Cetaceans

Cetaceans are marine mammals whose extraordinary variety and adaptations unsettle the boundary between the familiar and the unknown. The book presents them as both living animals and signs of an ocean humans cannot fully perceive: studied and classified, yet still resistant to complete description. Their history with people is correspondingly double-edged, joining curiosity and emotional identification to commercial use, military enlistment, and mounting concern for their survival.

Classification and Ways of Living

Cetaceans divide into two suborders. The toothed odontocetes comprise seventy-one species, including porpoises, river and ocean dolphins, beaked whales, killer whales, and sperm whales; they pursue prey such as fish and squid. The mysticetes, or baleen whales, include at least fourteen species and filter plankton and smaller fish through baleen. The contrast is not simply one of anatomy: toothed whales take prey individually, while baleen whales feed by taking in large mouthfuls and filtering out food.

Baleen makes that difference visible. Mysticete fetuses develop tooth buds, but these are reabsorbed before birth; fibrous keratin, the material also found in human fingernails, forms the growing plates that line the gums. The whales feed by expanding the pleats beneath the body as they take in water, then expelling the excess through the baleen, which retains food. In the productive waters of Cape Cod Bay, the mysticetes include the relatively small minke whale, the humpback whale, the right whale, and the fin whale, described as the sea’s greyhound and capable of reaching twenty knots or more.

An Animal Only Recently Seen

The book stresses the disparity between the age of cetaceans and the recency of human knowledge about their appearance. Whales existed before humanity, but people had little sense of what free-swimming whales looked like until underwater photography. The first underwater film of sperm whales was made off Sri Lanka in 1984; images of them moving through the ocean therefore arrived later than personal computers. Even now, some beaked whales are known only from bones washed onto remote beaches, and their status has been recorded as data deficient. New cetaceans continued to be identified in the twenty-first century, leaving open the possibility that large animals still move through the oceans without names or adequate study.

That limit to knowledge shapes the book’s account of human response. Cetaceans can appear almost geographical in scale, their movement making the ocean’s otherwise hidden life perceptible. Their shared mammalian qualities invite recognition, but their bodies and senses belong to a world humans cannot inhabit. The resulting tension is central: people can investigate these animals, but cannot assume that human categories or feelings capture their experience.

Projection, Observation, and Social Life

The book treats anthropomorphism as both a risk and an ordinary human response. It warns against assigning animals human motives merely because they are large, small, appealing, or apparently clever, while acknowledging that imagining a point of contact may help people approach lives unlike their own. A whale sighting can therefore generate wonder without making the whale a human character. Its visible presence points toward marine life that remains unseen, while its unfamiliarity resists easy interpretation.

Research on cetacean intelligence further unsettles the idea that human ways of thinking are the measure of all minds. Evidence discussed in the book indicates that whales and dolphins can solve problems, use tools, experience social emotions, and live in complex societies. Sperm whales pass knowledge through social interaction; distinct communities forage differently, with some practices learned maternally and carried between generations. Groups may also have distinctive repertoires of clicks. Researchers distinguish ordinary clicks associated with foraging, faster sequences associated with prey-searching or interactions at the surface, and codas that may function as communication, although their transmitted information remains unknown. Such findings suggest that whaling could destroy not only individual animals but also social knowledge accumulated within their communities.

People, Ships, and the Uses of Cetaceans

Cetaceans entered human history not only as objects of knowledge but as the basis of an industry and a shipboard social world. The book places whale ships within a broader economy of labor and migration. In the nineteenth-century whaling port of New Bedford, Black sailors and workers from a range of backgrounds contributed to the trade; by the second quarter of the century, one in twenty residents was Black. Frederick Douglass, after escaping slavery in 1838, lived and worked there for four years, taking on manual jobs including rolling casks and stowing ships. Yet opportunity aboard whaling vessels coexisted with segregated sleeping arrangements and difficult conditions. The whale’s commercial value thus shaped both maritime work and the unequal lives organized around it.

Changing technology and energy sources altered the scale and targets of hunting. In 1859, Edwin L. Drake drilled for oil in Titusville, Pennsylvania, marking a turning point for the sperm-whale fishery even as demand for light had previously helped sustain the market for whale oil. Sven Foyn’s patented grenade harpoon made fast rorquals, including blue and fin whales, newly vulnerable to pursuit. Later, steam-powered Antarctic whaling supplied whale products for industrial and military uses: during the two world wars, the book reports, tens of thousands of whales were killed, and whale-derived glycerine was used in munitions. Cetaceans were made to serve human economies even as the industries that depended on them depleted their populations.

The uses extended beyond extraction. From the 1960s, the United States Navy’s Marine Mammal Program trained bottlenose dolphins and beluga whales to identify mines and serve as underwater sentries. The book also describes later mine-clearing work in which dolphins carried cameras on their pectoral fins. Meanwhile, experiments modeled on whale skin informed submarine design, and military researchers considered using recorded whale sounds to disguise submarines underwater. These examples turn cetacean biology into a technology for human activity, while making the sea a site of military use as well as habitat.

Population Loss and Uncertain Futures

Commercial hunting left lasting damage, especially where slow reproduction and restricted populations made recovery difficult. Fewer than four hundred North Atlantic right whales remained in the account presented by the book. Although right whales received protection from hunting in 1935, their numbers remained static; shipping routes were moved north and vessels were instructed to remain five hundred yards away, but ship strikes and fishing-line entanglement continued to threaten them. The species’ limited number of breeding animals and only eight remaining maternal lines made each loss consequential.

The book places that crisis within a wider history of decline. The Yangtze River dolphin was declared extinct while the book was being written, and the author warns that other species, including right whales frequenting Cape Cod Bay, may face extinction. Even after the International Whaling Commission established a worldwide moratorium in 1982, cetaceans remained vulnerable to pollution, underwater noise, and entanglement; the book gives an estimate of three hundred thousand cetaceans killed annually as bycatch. A moratorium could not by itself undo the ecological effects of earlier hunting or remove newer threats.

The final uncertainty is not only whether cetaceans will persist, but how much of their lives people can ever understand. Scientific work has made a strong case for sophisticated minds and social learning, while leaving the content of cetacean communication and experience partly inaccessible. The book’s account refuses both easy mastery and simple reassurance: research expands what can be known, but populations and the knowledge they carry continue to disappear. Cetaceans remain evidence of an ocean larger than human understanding, and of the consequences when that unknowable life is treated chiefly as a resource.