The buck stops in the blubber

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, natural history, whales, ecology, environmentalism, pollution

A few years ago a half-grown humpback whale died in Delaware Bay and washed ashore near one of the little towns that are scattered along the shoreline. The Fish & Wildlife service soon found a more out-of-the-way place to take it, and towed the body there, using a tractor and nylon straps to pull it fully onto the shore. The body was 37 feet long and weighed about 16 tons, which is rather emaciated; a healthy humpback this length weighs closer to 20 tons. The curators from the Delaware Museum of Natural History "visited" the remains over the winter, when the smell was less, although the flesh had not yet all rotted away. A year later they organized a field trip for some of us to see the skeleton, now nearly flesh-free.

This is one of my colleagues from the museum next to the remains. About half of the skeleton is shown in this photo; the skull is to the right. You can see that, even in this rather small whale, the vertebrae are 2-3 feet (a little under a meter) across. A few ribs show.

Almost another year later the museum received permission to collect the skull, some vertebrae, and the bones of a flipper. A shed was built to house the remains, which were brought into it late in 2018. I took this photo from the door to the shed. One of the long jaw bones is on the left; its opposite number was carried off by someone before our visit the prior year. If the museum decides to put the skull on display, the remaining jawbone can be scanned and a mirror-image duplicate can be 3D printed.

There was still quite an oily smell about it in 2018. It takes years for all the oily material in the bones to either rot away or leak out and evaporate.

Fathoms: The World in the Whale, by Rebecca Giggs, begins with the story of her visit to a dying humpback whale near her home in Australia. I am not sure what I was expecting when I checked out the book; I should have been wise enough to expect a very environmentalist tone, particularly from someone who is probably a younger member of the X generation.

The book's chapters each have a subject, but the subjects are secondary to the overall theme, which is introduced on page 47, where a word that is new to me, and to most of us I reckon, is defined: defaunation. If you know that "fauna" refers to animal life, the word defines itself as the removal of animal life. The whales are harbinger species, and their downfall portends the general downfall of everything. It is happening all around us, but most people don't notice.

Some of us have lived long enough to remember very noisy Spring and Summer mornings, with dozens of species of birds singing their territorial songs. Our family lived in Sandusky, Ohio in the early 1960's. The southern shore of Lake Erie, from Cleveland westward to Toledo, and around the tip of the lake, is a concentrating flyway for songbird migration, so the morning chorus was very intense. These days, although I live under one of the East Coast flyways, the morning chorus is pretty, but quite "thin" by comparison; I seldom hear more than four species. Ms Giggs also points out that, in her lifetime (perhaps half of mine), the level of splatter on car windshields has dropped almost to nothing. I do remember that on road trips my Dad allowed for a stop every hour to clean the windshield and the grille. We didn't even try taking road trips during the heavy grasshopper and locust season of midsummer! Now when my wife and I drive from near Philadelphia to the town near Cleveland where some relatives live, we don't need to clean until the end, when we wipe off the remains of half a dozen insects at most.

Some species of whale are verified to live 200 years or longer. That means that some "pod elders" may remember the decades of intense whaling that they managed to survive. I suspect they also find the ocean as comparatively voiceless as I find a modern Spring morning. Whales communicate over hundreds to thousands of miles, and the enchanting (to us) "songs" of the humpbacks are just one version of their globe-spanning conversations. But voiceless doesn't mean silent. The thrum of a 50,000 horsepower engine driving a supertanker or container ship fills an entire ocean—yes, even the mighty Pacific—with noise that causes the whales to lower the pitch of their voices. Lower pitch travels farther, and engine noise has a higher pitch. Even when they do that, thousand-mile "gossip" just isn't happening any more. In most of the seas, the whales can hear each other "only" 100-200 miles away. You might say, as we humans have globalized electronic dating, "swiping" Tinder profiles from anywhere on Earth, we have crippled the water-borne Tinder that whales were using to find mates, at a time when there are fewer mates to find.

Just by the way, there are 770 supertankers and more than 5,200 container ships in operation, nearly all of them on the move nearly all the time. Their combined engine power is about 300 million horsepower. The fuel they burn is many times as polluting as gasoline. A container ship is how the rubber ducky made it from China to your bathtub.

Speaking of pollution, whales are also great concentrators of waterborne pollution. Their prey are polluted, no matter where on earth they may be. Many common pollutants are oil-soluble so they wind up in the blubber. While that means the whale is somewhat protected from adverse effects from those pollutants, when a whale dies, not from whaling but in the ocean, its blubber is the first thing to be eaten by an enormous number of scavenging organisms, all of which concentrate the stuff even further. People are also affected, some directly. The author tells of Inuit women, who eat a lot of whale blubber in the winter, when you need a fatty diet just to keep from freezing: their breast milk is so contaminated that, if they pump it into a jar, it would be illegal to carry across a state line. For that matter, most beached whales now must be treated like toxic waste!

The "Save the Whale" efforts that began in the 1970's have ironically saved them but not their environment. On the first Earth Day in 1970 (51 years ago this coming Thursday) nobody dreamed that the oceans would be filled with ships powered by 50,000 hp engines, ships that would outnumber some of the species of remaining whale! There are less than 400 northern right whales alive today, though most other species number in the tens of thousands to a quarter million or more. But most species of large whale were hunted down to populations of less than 1,000 by the 1920's to the 1960's. That cluster of population bottlenecks is in itself a great risk to the existing whales. Less genetic diversity results in greater susceptibility to diseases, for example.

This is not a happy book. The outlook for whales may be better than it was half a century ago, but the picture is still not rosy. I can't predict what the future holds, but a book like this is sobering, and may motivate some, at least, to drive even more toward a planet that is safer for both whales and people.

Bath toys in the biggest bath available

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, ecology, pollution, quests

About eight years ago Donovan Hohn became intrigued with the spill, in January 1992, of thousands of floating bath toys from a container ship into the northern Pacific Ocean. Initially thinking he could interview a few people and write an interesting article about it, he wound up quitting his teaching job and spent big chunks of the following four years traversing the planet in search of this latter-day "toy story" and of the toys themselves. His book details his travels: Moby-Duck: The True Story of 28,800 Bath Toys Lost at Sea and of the Beachcombers, Oceanographers, Environmentalists, and Fools, Including the Author, Who Went in Search of Them.

The toys that were lost were equal numbers of four varieties, 7,200 each of yellow ducks, red beavers, green frogs and blue turtles. Somehow, the duckies became the iconic representatives of them all. As this image shows, floating toys of all kinds have been lost in shipping accidents and wash up on "trash beaches" that are particularly prone to collecting flotsam. These particular toys were produced by The First Years and were called Floatees. The small duck below center of this image is the most like a Floatee, but it is not clear that it is the genuine article.

Most of the Floatees have never been found. Yet this unintended experiment in current tracking has been helpful to oceanographers that study the currents that circle within ocean basins and also flow between them.

This map, from the Wikimedia Commons, shows the likely current directions as deduced by Curtis Ebbesmeyer from reports of Floatees that were collected or spotted. Now that nearly twenty years has passed since the toys were exposed to the elements, it is a race against time whether any more will be found.

As the author found from keeping a plastic Floatee in his freezer for a few months, they become brittle and prone to breaking into pieces. Those that made it into warmer climes were sun-bleached and then degraded, and have also been breaking up. In gyres such as the North Pacific "Garbage Patch", the plastic that has been collecting there is mostly not intact, but is in little bits. Most plastic lost at sea is in the form of pea-sized "nurbles" that are used to mold things. All these bits circle the seas and collect in the centers of gyres. Their density ranges from a few per cubit meter to a few hundred per cubic meter. This seemingly low density makes it hard to spot the Garbage Patch visually. But there are a lot of cubic meters out there, and the plastic mass is in the millions of tons.

Somewhere between 2,000 and 10,000 containers are lost at sea every year, and each is the size of a semi trailer, holding up to forty tons of cargo. That comes to as much as a quarter million tons or more of cargo lost yearly. Much of that is nurbles on the way to China or plastic toys on their way back to America.

To elucidate such facts, the author first visited certain Alaskan beaches where the Floatees were first reported. These trips comprise the second and third chapters of the book. He also visited a toy factory in southern China, then managed to obtain passage on a container ship as it sailed from Pusan, Korea to Seattle, Washington.

In his chapter on this cruise, he records a few helpful coordinates. These are marked on this image as red pins. The green line is the great circle route between the two harbors, and is a straight line on this projection. The image below shows a more conventional view of the great circle and of the ship's route, which is quite a bit to the south.

The great circle route is not precisely navigable, and for this reason, and to avoid the worst winter storms, once the ships leave the Japan Sea they stay south of the various archipelagoes along the route.

This doesn't keep them from losing cargo. Studies of the dynamics of these "Panamax" ships (meaning too large to pass through the Panama Canal) indicate that nonlinear effects of wave motions can cause them to suddenly tilt from side to side as much as 40°, which is almost certain to set loose some of the containers on board. On the author's cruise, he experienced only a rather mild storm, which was enough to make him hurl his lunch, but didn't cause any loss of cargo. This is the "normal" situation, or bath toys would be a lot more expensive!

It may seem that a lot of cargo is being lost, but it is a small percentage of total shipping. The insurance underwriters have so far been willing to carry on shouldering such losses (for suitable premiums, of course).

In his last chase, two chapters' worth, the author sailed on a research cruise through the Northwest Passage, on an icebreaker. He had quite a gaggle of scientists along for stimulating conversation. Few were interested in his quest for Floatees, however. While becoming one of a select few who have sailed the Northwest Passage and lived to tell the tale, he left posters in all the settlements where the ship docked, the kind of poster with little tags telling how to contact him. Unsurprisingly, he has not heard from anyone. By 2007, few Floatees were expected to be sufficiently intact to be recognized if one does come ashore. Along the way he helped one scientist launch more durable bottles containing notes with contact information, for a continuing study of polar currents. As long as you don't launch a glass bottle against the side of an iceberg and shatter it, it is likely to last many years and eventually wash up somewhere. Bottle launching is still more effective than computer modeling, primarily because we don't yet know enough about the oceans to accurately model their currents on any except the hugest of scales.

What resulted from the author's quest? He wound up with a fresh Floatee given him by Dr. Ebbesmeyer (who expects its eventual return), and a weathered one he found in Alaska. He attained a much greater appreciation of the sheer size of our planet. It is amazing that a little yellow duckie and a few thousand of its fellows can help us understand a little about what makes the oceans tick.