The Sea Inside

particularly prone to stranding, and increasingly, it seems, susceptible to human-generated sonar because of their highly attuned reliance on sound. In one well-documented case in 2002, a mass stranding of Cuvier’s beaked whales occurred on the Canary Islands, four hours after the onset of military exercises in the area. Necropsies of the animals revealed the kind of haemorrhages and gas-bubble lesions associated with a build-up of nitrogen in the blood, known as necrosis – what human divers call ‘the bends’. The whales seemed to have been panicked by the noise into surfacing too early; other reports indicate that similarly frightened whales adopt an unnatural up-and-down ‘flight mode’.
    Such strandings address us directly, as emblems of our careless actions. In
The Sea, The Sea
, Charles Arrowby’s cousin James informs him, ‘The sea is not all that clean … Did you know that dolphins sometimes commit suicide by leaping onto the land because they’re so tormented by parasites?’ To which Charles replies, ‘I wish you hadn’t told me that. Dolphins are such good beasts. So even they have their attendant demons.’ In recent mass strandings of common dolphin on Cape Cod, rescuers discovered that the animals became less stressed if they were placed side by side, even as they lay beached and gasping on the sand. In their distress, their only consolation was each other.
    On 11 December 2009 there was a remarkable stranding on a southern Italian beach in the Mediterranean, where a ‘lost tribe’ of sperm whales live, distinct from their oceanic cousins, isolated in an inland sea. Their fate had all the elements of a classical tragedy. The seven whales, all males between fifteen and twenty-five years in age and measuring ten to thirteen metres long, had been driven into shallow waters, possibly by military sonar. Unable to forage on deep-sea squid, they first began to dehydrate, then to starve.
    Now a third threat came into play. In their state of hunger, their bodies began to break down their adipose fat, releasing the heavy metals and organochlorines they had inadvertently ingested from the polluted seas, and which had been absorbed into their bloodstream. In effect, the whales were poisoning themselves. As Dr John Wise showed me, in his laboratory at the University of Southern Maine, Portland, sperm whales are particularly susceptible to pollutants, not only because of their position at the top of the food chain, but due to the way they breathe so deeply. While I watched sperm-whale cells multiplying in a Petri dish under one of his electron microscopes, Dr Wise told me how sperm whales, which range widely in their oceanic travels, inhale chromium emitted from coastal chemical plants which, along with other contaminants, may be causing cancer and birth defects analogous to Down’s syndrome in human beings. We share the same air as mammals, yet we contrive to poison even that, as if not content with bespoiling the sea. The same chemicals that created Rachel Carson’s silent spring might yet silence the world of the whales.
    For the ill-fated spermaceti septet in the Mediter-ranean, that toxic cocktail weakened their bodies yet further, altering their sense of orientation and perception. The fishing gear, hooks, rope and plastic objects subsequently found in the whales’ stomachs – a result of their choosing to live in an inland sea subject to so much human detritus – hardly helped. (Recently, a juvenile sperm whale was found floating dead off Mykonos. The animal was emaciated, yet its stomach was distended; when it was cut open, nearly one hundred supermarket bags and other bits of plastic debris spilled out.)
    The last unlucky component in these, the last few hours of their unlucky lives, was the stormy weather that conspired to drive the seven whales inshore – possibly following the first of their number to give up and thereby demonstrating the loyalty for which their species is renowned. Four of the whales had already expired by the time they were discovered on the beach. The other three took days to die, ultimately suffocating under their own enormous weight; that which had sustained them at sea, a marker of their success as animals, doomed them on land. It must have been a painful death, reflected even in the usually measured words of the scientific paper, which described the whales ‘found agonizing on the shore’. In such circumstances, we humans look on helplessly. Smaller