A warning from the deep
Page January 7th, 2008
| Sperm whale in the Azores Islands of the North Atlantic. Photo credit: © Innerspace Visions / Doug Perrine. Click to enlarge. |
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| Click image to view a video of a mother sperm whale with her newborn calf. |
A couple of weeks ago, a friend of mine with the Greenpeace Netherlands action team gave me an absolutely stunning book for Christmas. It’s called Planet Ocean, and it’s a collection of photos taken by Greenpeace photographers on the 16 month “Defending Our Oceans” expedition. Here’s an excerpt from the introduction:
We are born of the oceans; it is where it all began. When the first slimy life forms slithered out of the seas and began the process of evolution on land 400 million years ago, life below the ocean waves was already well established, stretching back around three billion years.
While we might have progressed from the primeval soup, life on Earth still comes from the oceans. They cover three quarters of our planet, are the engines driving our weather systems, a ready-made food store for billions on land and sea and give sanctuary to a staggering 80 percent of life on Earth.
If you live far inland (as I did most of my life), it’s easy to forget that our planet is mostly ocean. It’s easy to forget about amazing creatures like sperm whales, which can dive up to 2000 meters deep hunting for giant squids (more fun facts here).
It turns out that sperm whales are unknowingly sounding a warning to the planet, and Ocean Alliance biologist Roger Payne has translated their message for us:
The first gift the whales gave Roger Payne was their song, which he in turn spread to the ears of the world.
He’s planning to do the same with their final gift to him, the data locked inside the skin and blubber samples he gathered from 986 sperm whales on a 5 1/2-year, round-the-world journey… sitting inside those biopsy samples is the first overall baseline assessment of pollution in the world’s oceans.
“What we’ve analyzed so far,” Payne said, “is shocking. It’s well beyond any degree of pollutants that I thought would exist.”
What may inspire humans to act is not the plight of the whales themselves, but that their plight could be a harbinger of our own demise:
“If we don’t do something about ocean pollution,” Payne said from the study of his hillside home in South Woodstock, Vt., “I think there’s a very good chance that humanity will lose access to fish from the sea. And because seafood is the principal source of protein for over a billion people, you could easily argue that this is the largest public health crisis in the world.”
