{"id":62815,"date":"2024-03-04T11:16:06","date_gmt":"2024-03-03T22:16:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.greenpeace.org\/aotearoa\/?p=62815"},"modified":"2024-07-12T09:42:46","modified_gmt":"2024-07-11T21:42:46","slug":"the-water-planet-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.greenpeace.org\/aotearoa\/podcast\/the-water-planet-2\/","title":{"rendered":"The Water Planet"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Hannah Stitfall is asking all the questions you ever wanted to know about whales. Did you know they have culture? She\u2019s joined by whale legend Hal Whitehead, whose close encounters with sperm whales and understanding of their culture has completely changed how we view these enormous animals.<\/p>\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-rich is-provider-spotify wp-block-embed-spotify wp-embed-aspect-21-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<iframe title=\"Spotify Embed: 3 | Whales\" style=\"border-radius: 12px\" width=\"100%\" height=\"152\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen allow=\"autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; fullscreen; picture-in-picture\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/open.spotify.com\/embed\/episode\/3n5BCnHbgj9CTKPX1MRe1U?utm_source=oembed\"><\/iframe>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n<p>We\u2019ll also have an update from the team onboard the\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.greenpeace.org\/international\/about\/ships\/arctic-sunrise\/\">Arctic Sunrise<\/a>, our research ship that\u2019s on its way to the Galapagos Islands.<\/p>\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<lite-youtube style=\"background-image: url('https:\/\/i.ytimg.com\/vi\/sjkxUA041nM\/hqdefault.jpg');\" videoid=\"sjkxUA041nM\" params=\"rel=0\"><\/lite-youtube>\n<\/div><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Listen to Roger Payne\u2019s groundbreaking whale song recording<br><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<lite-youtube style=\"background-image: url('https:\/\/i.ytimg.com\/vi\/APtmz_BAWPg\/hqdefault.jpg');\" videoid=\"APtmz_BAWPg\" params=\"rel=0\"><\/lite-youtube>\n<\/div><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Listen to Roger Payne\u2019s last ever interview<br><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n<p>Presented by wildlife filmmaker, zoologist and broadcaster Hannah Stitfall,&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.greenpeace.org.uk\/take-action\/life-under-water\/?utm_source=GPI&amp;utm_medium=website&amp;utm_campaign=Life+Under+Water\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Oceans: Life Under Water<\/a>&nbsp;is podcast from Greenpeace UK all about the oceans and the mind-blowing life within them.<\/p>\n\n<p>Listen on&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/podcasts.apple.com\/za\/podcast\/oceans-life-under-water\/id1729371744\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Apple Podcasts<\/a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/open.spotify.com\/show\/6BUAtH9pdVl8uCp38AHxbP?si=97331044200b4b0f\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Spotify<\/a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/music.amazon.co.uk\/podcasts\/e7123d7e-e687-41ef-b18d-a20e60cb3f55\/oceans-life-under-water\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Amazon Music<\/a>&nbsp;or wherever you get your podcasts.<\/p>\n\n<p><em>Below is a transcript from this episode. It has not been fully edited for grammar, punctuation or spelling.<\/em><\/p>\n\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity\"\/>\n\n<p><strong>Hal Whitehead (Intro):<br><\/strong>I love the ocean and have been attracted to the ocean since I was very young and wanted to understand it and beyond it. I spent a lot of time at sea sailing around with sperm whales. And I\u2019m on my boat and watch them when they come to the surface and they\u2019re clearly very social, they depend on each other, to live their lives to learn how to behave in the whale will. A whale isn\u2019t a whale without the other whales around it, who it lives with, who it depends on, who it learns from. And as I look out at them, I now realise that that group of whales that we are watching has a particular culture, it has a particular way of doing things. So these whales behave very differently from another class, it may be just over the horizon there. And I find this, this contrast totally fascinating. The whales are a vital part of the ocean. And for me are a reason to go into the ocean and they are a route to understanding the ocean because they have to use the ocean to live.<\/p>\n\n<p><strong>Hannah Stitfall:<\/strong><br>This is Oceans: Life Under Water, a podcast series all about the oceans and the mind-blowing life within them. I\u2019m Hannah Stitfall. I\u2019m a zoologist, wildlife filmmaker and broadcaster. And I want to learn everything I can about the world\u2019s oceans. In this episode: Whales.<\/p>\n\n<p><strong>Hal Whitehead:<\/strong><br>It\u2019s very hard to control anything in the ocean. Everything\u2019s fluid, it\u2019s three dimensional. I think this may be partially behind why they appear to have such societies.<\/p>\n\n<p><strong>Hannah Stitfall:<\/strong><br>A lot of people know that the blue whale is the biggest animal that\u2019s ever existed. But did you know that whales have culture?<\/p>\n\n<p><strong>Hal Whitehead:<\/strong><br>They have different ways of doing things which they\u2019ve learned from each other. This is the aspect of their lives that I find most fascinating.<\/p>\n\n<p><strong>Hannah Stitfall:<\/strong><br>This is Oceans: Life Under Water, Episode Three.<\/p>\n\n<p>I\u2019m really excited to be talking with Hal Whitehead who\u2019s joining me from somewhere in a studio in Nova Scotia, Canada. Now Hal is a biologist whose work studying whales and their inner lives since the 1980s has dramatically changed how we interact with and view these enormous animals today. So it gives me great pleasure to welcome Hal! Hello!<\/p>\n\n<p><strong>Hal Whitehead:<\/strong><br>Hello, Hannah! How are you?<\/p>\n\n<p><strong>Hannah Stitfall:<\/strong><br>I do love your shirt that you\u2019re wearing!<\/p>\n\n<p><strong>Hal Whitehead:<\/strong><br>Oh, good. Good. I like it too.<\/p>\n\n<p><strong>Hannah Stitfall:<\/strong><br>It\u2019s very on brand. It\u2019s a nice navy blue with white whales on it. Very nice Hal.<\/p>\n\n<p><strong>Hal Whitehead:<\/strong><br>Sperm whales too.<\/p>\n\n<p><strong>Hannah Stitfall:<\/strong><br>Good. So let\u2019s get into it. So how many different kinds of whale are there? What\u2019s the biggest and what\u2019s the smallest for our listeners that may not may not know?<\/p>\n\n<p><strong>Hal Whitehead:<br><\/strong>Well, as usual depends on what you call a whale. But as most of us call a whale, there may be 30 or 40 species of whale. The biggest is the blue whale, biggest animal that\u2019s ever lived. And the smallest maybe the pygmy right whale. Well, little by whale standard still a hell of a lot bigger than us. A little animal that we know rather little about.<\/p>\n\n<p><strong>Hannah Stitfall:<\/strong><br>Can you describe to us what a cetacean is so whales versus dolphins.<\/p>\n\n<p><strong>Hal Whitehead:<br><\/strong>So the cetaceans are a group of mammals, whose closest relatives are things like hippos. And they gradually made their way into the ocean 40-50 million years ago, first just shallow waters and then they got into deeper and deeper waters. Then gets about 30 million years ago, they made two major adaptations they developed two wonderful attributes. One lot developed baleen, fingernail type material which grows down from the upper jaw and forms a sieve and that allowed those whales to sieve out small creatures from the water, plankton, small fish things like that. And they can get a huge quantity of food in very short time, a blue whale, the biggest of them, you know, several tonnes of food in one gulp. Pretty amazing. So that\u2019s one kind. At the same time, another group more or less the same time, developed another wonderful adaptation, which was sonar. So the ability to make a sound, a particularly well adapted sound that travels through the water, bounces off something, usually something they might want to eat. And he comes back with enough information so that they can tell Yeah, that is worth eating or chasing or something. So those are the toothed whales, and they include all the dolphins, the porpoises, killer whales, pilot whales, and the biggest of them all the sperm whale.<\/p>\n\n<p><strong>Hannah Stitfall:<\/strong><br>And I\u2019ve watched your TED talk about whale culture, which is absolutely incredible. Can you explain to our listeners a bit about what whale culture is or so far that we understand it to this day?<\/p>\n\n<p><strong>Hal Whitehead:<br><\/strong>Yeah, well, first culture. And culture there\u2019s lots and lots of definitions out there. But the one that makes most sense to most biologists anyway, who think about it and quite a lot of other people, is it\u2019s behaviour or ideas that we learn from others, and then pass on so that a whole bunch of us do the same thing, because we\u2019ve learnt from each other, or from the same place. And if you think of culture like that, there\u2019s quite a lot of whale behaviour, which is cultural. We had been studying sperm whales, off the Galapagos Islands off Ecuador since 1985, we got to know some of the, what we call social units, which is sort of like family groups of sperm whales that live in those waters. And what we were interested in is whether different social units had different dialects. And they communicate using patterns of clicks, which sounds a bit like Morse code, so, click, click, click. click. Or, click. click. click, click, click. And what we found, there were a bunch of the social units who actually sounded pretty much the same. And they went, click, click, click, click. Or, click, click, click, click, click. So a bunch of clicks regularly space, kind of boring. And then we\u2019re another bunch of social units, who went, click, click, click. click. Or, click, click, click, click, click. click. And both these kinds of social units were off the Gal\u00e1pagos. And if social unit was making the regular clicks, it kept making the regular clicks over the years that we studied them, and vice versa with the plus ones. Now when we\u2019re at sea, we tend not just to see one social unit, but we see a group which may be 2, 3, 4, up to maybe seven or eight social units all going round together. And what we found was that even though the regular and plus one social units were using the same waters of the Gal\u00e1pagos, the regular social units only form groups with other regular and the plus ones, only with other plus ones. So the only explanation was that the sperm whales were learning their dialect, and learning who they associate with from their mums and the other members of their social unit. And we found other things like when we were following the regular social units, they wiggled around a lot, they go this way for a few hours and that way and back again, and so on. Whereas when we were falling, the plus ones they take tend to go for quite long periods and straight lines or fairly straight lines. They organised their babysitting differently because the females babysit each other\u2019s calfs when they make long dives to catch food. And so you know that the these clans weren\u2019t just about dialect they were about a whole range of behaviour. And then other people started to find pairs of clans in sperm whales in different places in Japan, in Brazil, in Chile, in Mauritius, in the Indian Ocean, in the Caribbean. In the biggest study, another colleague of mine, Taylor Hirsch, put together recordings from right across the Pacific and found seven clans in the whole Pacific about seven, seven clans in the Pacific with maybe 150,000 females in the Pacific means 20,000 females per clan. So this is a big, large scale social structure. Also large in spatial scale because there\u2019s one clan, the short clan front all across the Pacific, from Japan to Chile, from British Columbia to New Zealand. Whereas there\u2019s another clan much more restrictive. We\u2019ve just found off in waters of Ecuador.<\/p>\n\n<p><strong>Hannah Stitfall:<\/strong><br>Do you think it could be a matter of the different clans having different accents? And still being able to talk to each other like me originally being from Essex being able to speak to somebody from Scotland? We can still understand each other. Or do you think the further that the clans are away it\u2019s a completely different language? I mean, do we know that? I mean, will we ever note that?<\/p>\n\n<p><strong>Hal Whitehead:<br><\/strong>I think, and I\u2019m not sure about this, but I think maybe language is the wrong way to think about this. And they do seem to be what we call symbolic markers. So we humans use symbolic markers to mark our groups. So for instance, two football teams in the same city, say Manchester, for instance, is contrasting colours, right? So it\u2019s very clear if you\u2019re walking down the streets of Manchester, which this group of fans supports in which that group supports and they tend to stay a bit away from one another. So you know, they could understand each other if they want went out and talk to each other. And maybe in another context, they would but, you know, on on Saturday morning as they\u2019re heading for the game\u2026<\/p>\n\n<p><strong>Hannah Stitfall:<\/strong><br>Don\u2019t want to talk to each other!<\/p>\n\n<p><strong>Hal Whitehead:<br><\/strong>Right. And so I see it as more like that. And actually Taylor Hirsch\u2019s work suggested the same sort of thing with the sperm whale clans. So clans which use the same areas which overlap tend to have more distinct coders than clans, maybe one\u2019s off Japan and the others off of Chile, and so very unlikely to meet.<\/p>\n\n<p><strong>Hannah Stitfall:<\/strong><br>And apart from different whale species size, do they have different cultures dependent on the whale species? So for example, as a sperm whales culture different to a humpback, or pygmies?<\/p>\n\n<p><strong>Hal Whitehead:<br><\/strong>Yeah, a lot of it depends on the social system. So some of the whales in particular, the larger whales with teeth like sperm whales, killer whales, pilot whales, live in very tight, family-based societies. So a female probably stays in the same group as her mother, while they\u2019re both alive, so they\u2019re spending their lives together. And in killer whales, young males do as well. So in these species, there are these very tight social circle structures, which are incredibly important to the whales. In contrast, an animal like the humpback whale, which has a much less tight structured family society. So each individual will have a bunch of friends who it spends time with, but it\u2019s his others and so on. And it\u2019s much more loosey goosey. In that situation, the animals are learning from a much wider range of other animals, the cultures can span a whole ocean. So in blue whales, or humpback whales, all the blue whales in a particular ocean, all the humpback whales in a particular part of an ocean, sing the same song, but it\u2019s a different song from the ones in the next ocean.<\/p>\n\n<p><strong>Hannah Stitfall:<br><\/strong>And tell us about the closest interaction you\u2019ve had with a whale.<\/p>\n\n<p><strong>Hal Whitehead:<br><\/strong>Well, I don\u2019t particularly want to get super close them. I want to see the whales interacting with other whales, not with us. But I study a species here off Nova Scotia called the Northern Bottlenose Whale, which is a rather strange and poorly understood animal of the deep waters who dives very deep for squid. They\u2019re also very social. And unlike a lot of these deep water whales, they\u2019re very curious. There was one time we were out there, about 100 miles off the coast here in an underwater canyon where these animals live. And we get a lot of our data by recording the sounds and we do this through what\u2019s known as a hydrophone, which is an underwater microphone passes on the end of a long 100 metre cable. And the worst thing that can happen is that this hydrophone can get wrapped around the propeller on the boat.<\/p>\n\n<p><strong>Hannah Stitfall:<br><\/strong>Oh, no,<\/p>\n\n<p><strong>Hal Whitehead:<br><\/strong>And it did. So I jumped in. And I\u2019m pretty near the world\u2019s worst swimmer. So this was not an efficient procedure. Anyway, I was taking breaths and diving down for about 12 seconds and unwrap a teeny bit and come up to a bit more. And then I just looked behind me and there were two of these wonderful creatures, just about two or three metres away just watching everything. So I think that\u2019s the closest I\u2019ve got.<\/p>\n\n<p><strong>Hannah Stitfall:<br><\/strong>I find it quite interesting that you\u2019re not one of the \u2013 you\u2019ve said just then \u2013 you\u2019re not the world\u2019s best swimmer. But you spend a lot of time sailing and in and around the water.<\/p>\n\n<p><strong>Hal Whitehead:<br><\/strong>Yeah, I love being on a boat. Being on a boat is the very best thing, I think. But I like to stay on the boat. Yeah, I\u2019ll take a swim from time to time especially the waters warm. But yeah. Best to be on the boat.<\/p>\n\n<p><strong>Hannah Stitfall:<br><\/strong>Best to be on the boat. Okay, don\u2019t take good. So can you for our listeners at home tell us about who Roger Paine was?<\/p>\n\n<p><strong>Hal Whitehead:<br><\/strong>Sure. Yeah. So Roger Paine was a biologist who done some extraordinary work about the interactions between moths and bats. And you know how the bats tried to get the moths and so on. And he became fascinated by whales. But this is in the 1960s. And he went out there to see whales and to listen to whales. Because sound was his thing. He was a musician as well as a biologist. And he heard these extraordinary sounds from the humpback whales of Bermuda.<\/p>\n\n<p>(whale songs)<\/p>\n\n<p><strong>Hal Whitehead:<br><\/strong>He recorded and he got other recordings, and he analysed this recording.<\/p>\n\n<p>(whale songs)<\/p>\n\n<p>And he realised that these humpback songs were songs in the same sense that we humans have songs or birds had songs they had, they had a repetitive structure, they had verses notes and themes. And so they were very complicated song, possibly the most complex songs in the world. They were also extremely beautiful. So Roger put out really, with his colleagues, Scott McVeigh, put out a really important paper in a major scientific journal describing the songs and all the scientists were Wow, this is extraordinary. He also put out, and this is in 1970, a long playing record, which was the media in those days of the songs. And this went to the general public. And they went, Oh, wow!! And I can remember that time because I was in university sort of laying around on in my room on my bank listening to these extraordinary sounds. And this was a large part of became a large part of what changed our attitudes about whales in the 1960s the whales were sources of oil and margarine. That\u2019s what they were, by the end of the 1970s, for a lot of people they had become beings who sing. And a lot of this was due to the songs and at the same time, organisations like Greenpeace, were highlighting the extraordinary status of the whales. Where if you look at the late 1960s, and how many whales there were in the world and how that trajectory was going, it looked like in about 15 years there will be no more whales. We were killing them at that rate. And then in what I see is one of the great conservation stories in the 1970s we humans got together globally and pretty much stopped that. So the whale populations which were heading towards zero, levelled out in the late 1970s, and then whaling was pretty much stopped in the 1980s. And at least some of them, including the humpback whale, have rebuilt in the decades since then. And, you know, as humans, we should be proud of that we can sometimes get it right.<\/p>\n\n<p><strong>Hannah Stitfall:<br><\/strong>And that, that record that Roger Payne put out, wasn\u2019t it the biggest selling nature record today? I mean, to be honest, I can\u2019t think of any others that have been brought out, maybe that\u2019s why. But it was a huge deal, wasn\u2019t it<\/p>\n\n<p><strong>Hal Whitehead:<br><\/strong>It was a huge deal. And actually, that wasn\u2019t all Roger did. In the 1960s scientists like Jane Goodall was starting to treat wild animals as individuals, rather than just numbers or, you know, nice packages of cool physiology. And she started giving them names and looking at their social systems and, and looking at them in detail. And Rogers said, maybe we can do the same with whales. And he started studies on right whales in Argentina, where that was his emphasis getting to know whales as individuals. And that was another major bit of pioneering work that he did. It influenced a lot of us. And you know, our study the studies I\u2019ve been doing on sperm whales, as individuals have that as a sort of driving factor.<\/p>\n\n<p><strong>Hannah Stitfall:<br><\/strong>Whale song. So is it all whales that sing or is it just humpbacks?<\/p>\n\n<p><strong>Hal Whitehead:<br><\/strong>No, they don\u2019t all sing. Only baleen whales sing. These are the ones with the filters from the top of the jaw. But most of them do sing. The humpback whale song is way more complicated than any of the others but some of the others are really interesting. Such as the bowhead whale, a big baleen whale of the Arctic waters\u2026<\/p>\n\n<p>(bowhead whale song)<\/p>\n\n<p>\u2026who sings quite complex, but much shorter songs and very variable.<\/p>\n\n<p>(bowhead whale song)<\/p>\n\n<p>As bowheads songs, scientists put it: humpbacks may be more like a symphony, but bowhead, it\u2019s more like jazz. And then there\u2019s animals like blue whales, fin whales, which make songs so low, we can\u2019t hear them. But there are songs and they\u2019re quite simple. And they can travel probably 1000s of kilometres underwater. So there\u2019s a great variety and there\u2019s a few baleen whales that do not seem, like right whales. And as far as we know, none of the toothed whales sing in the sense of producing a repetitive series of vocalisations like a human song are or a bird song.<\/p>\n\n<p><strong>Hannah Stitfall:<br><\/strong>And why do they sing?<\/p>\n\n<p><strong>Hal Whitehead:<br><\/strong>Well, that\u2019s it, we don\u2019t know! We do know that the thing is most all, as far as we know, males, they sing mostly in the breeding season, which is the winter. But they also sing a bit in the autumn when they\u2019re on their feeding grounds cold water areas where there\u2019s lots of food. And in the spring after they return to the feeding grounds, as well as on the migrations between the feeding grounds and the breeding grounds. We assume it\u2019s something to do with mating, but I don\u2019t think we know. We don\u2019t know. I don\u2019t know.<\/p>\n\n<p><strong>Hannah Stitfall:<br><\/strong>I don\u2019t know either how, but we love to hear it. And from studying whale culture, is there something that you found in whale culture that you have become particularly attached to or something from whale culture that has taught you more about yourself?<\/p>\n\n<p><strong>Hal Whitehead:<br><\/strong>One thing we\u2019ve actually never know, almost never noticed is any aggression among the sperm whales. Now these are huge animals with massive mouths, big teeth. But there\u2019s almost no sign of aggression, maybe a little bit in the big breeding males. I once saw what was almost like a sumo match where these two huge creatures went for each other for a few seconds and then one gave up and went off. But otherwise, none. And that seems general, you don\u2019t see any of the aggression that you see, with many non-human primates, with baboons, and chimpanzees, and so on, as well as, you know, with other terrestrial animals, like say wolves, and so on. And I think a lot of this may come down to the structure of the ocean, it\u2019s very hard to control anything in the ocean. It\u2019s, you know, everything\u2019s fluid, it\u2019s three dimensional. It\u2019s really hard to say this is mine, and you\u2019re not coming near it. I think this may be partially behind why they appear to have such peaceable societies. And why they also seem to have, certainly the sperm whale I studied, seem to have more democratic societies. So I\u2019ve watched a group of sperm whales, maybe 40 animals as they move around the ocean. And this is really important to them. Because food is not evenly distributed, they\u2019ve got to go to the right places. And they\u2019ve got to make good decisions about where to go. But how do they do this? In elephants, which have, in some ways, quite similar societies to sperm whales, there is a matriarch, usually an older female, who is the big boss and says, off we go, here we go. So that we were kind of looking for that but we find very little sign of that. Instead, it seems much more democratic. They\u2019re going to make a turn in a few of them move that way and a few goes this way. And then oh, well, maybe and so on. And I\u2019ve watched some take over our to make a 90 degree turn. You know, like democracy itself, it\u2019s slow, it\u2019s messy, but it tends to produce the right answer. And I think that\u2019s a nice message for me and for us that you know, despite the problems we need our democracies.<\/p>\n\n<p><strong>Hannah Stitfall:<br><\/strong>Be more whale!<\/p>\n\n<p><strong>Hal Whitehead:<br><\/strong>Be more whale, in that respect. There we go. Yeah, nicely put.<\/p>\n\n<p><strong>Hannah Stitfall:<br><\/strong>We\u2019re gonna get you get your another shirt with that on it \u2013 be more whale!<\/p>\n\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity\"\/>\n\n<p><strong>Hannah Stitfall:<br><\/strong>So before we get back to Hal there\u2019s something cool I wanted to share with you. Right now there\u2019s a boat bobbing around in the Indian Ocean with a team of researchers on board. Now, one of those is a woman called Asha DeVos. She\u2019s one of the world\u2019s top whale experts. And she\u2019s leading pioneering research into the whales of the Indian Ocean, and she wanted to share it with you.<\/p>\n\n<p><strong>Asha DeVos:<br><\/strong>So we\u2019re out on the scientific expedition. And we\u2019re doing both visual and acoustic surveys of whales and dolphins. It\u2019s really interesting part of the Indian Ocean that I don\u2019t think many people have ever had the chance to explore. I\u2019m born and raised Sri Lankan, beautiful tropical island at middle of the northern Indian Ocean. It would seem like a really natural pathway to become a marine biologist. But when I told people at age 18, that that\u2019s what I wanted to do, most Sri Lankans were really confused. We didn\u2019t realise we had so much abundance of life in our waters. Our assumptions were based on the very little knowledge that we had. And so for me, I started this journey to really become a marine biologist. But take all that knowledge back to Sri Lanka, make sure I was establishing the field making space for others, allowing people to fall in love with the ocean just as I, I always dreamed I would. So Arjuna waters in the Indian Ocean, there\u2019s a range of threats that these whales and dolphins face. One of the big ones certainly of Sri Lanka is ships strike where they get hit by ships and get killed. They can get entangled in fishing nets that might be floating freely. There\u2019s also all kinds of pollution in our oceans. We think always about plastic pollution. But noise pollution is a huge problem for animals that navigate their world using their ears. And also in the Indian Ocean, in the last six decades, there\u2019s research to show that we\u2019ve lost about 20% of the phytoplankton on our surface of our oceans. About 50% of the oxygen that we breathe \u2013 that\u2019s one in every second breath we breathe \u2013 is produced by plants in the ocean. There\u2019s so much that comes out of the largest ecosystem on our planet. So it is really important for all of us across the world, no matter where we live, no matter whether our lives are deeply intertwined with the ocean or not to recognise that protecting the ocean is protecting ourselves.<\/p>\n\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity\"\/>\n\n<p><strong>Hannah Stitfall:<br><\/strong>And now back to Hal.<\/p>\n\n<p>Talk to me about whaling. I mean, it\u2019s one of the more positive stories we\u2019ve had over the last few decades. But when did it start? And how did we get to the point where it\u2019s amazingly, almost completely been phased out except Japan and Iceland.<\/p>\n\n<p><strong>Hal Whitehead:<br><\/strong>Yeah, it\u2019s an incredible story whaling, it goes back, well, probably into prehistory, learning how to kill whales who came very close to the coast and bringing them in and using the products. A whale is a huge animals, so for a small community coastal community, it\u2019s like a windfall. That was always a very small scale operation. But that all changed. With industrial whaling. Industrial whaling probably started, I don\u2019t know, in the Middle Ages, in Europe, in the Basque Country between France and Spain, they were killing right whales close to the coast, they killed a lot. They use them mainly for oil made a lot of money, and they started moving around and they wiped out those right whales, they would go to other parts of the North Atlantic and and kill them too. It grew and grew and in 1712 people from Nantucket in the United States started industrial whaling for sperm whales. And that became a huge industry, partly because sperm whales have better oil than the other whales. And there were a lot of them there all around the world. And so the whale is, from Nantucket and to another ports in New England, as well as Western Europe, started going further and further around the world. They\u2019d go into the Pacific and Indian Oceans, they would discover islands, which had never been seen by these Europeans before. They would bring diseases, they would wipe out other native animals, like giant tortoises. So whaling had a huge impact not only on the whales, but also on a lot of other things. But by the end of the 1800s, whaling was becoming less lucrative they killed a lot of whales. The discovery of petroleum meant there were other sources of oil. So whaling was wasn\u2019t doing too great until they discovered ways to make it much more effective. And this was largely done by Svend Foyn, and Norwegian who started instead of using sail powered whaling boats and road capture boats. He started using steam powered whaling boats, which could go much faster, in much worse weather. He started using harpoon guns rather than people throwing harpoons. So by the beginning of the 20th century, industrial whaling was far, far more efficient than the whaling of the Nantucketers, and so on. And they were a bit of a pause for the two World Wars when we were too busy killing each other to kill quite so many whales, but otherwise, it just went on and got bigger and bigger. And it was all over the world by a lot of different countries, and it couldn\u2019t be controlled. And in the 1960s, it was very clear that the whale populations were in very bad shape. And, yeah, the end of the 60s, that\u2019s when Roger Payne\u2019s record came, our attitude started changing. Greenpeace were out there, you know, challenging the whalers and things changed.<\/p>\n\n<p><strong>Hannah Stitfall:<br><\/strong>It is crazy, really, I mean, those those ships, I mean, I\u2019ve seen photographs of them, they sit with the big steam powers ships with the, you know, the harpoon guns, I mean, they are just, you know, they are killing machines, aren\u2019t they? And you think if everybody around the world are using them, and nobody really has any interest in protecting whales, I mean, they don\u2019t stand a chance against them. Some of the photographs I\u2019ve seen that just awful to look back on now. It\u2019s the way it was, they just didn\u2019t stand a chance against us.<\/p>\n\n<p><strong>Hal Whitehead:<br><\/strong>They didn\u2019t. And even though by the 1960s, there were population biologists who were looking at the numbers and saying, This is awful. We have a huge, huge problem here. Of course, no one listened \u2013 as they don\u2019t today, as people warn about what we\u2019re doing to other kinds of wildlife and the environment generally. But luckily in the 1970s conception of whales changed. That was pretty much it for whaling, which was fantastic.<\/p>\n\n<p><strong>Hannah Stitfall:<br><\/strong>So basically, we need someone to bring out a shark record. Thinking any of our listeners out there that want to want to break into the industry, I think that that\u2019s your that should niche there \u2013 make shark record!<\/p>\n\n<p><strong>Hal Whitehead:<br><\/strong>Absolutely, yes, yes!<\/p>\n\n<p><strong>Hannah Stitfall:<br><\/strong>I\u2019ve read recently about what they\u2019ve been doing in Dominica establishing the world\u2019s first ever sperm whale reserve. Now, how significant is this for the protection of these animals?<\/p>\n\n<p><strong>Hal Whitehead:<br><\/strong>Well, I think it\u2019s, it\u2019s very significant. So I\u2019ve tried to look at sperm whales around the world, and how they\u2019re doing now, like the other big whales, they haven\u2019t been whaled much at all. Over the last 40 years or so we would expect their populations to come back. But sperm whales have extraordinarily low rates of producing babies. So each female only produces one every five years, and there\u2019s no twins. So that means that populations cannot increase fast. In the areas where humans have a much bigger footprint. It doesn\u2019t look good for them. Their populations seem to be declining, certainly not increasing. So places like the Mediterranean, like the Gulf of Mexico, and the waters of the Eastern Caribbean, around Dominica. So off Dominica, and I\u2019ve spent quite a bit of time there. It\u2019s a wonderful place, and the sperm whales there are particularly splendid, because my colleague, Shane Giro has got to know them individually, in the same way that Roger Paine was hoping people would do way back when he started his work in the 60s. And Shane does know all those individuals. So when I\u2019m out there, and I see a sperm, well, you know, they all look pretty much the same. They look a bit like logs to me in the water. But Shane notes: that is so and so. And she\u2019s the daughter of so and so, and she likes doing this, and so on, and the whole history of her social world, and her preferences and her personality. And it\u2019s pretty wonderful! But those populations are under threat because it is a part of the world that\u2019s used a lot by us. There are a lot of shipping, including huge cruise ships that go through there. There are fast ferries, there\u2019s swimming with the whales of Dominica, which was fairly far out of control when I was last there. And all this is a threat to the whales. So this proclamation, as I understand it, of the small sanctuary of Dominica looks like it will reduce those threats. It will regulate where the cruise ships go, how fast they go. It will regulate the people swimming with the whales, so that they\u2019re not being swarmed with all day long. So yeah, I think it\u2019s a good thing. I\u2019m really pleased and congratulate the people who worked on this, especially the people of Dominica, who had to do it themselves.<\/p>\n\n<p><strong>Hannah Stitfall:<br><\/strong>And what is your next project? What are you working on now? Can you say or what are you working on in the future, near future?<\/p>\n\n<p><strong>Hal Whitehead:<br><\/strong>Well, as far as you know, going up see goes which is my favourite bit.<\/p>\n\n<p><strong>Hannah Stitfall:<br><\/strong>Apart from the fact that you can\u2019t swim.<\/p>\n\n<p><strong>Hal Whitehead:<br><\/strong>Yeah, but no I\u2019ll stay on the boat! And I can just about swim, I\u2019m just not very good. We\u2019ll be studying these Northern Bottlenose Whales here off Nova Scotia and further north of Newfoundland. We\u2019re interested in them just as wonderful creatures, but also in how they\u2019re dealing with us, like most creatures, so the ones here have no Nova Scotia, there\u2019s only about maybe 160 of them because they were heavily affected by whaling into the 1960s. So when I was growing up in England, the pets in our family, were he probably eating Northern Bottlenose Whale, you know, that\u2019s what they were being used for. And they, you know, they get stuck in fishing gear and so on. But luckily, their main habitat is now a protected area, so there\u2019s no fishing there. So they seem to be doing a bit better. So that\u2019s great. The next population off Newfoundland there is an area of huge oil and gas development, and I\u2019m very worried for them so we\u2019ll get up there and see what\u2019s going on. I don\u2019t know. But it\u2019s concerning.<\/p>\n\n<p><strong>Hannah Stitfall:<br><\/strong>Well, Hal thank you very much for talking to us today. I know our listeners would have gotten a lot out of the conversation we\u2019ve just had. It\u2019s absolutely fascinating talking to you, thank you. Keep up the brilliant work that you do with whales. And I hope you wear that shirt most days because it\u2019s fabulous.<\/p>\n\n<p><strong>Hal Whitehead:<br><\/strong>Okay, thank you. I\u2019m just off to my class and I\u2019ll wear it in there and see if they notice. Thank you. It\u2019s lovely talking to you.<\/p>\n\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity\"\/>\n\n<p><strong>Hannah Stitfall:<br><\/strong>Next week, we\u2019re going south to the Southern Ocean and Antarctica. But if you want something else in the meantime, check this out. Remember the story we heard at the end of the first episode, the research ship that set sail on an expedition to the Galapagos Islands? Well, we\u2019ve had an update from one of the people on board that Arctic Sunrise, she\u2019s called Usnea.<\/p>\n\n<p><strong>Usnea Granger:<br><\/strong>So my name is Usnea Granger and right now the Arctic Sunrise is on its way to the Galapagos, we are surrounded by gorgeous, beautiful tropical water and weather. It\u2019s sunny, I think we\u2019re expecting some squalls to come our way the next few days. So we\u2019re enjoying these last few moments of sun. So right now on board, everyone is maintaining a certain amount of vigilance or situational awareness. Because we\u2019re on cetacean watches. We\u2019re always looking for what wildlife is around us and you never know what you\u2019re gonna find. A couple days ago, we saw pilot whales a whole pod of pilot whales. I know that they caught a Marlin the scientists right now as we speak are going through that footage. So we\u2019re really excited to see what they come up with.<\/p>\n\n<p>Last night was a special night. It\u2019s sailor tradition that when you cross the equator, there is a ceremony that happens, an equator crossing ceremony. And I can\u2019t say too much because there\u2019s some people present who haven\u2019t been a part of it. And it\u2019s a secret until you go through it. But it\u2019s really, really, really special and a beautiful thing to be a part of. And so we crossed last night at 01:30 in the morning.<\/p>\n\n<p>This morning was also really, really beautiful. There was a whole bunch of people up for the sunrise, people taking pictures of other people taking pictures of that gorgeous, it\u2019s just nice when we can come together at these special calm moments in between operations.<\/p>\n<div class=\"EmptyMessage\">Block content is empty. Check the block&#8217;s settings or remove it.<\/div>\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity\"\/>\n\n<p>This episode was brought to you by Greenpeace and Crowd Network. It\u2019s hosted by me wildlife filmmaking broadcaster Hannah Stitfall. It is produced by Anastasia Auffenberg and our executive producer is Steve Jones. The music we use is from our partners BMG Production Music. Archive courtesy of Greenpeace. The team at Crowd Network is Catalina Nogueira, Archie Built Cliff, George Sampson and Robert Wallace. The team at Greenpeace is James Hansen, Flora Hevesi, Alex Yallop, Janae Mayer and Alice Lloyd Hunter. Thank you so much for listening, and see you next week. Transcribed by https:\/\/otter.ai<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Hannah Stitfall is asking all the questions you ever wanted to know about whales. Did you know they have culture? 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