Cuvier’s, other common names commem-orate a list of long-dead scientists: Arnoux’s beaked whale, Andrew’s beaked whale, Longman’s beaked whale, Hector’s beaked whale, Gray’s beaked whale, Baird’s beaked whale, Blainville’s beaked whale, True’s beaked whale. Other, equally cumbersome denominations amplify their owners’ dentition: the strap-toothed whale, the spade-toothed whale, the gingko-toothed whale. A cetacean orthodontist would surely shake his head and say, ‘What can I do with teeth like that?’
    Yet their owners surely rejoice in such splendid canines. On Blainville’s beaked whale, as on others, the teeth are resplendent with purple-stalked barnacles as exuberant, weedy adornments dangling from their mouths. Like a deer’s antlers, such tusk-like teeth may be used as a secondary sexual signal, enabling females to sort out males of their own species, since even to beaked whales, other beaked whales look the same. But the animals themselves are, on closer inspection, subtly coloured, a muddy range of greys and browns and blacks, striated and crisscrossed by innumerable scratches, as if subjected to cosmic strikes. Each might be a heavenly body, like Saturn’s icy moon Europa with its ‘chaotic’ terrain cracked and riven by an unknown ocean. (Indeed, astro-biologists speculate that the exosolar planet Kepler-22b could be a watery world where whale-like animals swim through atmospheres of sea; the word planet, after all, means ‘wandering star’.)
    Like those remote astral bodies, which may be detected only when they dim the light of their parent suns almost imperceptibly as they pass between them and us, it is extraordinarily difficult to discern these strange species at sea, even for the most experienced cetologist. They remain a remarkable absence. Melville omits them from his Cetology, but given his love of the eccentric and the paradoxical, I dare say he would have had words for them. To me, they appear to be engaged in a cryptic choreography of their own, out there in the oceanic universe, a masked ball of beaked whales, elegantly pirouetting beyond the human gaze. But then, I probably think too much about whales, generally.
    The next day, after my visit to Marcelo in the vigia, reports come in confirming a group of Sowerby’s beaked whales,
Mesoplon bidens
, first identified in 1804 by the English naturalist James Sowerby. As social, toothed whales, beaked whales are