How to Speak Whale

Metadata

• Author: [[Tom Mustill]]
• Full Title: How to Speak Whale
• Category: #books

Highlights

• For example, humpback whales include percussive and tonal sounds in their music in about the same ratio that we do in several of our musical traditions. (Location 541)
• He said that Linda, Katy, and he speculate that whales may use rhyme for the same reason the ancient Greek bards used rhyme in their epic poems—to help them remember what came next in a long song. (Location 544)
• At the beginning of each breeding season, the whales of a population may all sing slightly different songs to one another. Over the season, like an orchestra tuning up, these seem to coalesce into a single, coherent song that is quite accurately repeated. These songs evolve continuously, each one changed from that of the previous year, until after a few years it would become entirely different. Various populations of whales sing distinct songs in different oceans, but there appear to be “hit factories” like the Australian whales, whose ear-worm tunes seem to leak out from their population, carried by bulls to other seas where other bulls take elements of their phrases and verses and add them to their own songs. (Location 548)
• The story goes that when the pod Old Tom belonged to encountered humpback and right whales passing by, they would herd them into Twofold Bay, where the Davidsons lived. Old Tom and other whales would break away from the hunt and alert the humans by swimming right to the river mouth by their houses and breaching—throwing and slapping their tails on the surface—at all times, even at night. The Davidsons and their crews would rush out to their boats and paddle out to the killers, who would then guide the men to the prey whale, helping to corral and attack them until the whalers had harpooned and killed their prey. Sometimes the killers would even help by pulling on the ropes leading from the harpoons, tugging the ensnared whales toward the whalers’ boats. (Location 846)
• When a hunt was complete, the Davidsons’ teams would attach the dead whale to a buoy and the killers would take their share of it, eating its huge, fleshy lips and tongue. It’s thought the Davidsons were taught this by their indigenous crew. The whalers would then take the rest to be rendered for its valuable blubber to be used in soaps, fuels, and the manufacture of leather. It was also a good deal for the killer whales, who would normally have to spend many dangerous hours hunting a baleen whale by battering it with their tails, pushing it beneath the water or biting at vulnerable parts. This exchange, a formalization of what was perhaps a mutualistic symbiosis millenia in the making, became known locally as the “Law of the Tongue.” (Location 855)
• Researchers listening to the whales have discovered that there are different populations, each of which has its own “dialect” of coda click-patterns. Scientists have dubbed these “vocal clans.” It astonished me to learn that two whales of different vocal clans wouldn’t just “speak” differently, they would live differently as well—whales of different vocal clans use different hunting techniques and hunt different prey, they care for their young differently and pass down other behavioral traditions unique to their clan. Even though their ranges overlap, the sperm whale vocal clans don’t seem to mingle much with each other—they live as different tribes in the same seas, split by behaviors and perhaps unable to communicate with whales of other clans. (Location 1191)
• When I think of whales passing information to one another in their cultures, I wonder what they might say and how long those whale cultures might have existed. I think of whaling, and how even if some whales survived, and populations rebounded, what of their cultures is now gone? I’m reminded of the British colonists arriving in Australia and seeing the indigenous people, who had no writing, and writing their cultures off—despite their spoken histories, which had been passed down for thousands of years, since before histories of Britain began. Since the cultures those colonists encountered didn’t imitate their own, they were invisible to them and terribly damaged by their actions. The cultures of both whales and people are fragile; they can be lost. (Location 1202)
• A social animal needs more brain hardware on which to run the software of culture. (Location 1397)
• To move forward is to concoct new patterns of thought. —Edward O. Wilson (Location 2623)
• Williams decided to take a risk: He was going to point the telescope at an unremarkable patch of space. His colleagues tried to stop him, convinced that there was nothing there, that it was a waste of time and a waste of money. He would be ridiculed and might lose his job. “Scientific discovery requires risk,” Williams said. “I was at a point in my career where I said, ‘If it’s that bad, I’ll resign. I’ll fall on my sword.’” (Location 2631)
• Britt compared the proliferation of computer tools developed from machine learning to the Cambrian explosion—the juncture about 540 million years ago where a great variety of complex life-forms suddenly emerged. It is startling to me to think of computer programs through the framework of evolutionary biology. But if one way of looking at the history of life on Earth is a story of the construction of ever more complex living systems and the diversification of information-exchanging beings, then perhaps the comparison was (Location 2790)