Spying on Whales: The Past, Present and Future of the World’s Largest Animals - Nick Pyenson

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In the past few decades, Chile’s geologic resources have become prized targets for extraction by the mining industry, and accommodating large mining machines has meant road widening along remote parts of the Pan-American Highway. An environmental-impact study at Cerro Ballena concluded that further expansion would very likely uncover more fossils. Nevertheless, a road-construction company was green-lighted to begin widening the highway. To comply, the company enlisted Tuareg and his museum for assistance, with Chile’s strong natural patrimony laws ensuring that any fossils would be saved. It was then that Tuareg had started sending me clipped e-mails and shaky videos from the site, not exactly adequately conveying the message of what was happening there. Besides, it was Tuareg—hard to pull out the facts from hyperbole.

      When Caro and I arrived, Tuareg and Jim were pacing about the quarry. Large black felt tarps dotted the desert floor every dozen feet, stretching north and south. I ambled up to Jim. “Dude,” he said in a low voice, telling me everything I needed to know in a single word. “This is not the Playa del Pulpos that we saw two years ago.” Everyone gathered to follow as Tuareg walked from tarp to tarp, rolling each one backward. My mouth fell open as I absorbed the fact that every tarp covered at least one complete whale skeleton, and sometimes several on top of one another. Every black tarp, dozens spread up and down the road-cut quarry, demarcated a whale skeleton. The sheer density of complete skeletons outstripped everything I thought that I knew about how whales get preserved as fossils.

      The skeletons, some thirty feet long, were almost all complete in a way that fossil whales hardly ever are, nose to tail. Many looked as if the creature had died in place, carefully turned on its back, and then been pressed flat over geologic time, like a preserved flower. Skulls were easy to spot, their triangular projections and bowed jawbones at the end of a trail of bricklike vertebrae. Rib cages collapsed toward tails, like gigantic Slinkys. In many skeletons, the ribs were still adorned with shoulder blades connected to arms and even finger bones. The fossil whales at this site were jaw-droppingly complete. And it made no sense that there were so many, so close together. I couldn’t think of any other field site of fossil whales like it.

      I was stunned. Tuareg gabbed away with a positively gleeful Caro and her students. I walked over to where Jim stood at the south end of the quarry, taking photos and rubbing sediment between his fingers. We silently watched the sun slipping over the horizon, evening cloud banks bringing a cool wind. In the distance, a single round peak—El Morro, a weathered mound of igneous rock—capped the view.

      “It’s over,” Jim said, flatly. I looked north and south across the entire quarry, more than a football field in length. I knew exactly what he meant: anything we had thought about doing needed to make room for this site and the several dozen skeletons that stretched up and down the hill in each direction. Measuring the stratigraphic columns across the Caldera Basin, slotting in all of the fossils we already knew about, deciphering that geologic map full of faults—it all needed to wait. My hours and hours of planning had focused on a sure thing, returning with bags of rock samples and with notebooks full of the makings of promised papers. Entire whale skeletons were not part of that plan, certainly not dozens of them.

      I breathed in, anxious and unsure. I was frustrated with myself for not listening to Tuareg more carefully earlier on, paralyzed by the enormity of the scene in front of me. At the same time, part of me recognized that the scope of the site, with its dozens of perfect whale skeletons, was undeniably significant—and I had an open invitation to be one of the first ones to study a place like nowhere else, as far as I knew, on the planet. It was vexing and tantalizing; it was a kind of Pandora’s box, and we’d just seen it crack open.

      “I know,” I said. “What are we going to do?”

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      I think a lot about how whales die. That might sound like the ranting of a whale bone chaser gone full Ahab, but my preoccupation is not with the gore of decaying flesh or exploding body cavities (although those don’t really bother me). Instead, I’m fascinated by the details of the what, where, how, and why: what happens to their carcasses, their locations when they expire, how whales perish, and the reasons for their demise. You might think that these facts are easily uncovered in the scientific literature, or in the many accounts of whaling on the high seas. But they aren’t, not for all of the whales that have washed up on the world’s shores or been hauled up by whalers. So I parse these factors in my head instead—ocean currents, water depth and temperature, scavengers, time to burial, and even anatomical differences—that contribute to the many different ways that a whale carcass might become a fossil.

      Figuring out what parts of the living world can be entombed in rock, and how we might find them, is a game of probabilities. Paleontologists tend to think about the life and death of organisms as a continuous thread from birth to death—and to museum drawer. We visualize this thread as a stream of information where a variety of biological and physical processes winnow away data at each step in a pathway of decay: a carcass scavenged to pieces, not buried intact; a skeleton, or parts thereof, coming to rest in an unpromising setting; the rocks containing the fossil accidentally destroyed. Even if a great specimen is uncovered, the fossils may lie silently in a museum, collected from the field but mislabeled or undiscovered in a drawer. The reality is that we lose information throughout this process; it’s an attrition of data from carcass to cabinet. Given the chances against any living thing becoming a fossil, it is a wonder that we know anything about life from the geologic past at all.

      Thinking like a paleontologist makes you something of a connoisseur of dead things. My pursuit of dead whales has led to the rich record of strandings. Since antiquity, whale strandings have captivated the interest of everyone from Aristotle to casual spectators of exploding whale videos on YouTube. Strandings are a timeless motif—an immobilized, beach-cast leviathan, angrily tail-slapping against the surf. The image shocks us because we imagine whales to be fully a part of the aquatic realm. How would a whale end up landlocked in our world, a creature so large and strange suddenly so uniquely vulnerable?

      Whale strandings happen in many different ways, for multiple reasons. Consequently, there is no single definition of a stranding—just an operational one, for the seemingly aberrant sight of a whale on a shoreline. For example, a stranding might consist of one whale, a mother-calf pair, several individuals from a single species, or several individuals from different species. Adding to the complexity is how they strand: whales may be dead upon arrival, alive but flailing on the shore, or already decayed to a raft of blubber, cartilage, and bones.

      Beyond the how, there is still more complexity to the why: what causes a whale stranding? Senescence or disease may provide simple explanations in some cases, whereas the side effects of living near humans can be either plainly obvious (entanglement in fishing nets or ropes) or more difficult to plumb (toxin poisoning from marine algae). Certainly the sight of an entire pod of whales stranded, dozens in a row, begs some kind of explanation, although that is frequently elusive. True cause is often like that, in the natural world.

      For naturalists working before the era of Yankee whaling in the midnineteenth century, strandings provided the only source of anatomical knowledge about whales. Despite all of the whales killed by Basque whalers for hundreds of years in Europe, there was essentially no documentation of what a whale looked like on the inside—fairly important evidence, when you consider that despite a few snout hairs, nipples, and nostrils for breathing air, whales otherwise largely look like fish on the outside. There are similarly limited firsthand descriptions of dissections on stranded whales from this era—though they must have been uniquely awful. Once word of a whale stranding arrived at the door of a rural doctor or an amateur naturalist in the eighteenth or early nineteenth century, the opportunity would have launched a whirlwind of ad hoc planning for several days of dreary, odorous dissection. The happenstance of a whale stranding dictated where

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