## Metadata - Author: [[Tom Mustill]] - Full Title: How to Speak Whale - Category: #books ## Highlights - Only if you love something will you inconvenience yourself to work on its behalf. —Barbara Kingsolver ([Location 450](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09PL5H8TT&location=450)) - A few days after Roger attended the lecture, he happened to hear a recording of the calls of right whales. Roger had never heard such a sound before, so mysterious and lovely. It haunted him. He programmed his alarm clock to turn on a record player that would play it each morning to wake him. “I figured, if I can wake up to these sounds, maybe the day will be better. And I did, and it was.” ([Location 494](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09PL5H8TT&location=494)) - To Roger, part of the problem was that the only connection people had with whales was through the whaling industry. Killing a whale as soon as we saw one was “not a terribly good way of inspiring people as to its complexity and interest and variability and clever wit or anything else.” He became determined to change this. ([Location 498](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09PL5H8TT&location=498)) - As with many whale scientists, studying whales was also an appealing way to live. “I’ve always wished to go down, you know, smaller and smaller roads until you get to a track that leads to the sea,” he said. “And if you get into a boat at that point, and set forth, that is a kind of a living and a sensual experience, which I find irresistible.” ([Location 503](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09PL5H8TT&location=503)) - The biggest coup came when Roger was able to persuade National Geographic to press a disc to include within the January 1979 issue of the magazine. At the time, the magazine’s circulation was 10.5 million, so 10.5 million flexi disc pressings—with a selection of songs from humpback whales—were made. To this day, this remains the largest single print order of any recording ever made. ([Location 585](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09PL5H8TT&location=585)) - Roger had wielded the songs with great power to save the whales—appealing not to our reason, but to our emotions and empathy. He gave the whale its voice in our culture, and this individual human decision is one of the reasons there are still whales at all. ([Location 597](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09PL5H8TT&location=597)) - It’s impossible to know the exact total, but estimates suggest in the twentieth century we killed around three million whales, more than 90 percent of many populations. This is thought to be the largest cull of any animal, in terms of biomass, in history. ([Location 624](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09PL5H8TT&location=624)) - “We do not know the true nature of the entity we are destroying,” wrote Arthur C. Clarke in 1962. Back then, it seemed to those studying whales that they would go extinct and be as lost to us as mammoths and dinosaurs. They would become old stories for children and dreams, relics of the vanished world. And yet they did not die out. Thanks to the efforts of Roger and his colleagues, and the millions of people who protested and forced nations to enshrine protections of whales into law, many populations of whales around the world today are rebounding and expanding. This is a counterpoint to the dangerous narrative of innate human destructiveness, which leads to apathy. It shows how we can change, and life can recover. ([Location 632](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09PL5H8TT&location=632)) - In place of a cozy pelt, whales are kept warm and insulated by a thick layer of fat called blubber, directly beneath their skin and around their entire body, like a sleeping bag made of butter. Once an animal has died, the process of cell death releases heat. In the case of cetaceans, this heat is trapped inside their blubber, and they quickly cook themselves. Depending on the air temperature and exposure of the body, their brains, organs, and other soft tissues can turn to goop within a few hours, and all the information a racing anatomist is looking for is lost. ([Location 967](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09PL5H8TT&location=967)) - The human brain is about 1,350 grams (about three pounds), three times larger than our big-brained relative, the chimpanzee. A sperm whale’s or killer whale’s brain can be ten kilograms (twenty-two pounds)! These are the biggest brains on Earth and possibly the biggest brains ever, anywhere. It’s perhaps not a fair comparison: In relation to the size of our bodies, our brains are bigger than those of whales. Ours are similar in proportion to our body mass, as the brains of some rodents; mice and men both invest a lot of themselves in their thinking organ. But we both lag far behind small birds and ants, which have much bigger brains compared to their body size than any big animals. ([Location 1287](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09PL5H8TT&location=1287)) - To quote the Yosemite National Park ranger who, when asked why it was proving so hard to make a garbage bin that bears couldn’t break into, said, “There is considerable overlap between the intelligence of the smartest bears and the dumbest tourists.” ([Location 1330](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09PL5H8TT&location=1330)) - But mentioning the very idea of “animal language” to some scientists was like “waving a red cape in front of a bull.” It seemed a surprisingly emotional topic. The primatologist Frans de Waal wrote that “the one historical constant in my field is that each time a claim of human uniqueness bites the dust, other claims quickly take its place.” ([Location 1499](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09PL5H8TT&location=1499)) - Humans can communicate in many ways, but we cannot, at will, release combinations of pheromones from fifteen glands to summon and excite or warn or court our fellows, as the honeybee does. We can’t peel back and display hidden neon feathers in a dance of electrifying winged semaphore, as can some birds of paradise, or change the color and reflectiveness of our skin in milliseconds like cuttlefish, with one side of our bodies displaying a come-hither to a suitor, while the other side flashes a warning to a rival. ([Location 1516](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09PL5H8TT&location=1516)) - Our ears cannot hear the sonic rumbles of elephant voices, as they are below twenty hertz, so their vibrations pass through our bodies with those of distant earthquakes. Nor can we hear the calls of bats and moths swooping past our windows at night, which are above twenty kilohertz. Cows have twice the hearing range we do; in fact, humans live in an audio bubble, deaf to the chatters of tarsiers, the call of the sloth, and even the complex trills of male mice. We can hear rats squeak, but not when they are happy; as when they become excited—such as when tickled—the pitch of their squeaks increases and is lost to us. Which means we only hear sad rats. ([Location 1521](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09PL5H8TT&location=1521)) - So, what would a whale need to do to be able to speak? I formed a shopping list in my mind of helpful ingredients for an interspecies whale conversation. So far I’d learned that cetaceans had finely tuned ears, incredibly sophisticated voices, impressive and enigmatic brains, complex changing repertoires of songs, social lives based on their sophisticated vocalizations (encouraging for a human wanting to speak with a whale), and the ability to learn to change their vocalizations to imitate the sounds of other species. ([Location 1784](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09PL5H8TT&location=1784)) - A perplexing dolphin cognitive ability is pointing. Most animals do not seem to comprehend pointing, apart from dogs and, surprisingly, bottlenose dolphins. Dolphins were able to understand pointing commands when their human trainers used fingers or arms pointing in a different direction than the human was facing, and even a sequence of points at different objects with a command sequence that could only be interpreted correctly in one way (“Take this ball to that basket”). No other species can do this. In the words of biologist Justin Gregg: “Why dolphins—an animal that has no arms, hands, fingers, or any other appendage that could produce something resembling the human pointing gesture—should have this ability is still a mystery.” ([Location 1828](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09PL5H8TT&location=1828)) - While all scientists should be rigorous, I was beginning to get the feeling that many cetacean scientists are extra careful. This owed something to the complex legacy of a legendary New Age figure, Dr. John Lilly. A controversial and fascinating man, Lilly began his career as a neurologist. His vocational interests whorled out from contributions to conventional science, physiology, and psychoanalysis to cognitive experimentation with LSD and ketamine, the invention and use of sensory deprivation chambers, and the study of dolphins and their “language.” ([Location 1865](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09PL5H8TT&location=1865)) - Note: I like the use of the word "whorled" here. - Speaking to Diana, I was struck not only by the challenging nature of her work but also how vital she felt it is. Her hard-fought insights into the minds of cetaceans reinforced her conviction that there was somebody home inside the bodies of whales and dolphins, and that other people should know about this. “For me,” she said, “this is translational science,” a means of scientific discovery that leads from what we know about an animal directly into the ethics of how we treat them. ([Location 1989](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09PL5H8TT&location=1989)) - As we drove, Pat told us about the wonders of Hawaiian birdsong; how much more complex their calls are than our human voices, which he dismissed, jokingly, as “just low-frequency mumbling, really.” He told me of how different bird species will sing at different pitches and times—in different acoustic channels—so they didn’t speak on top of each other. ([Location 2130](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09PL5H8TT&location=2130)) - At the conference, a team led by Katharina Riebel from Leiden University shared the extraordinary results that in their analysis of all songbirds, they found that 71 percent of species have female song, and females sang in every group of birds. Katharina was left “speechless” by the discovery. ([Location 2376](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09PL5H8TT&location=2376)) - As Dr. Evangeline Rose, a biologist from the University of Maryland who studies female song, told Psychology Today, “There’s been almost a century and a half of research on male song, while studies on female song only started in earnest in the 1980s.” ([Location 2384](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09PL5H8TT&location=2384)) - The fungal biologist Merlin Sheldrake talks about how helpful queer theory, which explores nonbinary ways of dealing with identity, can be to biologists: “If you don’t presume to know what this organism is before you start investigating it—if the very nature of its being is a question—then you get to some interesting places.” ([Location 2394](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09PL5H8TT&location=2394)) - One young man, a flame-haired, goateed, unflappable Kiwi named Wesley Webb, was so fed up with the tiresome business of dealing with his thousand-plus recordings of New Zealand bellbirds that he’d teamed up with a data scientist named Yukio Fukuzawa to make a program to do it for him. “Koe” could sort all your sounds, in bulk, automatically by their acoustic characteristics, and arrange them in a giant visual cloud of individual sounds. ([Location 2406](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09PL5H8TT&location=2406)) - If you are trying to decode a conversation, or even what one speaker in a conversation is saying, it is impossible if lots of people are speaking all at once. This problem is even harder in the sea, where sound bounces around all over the place. And cetaceans don’t open their mouths or give any outward sign when they vocalize like we do. Pinpointing which dolphin said what was like trying to figure out who’d called your name at a ventriloquists’ convention. ([Location 2781](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09PL5H8TT&location=2781)) - Britt compared the proliferation of computer tools developed from machine learning to the Cambrian explosion—the juncture about 540 million years ago where a great variety of complex life-forms suddenly emerged. It is startling to me to think of computer programs through the framework of evolutionary biology. ([Location 2790](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09PL5H8TT&location=2790)) - In the words of the contemporary philosopher Melanie Challenger, “the world is now dominated by an animal that doesn’t think it is an animal.” ([Location 3112](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09PL5H8TT&location=3112)) - It’s worth stating that not everyone subscribed to this way of thinking. In 1580, a century before Descartes’s own postulations, the French philosopher Michel de Montaigne wrote, “When I play with my cat, how do I know that she is not playing with me rather than I with her?” Such views, however, were outliers. ([Location 3113](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09PL5H8TT&location=3113)) - it was only as recently as 1898 that Edward Thorndike, a psychologist, published the first-ever psychological study involving nonhuman subjects. By 1911, so little had changed that he complained that “the beasts of the field, the fowl of the air and the fish of the sea” had all been examined by hundreds of workers with “infinite pains” to figure out how their bodies worked. How about looking at their intellect, proposed Thorndike. ([Location 3117](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09PL5H8TT&location=3117)) - The primatologist Frans de Waal has a good term for when we dismiss an animal’s behavior when it seems able to do something a human can do: “anthropodenial.” ([Location 3159](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09PL5H8TT&location=3159)) - Killer whale and dolphin mothers have been observed pushing their dead calves around for days and sometimes weeks, like the orca mother in the Southern Resident killer whale group off British Columbia, known as J35, or Tahlequah. She captured and then broke the hearts of people following her story across the world by carrying around her dead calf for seventeen days. ([Location 3166](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09PL5H8TT&location=3166)) - I once asked Roger Payne what he thought had been holding us back for so long from trying to speak to animals. “It’s exactly like white supremacy, only it’s human supremacy,” he said, “and like white supremacy, it’s based entirely on fear.” ([Location 3203](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09PL5H8TT&location=3203)) - But while our tech develops, as our inclination to look deepens, as our understanding of how little we have found increases, as we see more and our questions proliferate, will this be in step with the destruction of what we are studying? To be alive and explore nature now is to read by the light of a library as it burns. Could our discoveries prompt us to put out the flames? ([Location 3499](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09PL5H8TT&location=3499))