whales Archives - When We Talk About Animals

Ep. 36 – Rebecca Giggs on the world in the whale

YaleUniversity · Ep. 36 – Rebecca Giggs on the world in the whale

*“A whale is a wonder not because it’s the world’s biggest animal, but because it augments our moral capacity.”* – Rebecca Giggs (Photo by Leanne Dixon.)

In her genius debut book Fathoms: The World in the Whale, writer Rebecca Giggs introduces readers to blue whales that exhale canopies of vapor so high that their blowholes spout rainbows, to spade-toothed beaked whales that are so rare they’ve never been seen alive, and to sperm whales whose clinks are louder than the heaviest space rocket ever launched from Earth. In prose so deft it ought to be called poetry, Giggs describes scientific research on how whales shift the chemical makeup of our atmosphere, how they respond to solar storms that migrate vast unseen geomagnetic mountain ranges, and how a bestiary’s worth of fantastic creatures flourishes in whale carcasses as they sink to the ocean floor.

“Every species is a magic well,” E.O. Wilson wrote. “The more you draw from it, the more there is to draw.” But, as Fathoms illuminates, there’s more than just mystery and wonder in the wells these days. Animals’ bodies and lives are polluted with reminders of ourselves. Into these magic wells, we have dumped our plastics and our poisons. As one example, Giggs describes a sperm whale that washed up dead on Spain’s southern coast. In its ruptured digestive tract, scientists found an entire flattened greenhouse that once grew wintertime tomatoes, complete with plastic tarps, plastic mulch, hoses, ropes, two flower pots, and a spray canister. The whale had also swallowed an ice cream tub, mattress parts, a carafe, and a coat hanger. And that was just the obvious human refuse. Toxins build up in whale blubber over years such that the concentration of pollutants in some whale bodies far exceeds that of the environment around them. We have turned the world’s largest animals into hazardous waste. ‘‘Would we know it,” Giggs asks, “the moment when it became too late; when the oceans ceased to be infinite?”

In the past, Rebecca Giggs says, “we thought the sea was kind of timeless and it would remain as it was ever so. Now that we know that it’s not that way, we also need to recognize that our power to change is there too – that we are not condemned to be changeless. I hope that, while the extent of our influence is revealed to be vast, so then too is our capacity to withhold damage.”

Ep. 27 – Ed Yong on telling the grand, urgent and surprising stories of animal worlds

*“People often are best at learning when they encounter something that defies their expectations, where the gap between reality and expectation is the widest,”* says Yong. “I think one wonderful thing about covering the animal kingdom is that there are so many such gaps. Animals constantly surprise us in what they do and what they are capable of; even the people who know them best and who study them, people who devoted their lives to the understanding of the animal kingdom, are constantly surprised.” Photo courtesy of Ed Yong.

“Every human being is a colony,” Pablo Picasso once said. The insight is made literal in Ed Yong’s acclaimed book, I Contain Multitudes, about our hidden relationship with the microbial world. “If we zoomed in on our skin,” he writes, “we would see them: spherical beads, sausage-like rods, and comma-shaped beans, each just a few millionths of a meter across. They are so small that, despite their numbers, they collectively weigh just a few pounds in total. A dozen or more would line up cosily in the width of a human hair. A million could dance on the head of a pin.”

These microbes are not just hitching a ride, but enabling us to become ourselves: they help digest our food, sculpt our organs, and craft and calibrate our immune systems. To be at all, Yong demonstrates, is to be in partnership with them. Yong’s work has contributed to a radical shift in how we understand animals — from discrete organisms motivated by competition to living islands, communities of hidden beings.

“Toughie,” the last-known living Rabbs’ fringe-limbed treefrog, died in captivity in September 2016. The species is now considered extinct. Yong wrote about Toughie and the people who cared for him in his story, “Animal Extinction Caring for the Last of a Species.” Photo source: Brian Gratwicke.

Ep. 13 – Nicholas Christakis on the animal origins of goodness

“When you go to these elephants and you study their networks and you study their behavior, you find in elephants the same, I would argue, type of friendship that you find in us,” Dr. Christakis says. “I find that incredibly moving. If we can share this property with elephants for God’s sake, we can certainly share it with each other.” (Photo: Via Yale Human Nature Lab)

For decades, researchers have debated whether or not animals make friends. “Friends” — the taboo “f word” — was generally put in quotes if it was used at all. But if you study the social networks of elephants, whales and other animals, it is clear that they have friends just like we do, according to the renowned sociologist Dr. Nicholas Christakis. Friendship, like other societal characteristics, evolved independently and convergently across species. Co-Director of the Yale Institute for Network Science, Dr. Christakis is a leading Yale sociologist and physician known for his research on human social networks and biosocial science. In this episode, he speaks with us about the ancient origins and modern implications of our common animality and his remarkable new book, Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society.

In his new book *Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society,* Dr. Christakis investigates the biological foundations of our impulse toward the good. “For too long,” he writes, “the scientific community has been overly focused on the dark side of our biological heritage: our capacity for tribalism, violence, selfishness, and cruelty. [But] our good deeds are not just the products of Enlightenment values. They have a deeper and prehistoric origin …. we come to this sort of goodness just as naturally as we come to our bloodier inclinations.”

Ep. 11 – Diana Reiss on recognizing the dolphins in the mirror

“[T]here are places in the world where the spoken word doesn’t travel very far,” Dr. Diana Reiss says. “In these areas, there are people who convert their spoken words into whistle languages. They whistle the prosody, or the intonation, of the spoken language… You can look at a whistle sequence that looks like a dolphin whistle or a bird whistle, and it’s actually a human sentence that is communicating enough that another could decode it. When we look at whistles of birds or dolphins, they look simple and we don’t think about what kind of information might be in there.”

For thousands of years, humans have been enthralled with dolphins. In Ancient Greece, dolphins were considered closer to the gods than any other creature, viewed as half divine messengers between men and gods. To kill a dolphin was an offense punishable by death. The second century Greco-Roman poet Oppian wrote, “Diviner than the Dolphin is nothing yet created for indeed they were aforetime men and lived in cities along with mortals.” Reverence for these creatures was not limited to the Greeks. There are caves in the French Pyrenees with Ice Age era dolphin engravings. Stories about dolphins are part of the Australian Aborigines’ understanding of the world known as “Dreamtime.” To the Maori of New Zealand, dolphins have long been seen as water spirits who can carry messages from island to island in times of need.

“I always felt that just putting yourself aside for a moment and just seeing what you can see, hearing what you can hear, you’ll see patterns or hear patterns emerge,” Reiss says. “And that can inform what you do and the kind of questions you ask. In that way, I think we can partner with animals. My best ideas about animals come from the animals themselves.”

We are separated by 95 million years of evolution, and yet we intuitively feel a striking kinship and admiration for these intelligent creatures. Of course, mythologies like these, as our guest has pointed out, are not verified or scientific truths. “But,” she writes, “mythologies reach a different, deeper kind of truth, one that relies on resonance, not on demonstrable evidence. Mythologies do not account for the origin of people or dolphins in the way that scientific theories do, but mythologies tell us something about who we believe ourselves to be, our values and our place in the world in relation to all the other creatures of nature.”