ecosystems comprising 80 percent of all life on this planet. But rampant carbon emissions from people mean a warmer and more acidic ocean, which severely stresses the intricate tangle of life below. 6 It’s dire, but ironically the situation isn’t all negative. Warmer waters can actually help some whales thrive. At The Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, Simone Baumann-Pickering listens to whales for a living. 7 As a professor of biological oceanography, she uses underwater recorders to study how man-made noise, like military sonar, impacts whale behavior. 8 She sees whale behaviors changing due to the climate crisis. “It’s really geographically distinct whether animals are doing well or not,” she told me. “You have to look at the individual stock level. Some are
nearly eradicated in a matter of decades through commercial whaling. 3 Today’s whales are largely protected if you don’t count pollution, ship strikes, and suicide-inducing underwater noise from commerce and the military. But for a couple of centuries, humans efficiently slaughtered them like sardines. Humpback populations were believed to drop from tens of thousands to mere hundreds worldwide. It wasn’t until multiple species were all but extinct that commercial whaling was banned, finally, in 1986. The end of international large-scale whaling proved that given the chance, nature rebounds, which we saw again, briefly, with the global economic Covid slowdown in 2020. Humpback populations are now thought to be above 90 percent of what they were before commercial whaling,
BIG AND OLD AND SORT OF BACK IN BUSINESS
D
inosaurs are generally thought to have been these massive lumbering behemoths, but, the truth is, whales are bigger. A
blue whale—which one could theoretically go out and see today , depending on one’s location and luck—can be as big as thirty T-Rex. Thirty. They are the largest creatures to ever exist. Jurassic Park is a flea circus. Cetaceans (whales, dolphins,
benefitting from changes, and some are not. Arctic whale habitat is shrinking due to ice loss, but tropical species might be able to expand their range.” “You see baleen whales growing in numbers, but
Whales tell us about ourselves. 200-ton, eight-figure storytellers.
porpoises) were once hairy land mammals that slowly made their way into the water for food before evolving into the sleek
swimmers we know them to be. A few species even retain whiskers from this evolutionary journey. Whale goatees. These hipster whales we know today began evolving around 50 million years ago, meaning whales were dominating the oceans—forming culture, customs, and language—long, long before humans existed. Whales swam in these very oceans as paleolithic pre-humans grunted and froze in caves, as Jesus walked dusty-footed through the desert, and they swim here now, with baleen species eating a couple tons of fish and krill per whale per day, then releasing long greasy clouds of excrement that feed the phytoplankton that then feeds the krill in a timeless cycle that humans
that’s not true for every species and population,” she added. “Generally speaking, the rebound isn’t as fast as we would hope.”
for example. A rare conservationist success story of sorts. 4 But the oceans, generally speaking, are not in good shape. 11 million tons of trash enter the oceans each year. 5 Each week, it seems, we see entire neighborhood’s worth of natural disaster detritus washing away from tsunamis and hurricanes. Cars full of petrochemicals, entire buildings. Where does all that go? Not to a recycling plant. Sure, the ocean would love to kill each of us, but we are much more efficient at killing it with our simple daily routines and the cheap plastic systems that support it. Something has to give. The ocean is home to an incredibly ancient and complex latticework of
MILLIONAIRE CETACEANS
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hales have captivated me since childhood, but my ardor grew more, um, ardent, while living in Baja,
as close to the ocean as one can get. Waves like a thunderstorm waking me in the night. In the winter, Humpbacks and Greys migrate up the Gulf of California to calve. They then migrate, baby in tow, back to the Pacific and north for the summer, where the waters are cold.
3 Phytoplankton create more than half of the Earth’s oxygen, meaning whale poop is fundamentally important to life both on land and at sea. 4 At least for now. 5 According to the UN. Almost 90 percent of plastic found on the ocean floor are single-use items like plastic bags. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is comprised of nearly 2 trillion pieces of floating plastic. It’s three times bigger than France.
6 According the UN, “Ocean acidity has increased about 26% since pre- industrial times. At this rate, an increase of 100 to 150% is predicted by the end of the century, with serious consequences for marine life.” 7 A job I am acutely jealous of. 8 She has “no shame” about eavesdropping on them.
51 SAN DIEGO MAGAZINE
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