Word: scheffer
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...YEAR OF THE WHALE, by Victor B. Scheffer. The most awesome of mammals has been left alone by literary men almost since Moby Dick. Now Dr. Scheffer, a scientist working for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, writes of the whales' life cycle and the mysterious deep with a mixture of fact and feeling that invokes Melville's memory...
Biological Predestiny. Men are killing off sperm whales at the rate of 25,000 a year, perhaps one-tenth of the total stock, and Dr. Scheffer is indignant at the profligacy and lack of "humaneness" with which this is done. But it is the whale's biological predestiny that saddens him most. Nature seems to have no future plans for the whale -an animal with beguiling potential yet lacking the indispensable potential to evolve beyond itself...
...scarred by the sucking disks of the octopus, bitten by the squid, carrying the buried bills of swordfish, a few of this year's crop of calf whales may survive to be 75. But most of those that escape the whalers' harpoons will succumb to what Dr. Scheffer suggests are their real enemies: "The small, erosive, unimpressive costs of living . . . broken teeth and bones, poisonous foods, and all the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir...
Unrecorded Death. In this respect, at least, a whale's death resembles a human's, and takes on something of the tragedy of the unheroic and unnoticed. In a remarkable passage reconstructing the death of a whale tangled in an underground cable off Ecuador, Dr. Scheffer writes: "His is an unrecorded death, for the cable does not break. The soft words flow around his grave; the messages of life and death, the loving words and stupid words, and pesos up and pesos down. . . . The luminescent beasts and the dark beasts and the beasts in between come...
...subject is a whale; the insight is into man. For Dr. Scheffer's supreme achievement is to take the king of the ocean's beasts, careering half-blindly across the world's seas, and cast him as Lear...