It’s mind-bending to imagine what some of our world’s oldest whales have seen–some of these massive mammals can live to over 100 years old. That means that many of the whales alive today were old enough to have seen the last days of whaling, a practice that was only, finally, ended in 1986 (mostly).
But while we can perhaps imagine what these centarians have seen, we’ve had a harder time knowing what they’ve felt during the century that saw many of their populations hunted almost to extinction–and what they might have felt when we stopped.
Now, thanks to an old, forgotten collection found in the Smithsonian and a great piece of reporting by bioGraphic, we may have proof that whales knew when their families were experiencing whaling, and that it stressed them out.
Why? During World War II, most of the ships that had been used for whaling were instead used in the war effort–which meant that for a few years, whales weren’t being hunted at such high rates.
Following the war, whaling began again–and U.S. General MacArthur, responsible for dealing with food and oil shortages in Japan post-war, order two vessels to go on the hunt. In total, these two vessels killed 2,300 blue and fin whales from 1946-1948.
This slaughter was accompanied by scientific observers who collected baleen, the feathery keratin plates that baleen whales use to filter feed, from each of the whales killed and then shipped it off to the Smithsonian. Then, decades later, scientists used this collection of baleen to get a snapshot of the whales’ lives.
A return to whaling meant increased stress for these gentle giants
By testing the hormone levels found in the baleen, we can see the whales’ relative stress levels over the 4 years before they had been killed. These stress levels spiked dramatically in 1946–the year whaling began again.
This indicates that, whether it was the feeling of being under attack or just the presence of more ships where the whales were feeding, whales had strong stress responses to the return of whaling.
There’s way, way more to the fascinating story of how the Smithsonian team rediscovered this long-lost baleen collection, and went about testing and understanding what the baleen was telling us–if you want to read more, the bioGraphic piece is an excellent deep dive.
Thankfully we have, by and large, ending our hunt for whales. But understanding the stress we caused these gentle giants during our centuries of whaling isn’t just a grim reminder of that catastrophic era–it’s also a reminder that, we can have a big, measurable impact on how whales experience the ocean.
Even if we no longer follow them around with harpoons, we are still stressing whales out–we hit them with our boats, entangle them in our fishing gear and drown out their songs with a cacophony of industrial ocean noise.
I hope that this study will help us think more deeply about the lives whales lead–and how we can give them happy, long lives in a peaceful ocean.
