While working on a project with Sperm whales this past spring, I found an early edition of Farley Mowat's "A Whale for the Killing" at a used bookstore in Olympia. On the first page there appears this quote from Henry Beston:
"Remote from universal nature, and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth."
Off Washington's coast tribal fisherman had been reporting sperm whales near their longline boats. These vessels fish well off the continental shelf, by lowering a long loop of heavy baited hooks in the deep Pacific and drawing up Black Cod, Flounder, and other deep sea fish. These Black Cod can be over ninety years old. In Alaska, Sperm whales have begun stealing these fish off the lines as they are pulled to the surface. Tipped off, perhaps, by the distinct bubbling pattern of a boat's motor when operating its wench, Sperm whales will come from miles away. Sometimes as many as six whales to a boat. The largest predators on earth.
They also have the largest brains on earth. Researchers in the Gulf of Alaska captured this video of a sperm whale delicately plucking the fishing line with its thin lower jaw, as if it were a guitar string. The resulting vibrations flicked the catch from its hook. Presumably, to be easily eaten by the whale without hindrance of hook and line. From the frequency of their feeding clicks while depredating these longline boats, it seems they increase their normal feeding rate by three times. What we choose to call this behavior really doesn't matter, to the whales. We are fishing in their world, and they have learned to take advantage of those efforts; the meme may be spreading.
Does the appearance of Sperm whales near boats in Washington suggest other whales have learned this trait independently, or have they been taught? So far, every trick the fishermen have tried, from dummy longlines to bubbling buoys that obscure the engine's underwater noise pattern, have confused the whales for only a short time. We cannot know the thoughts of whales, but not because they do not think.
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