Secrets Of Whales - A Documentary

Secrets of the Whales is a new documentary by  James Cameron. 

Few good humans are doing a moral and wonderful job by educating Sapiens who have almost no capacity to change their minds. Eventually, their own demise does that for them. But yet, these efforts have a tremendous impact on few humans who understand their own insignificance and are open-minded.  

They Love. They Play. They Mourn. Just Like Us. 

For the first time, I am reading the word "wisdom" while referring to a non-human animal. Yes, the following sentence is coming from me - This is progress. 

When photographer Brian Skerry first mentioned his interest in exploring the culture of these remarkable animals, one group leaped to mind. I live four miles from Puget Sound, where three pods of southern-resident killer whales spend a portion of their year zipping about in tight formations like squadrons of Air Force Thunderbirds. When their dorsal fins break the surface near shore, crowds gather with cameras, hoping to catch a memorable hop or acrobatic lunge. What secrets might these whales carry? Could knowing them help us live better together?

Photographer Brian Skerry traveled from the Arctic to the South Pacific to capture spectacular and intimate images...Read More

Scientists have long understood that many whale actions must be picked up from peers or elders. It’s learned behavior and hardly shocking. Even Aristotle knew animals learned from one another. Songbirds raised away from their own families “utter a different voice from their parents,” he wrote. Charles Darwin noted that animal traps eventually must be moved because wild creatures “imitate each other’s caution.”

While genes determine the shape and function of a creature’s body, encoding instructions for essential traits and behaviors, social learning is received wisdom, the development of neural connections that let animals learn from the knowledge of those around them. Scientists generally agree that culture requires that behaviors be socially learned and shared widely, and that they persist. As groups of animals transmit multiple learned behaviors, they can develop sets of habits wholly distinct from others of their species. For example, the ability to throw is genetic. But throwing a curveball requires social learning, and playing baseball instead of cricket is culture.

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Among some whales, intelligence may even be an evolutionary response to culture, as social animals spread learned wisdom far and wide. For culture to exist, individuals must come up with new ways of doing things that get shared among peers. And whales can be shrewd innovators. A few hungry sperm whales off Alaska in the late 1990s found new ways to snack: They stripped black cod off commercial fishing boat longlines. Using underwater cameras, scientists recorded a whale delicately grabbing a line with its massive jaw, creating tension, and then sliding its mouth up the strand until the vibrations popped off a fish. The practice, previously rare, quickly spread. In the Gulf of Maine, in 1980, one humpback was seen hunting in a new way. Before blowing bubbles around schools of sand lances to disorient them, the whale smacked the surface with its fluke. Humpbacks regularly use the bubble technique, but the fluke slap was new. It’s not clear how it helps, but by 2013, scientists counted at least 278 whales that hunted this way.

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When I ask about resilience during one of our many talks, Ford shares a story. Killer whales travel in matrilineal family pods for life and learn how and what to eat by watching their kin. In 1970, when wild orcas in the region were still being caught for marine parks, wranglers drove five killer whales into a British Columbia cove. Two were taken to a marine park. The remaining three refused to eat the salmon offered by caretakers. One eventually died. Only after 79 days did the survivors start eating fish.

The whales were “caught in this behavioral rut,” Ford tells me. The caretakers didn’t know killer whales in the Northwest represent three different diets: southern- and northern-resident salmon-eaters; offshore shark-eaters; and Bigg’s killer whales, which hunt only marine mammals. Unlike some other cetaceans whose culture offers them flexibility, these killer whales are unwilling or unable to switch food even when options dwindle, much as Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen beat Robert Falcon Scott, a Brit, to the South Pole by eating his sled dogs, which Scott refused to do. “It’s just an example of how ingrained these cultures are,” Ford says.

That’s partly why, in 2019, more than two dozen scientists, including Ford, Garland, Whiten, and Whitehead, called for a sea change in global conservation. In the journal Science they urged the world to incorporate culture into wildlife management decisions. The Convention on Migratory Species already is developing a plan for South American countries to protect sperm whales in the eastern Pacific by focusing on what individual clans require. Such approaches are “essential to maintaining the natural diversity and integrity of Earth’s rich ecosystems,” the authors argue.