Word: whaled
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...positive that whales communicate by ultrasonic signals that sound rather like "a kitchen faucet with a leaky gasket." Indeed, hearing is the whale's indispensable sense: his eyesight is on the way to becoming obsolete, and he has no sense of smell. But Dr. Scheffer cannot explain what part of the whale produces that sound, or how. He knows that the whale is capable of "caregiving behavior" to the wounded within the "family" of 30 or so in which whales travel. Still, in the end, he is not certain how social or even how intelligent the whale...
...Scheffer's vision, the whale, for all his mammoth visibility, becomes the ultimate enigma in the enigma of the sea: "A hundred chemicals and a million living sparks and a billion bits of drift, no two alike ... an endless, moving, thin, transparent soup; a cosmic stock forever old and ever...
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...
Zoology's general rule is that no animal dies of old age. But the whale may come as close as any. For the whale has no "natural" enemies, in the sense of larger animals that habitually feed on him. Only when young or when attacked by his own kind does he need to flee. Though 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...
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...