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.

Enjoying whale science

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, whales, science, paleontology, natural history

Almost a year ago, I went with several colleagues from the Delaware Museum of Natural History (DNMH) to look at the skeleton of a humpback whale on the shore of Delaware Bay. It had been a juvenile whale, about 35 feet long, that washed ashore dead near a popular fishing pier. It was towed by the state Department of Natural Resources to a more sheltered spot on a wildlife refuge, to rot in peace. Here are some of the crew having a look. The skull is to the right.

We were mainly there just to see it. The director and a curator were along, though, and they decided to see if the museum could get permission to collect at least the skull. Early this year they applied for the appropriate permit, which was approved. They decided to bring the skull, several vertebrae, and a flipper if they could excavate it from the sand. A large shed was put up in the museum's back yard.

Just about a month ago a few folks went to gather it. The skull weighed about 250 pounds, so it took a few people to lift it onto a flatbed truck. Anyway, they got it safely retrieved, along with several vertebrae and the flipper they could get to. The skull was put in the shed, where I took this picture. You can see that the remaining skin, seen in the photo above, had been eroded and eaten away, leaving just the not-too-smelly bones.

This isn't stamp collecting. This skull is about as big an object as the museum is capable of storing and preparing for exhibit…and exhibiting. A new plan for the exhibit halls is in the works anyway, so they'll tinker with it to find a way to include this, possibly as a touchable piece. It will need a bit of degreasing before it is fit to touch, though! Whale bones such as these are full of fats and oils, even after more than a year in an exposed location.

Reading Spying on Whales: The Past, Present, and Future of Earth's Most Awesome Creatures, by Nick Pyenson, I learned that the Smithsonian Museum's National Museum of Natural History (NMNH) has a series of warehouses on the outskirts of Washington, DC, where research collections and other materials not on exhibit are kept. That includes thousands of whale specimens, including hundreds of skulls.

The DMNH skull is rather small compared to some. The skull of a mature blue whale can be more than 25 feet long, and each lower jaw bone weighs about a ton. It takes a lot of muscle to hold such a pair of jaw bones in place during lunge feeding, but a 100-to-150-ton animal has the muscle to do it.

Dr. Pyenson is a paleontologist at NMNH, specializing in fossil marine mammals. To understand the past of whales, he has spent a lot of time with people who work with living (or recently living, in the case of whalers) whales. He is the kind of scientist I like most, one who gets out of his stovepipe and works with others in allied, and not-so-allied, fields.

True to the title of the book, it is in thirds, for past, present and future. Whales as we know them arose rather recently, roughly 5 million years ago. Fully aquatic whales, similar in shape to modern species but smaller ("only" the size of a minivan or school bus), have been around for something like 35-45 million years. Earlier semi-aquatic "whale ancestors" date to 45-55 million years ago. The earliest "whale", called Pakicetus, was kind of like a big dog that could wade and swim. A significant portion of the author's study is aimed at finding how whales grew to the awesome sizes of the largest ones that exist today. A few species regularly exceed 80 feet in length (24m), topped by the blue whale; the largest blue whale ever measured was 109 feet (33m) long.

A tentative scenario for producing really enormous whales is the combination of a globe-girdling Southern Ocean, but a closure of the Atlantic-Pacific communication that existed until 4-5 million years ago, until the uplift of Panama. Currents and wind patterns cause localized upwellings of nutrients, which in turn cause stupendous accumulations of small prey animals such as krill and herring. Large whales migrate long distances to feed on these bountiful feasts in their seasons. A really big whale has to eat a lot. Being big, though, it can travel more efficiently than a smaller animal, so crossing the Earth to get between areas for feeding and breeding is more possible. There are other factors the author enumerates.

The author's life is at the extreme end of being a naturalist, for which he has to (gets to) travel as far as the whales do, and to all the places where whale fossils or whale remains can be found. He tells amazing stories of field seasons in Chile and Norway and Alaska. He got to try his hand at putting a suction-cup tag on a whale in Alaska. Live and learn: he broke the tagging pole, but got the tag on. Such tags stay on for just a few hours or for a few days, then slip off. Then begins the fun of locating the tag, which fortunately is sending "Here I am!" radio signals. Only then can the scientists download the data and pictures the tag has accumulated, to see what the whale has been doing. He also tells of the astonishing find of a series of four strandings that happened a few million years ago, probably caused by red tide or a similar toxic phenomenon. Dozens of complete whale skeletons were found it a special place in Chile, of sizes ranging up to 30+ feet (9+m). That is as large as whales became at that time. But a single, complete skeleton is usually the find of a lifetime. He and his colleagues were blown away to find acres and acres of them!

Whales today exist as about 80 species, from smaller dolphins and porpoises—roughly human size—through the "usual" 40-70-foot sizes we associate with sperm whales, humpback whales and gray whales, to the really big blue and finback whales. About 8-10 times as many fossil species are known.

What of the future of whales? A generation ago their future was in doubt. Already by the early 1900's, it is thought that 90% of all whales had already been caught and killed, but the catch continued until the 1970's, when a series of international laws were enacted. Some whaling still occurs (and it gave the author a chance to dissect some very fragile portions of whale anatomy). But the chapter "Shifting Baselines" reveals a great problem when a trend goes on longer than a human lifetime. The "good old days" that senior whalers now living remember actually represent a much-depleted ocean. Nobody living remembers a time like the 1600's when whales outnumbered ocean-going ships.

I remember when I was trying to get a multi-level marketing business going, and two women came to one of my presentations, apparently drawn by the "anti pollution" portion of my advertising. But they didn't want to sell my products. They really wanted to "Save the Whales." Considering that this was 1970 or so, the whales they wanted to save consisted of about 3% of the whales that once roamed the seas.

Today a few species have rebounded, but there are still probably no more than 10,000 (some say 20,000) blue whales remaining, and there may be more than one million sperm whales. As Captain Ahab could attest, they are harder to catch than a blue whale. But there were probably at least half a million blue whales 200 years ago, and several million to perhaps 10 million sperm whales. Those are just two of around 80 species.

How will climate change affect the whales? It seems that in recent years some Pacific gray whales (the only remaining gray whale species) have made their way through the Northwest Passage to the Atlantic, something not possible for the past 2-3 million years. However, human shipping is starting to take advantage of the same passage, and ship-whale collisions usually go very badly for the whale.

I could rhapsodize on and on. I really enjoyed this book.

Brains of the sea, or dogs of the sea?

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, animals, whales, conservation

Diana Reiss is passionate about dolphins (AKA porpoises), and about toothed whales generally, and her passion makes it all the more enjoyable to read The Dolphin in the Mirror: Exploring Dolphin Minds and Saving Dolphin Lives. From time to time I have followed research on these small whales. Living in the Philadelphia area, the beaches that I can reach most easily are in southern New Jersey and Delaware. On many beach visits I have observed pods of porpoises passing by.

In the book, Dr. Reiss consistently uses the term Dolphin for these small toothed whales. I tend to prefer the term Porpoise, which is never applied to a fish, and I avoid Dolphin because of confusion with the dolphin fish, or mahi-mahi. However, the expected common name of the most familiar small whale is Bottlenose Dolphin, so I can go along with the author for the sake of this review.

Her premise is simple. The bulk of the book demonstrates that dolphins are unusually intelligent and that they share many characteristics that were once thought to be unique to humans, such as creating tools and toys, empathy and sympathy, and a theory of mind, even deception. Consider tools. How can a creature with no hands make a tool? It isn't easy, but it is possible. In areas with a coral bottom, rooting around in the bottom debris for fish that hide by self-burial is painful for a dolphin. Most of the dolphins in such an area get around this by breaking off a hollow sponge, and pushing the end of the snout (called the "rostrum") inside. They root around with the sponge, and when a fish flushes, quickly discard the sponge to snatch up the fish.

Then there are toys. Like all animals smarter than the average lizard (and maybe some of the lizards), dolphins play, even as adults. They play with the sponges when they've finished "fishing" with them, they play with shells and with floating debris, and they have been observed playing with bubble rings they blow with careful blasts from their blowholes.

They don't just make rings and watch them. They make multiple rings and manipulate them to merge or to pass through, a smaller through a larger. They drop a bit of fish or other debris into a ring, and the vortex will support it for a while.

In early experiments into creating a common language, Dr. Reiss built a simple keyboard with shapes the animals could easily discern, and created the association between one of the three keys and a bit of food, another with a toy, and the third with a rub or pat. The dolphins quickly learned, first, to come appropriately for one of these three things, and later to push the buttons to request one of them.

During training, when a dolphin acted inappropriately, such as by splashing, the trainer (usually the author) would give it a timeout by withdrawing or turning her back for a moment. After some days or weeks of training, she happened to offer a piece of food that one dolphin didn't like. The dolphin swam a short distance away then lifted half out of the water and looked at her; it gave her a timeout! Parents, if you use timeout with your kids, at what age will a kid who gets angry with you tell you that you need a timeout?

Then there is theory of mind. This is the researcher's term for a sense of self, and it is studied using a mirror. Your pet dog always thinks the image it sees in a mirror is a different dog. Dogs never recognize themselves. Great apes do recognize themselves, perhaps after several exposures to the mirror. Monkeys never do, but elephants and some birds do. So do dolphins and some larger whales.

This is first seen by a change of behavior. An animal (including very young humans) that thinks the image is a fellow being will first respond socially, perhaps by playing alongside, offering a toy, or trying to communicate. Once self-recognition occurs, things are quite different. Then it is a matter of turning this way and that, examining body parts not usually seen, and pirouetting while observing, "Boy, I look fine!" But scientists are reluctant to take this evidence as a sense of self. More is needed.

The Mark Test was devised to prove that chimps know they are looking at themselves. While playing with a chimp, or even under anesthesia, a mark is made, often on the forehead, using a harmless dye. When a marked chimp who is accustomed to mirrors sees his or her marked face, the response is immediate: touching the mark and even trying to rub it off.

How can an animal with no hands pass the Mark Test? Dolphins marked with waterproof dye react with clear surprise when they see it. In a few cases, a dolphin went to the side or bottom of the pool and rubbed the mark off against it, then returned to see that it was gone. Mission accomplished!

Just how intelligent are dolphins? This is still a very hard question. We can't yet communicate with them beyond the three or four keys on the keyboard the author used. We aren't ready to discuss whale philosophy or even ask how they structure their social groups. Many, many observed behaviors between dolphins indicate that they can communicate complex ideas, but we don't understand their whistled language…yes, I consider that they have genuine language.

A side note: once at Cape Henlopen, Delaware, a beach near Lewes, a pod of porpoises came by. I put my head underwater to listen to them. I could hear the clicks, creaks and rattles of their echolocation (sonar) as they used it to locate fish and obstacles. I could also hear whistles, swooping sounds and quite a variety of other noises they were making. It sure sounded like communication to me, particularly when similar sounds were made in different "voices", presumably by different animals.

So far the only "word" that Dr. Reiss has been able to clearly decode is the distress call made by a hurt dolphin. It is a descending glissando that sounds like the whistle of a bottle rocket. I find this ironic; dogs, cats and parrots at the very least have shown the ability to learn to understand dozens, even up to 200, human words. We've spent billions to learn three or four words of Dolphin. It would not surprise me if we one day find out that there are many dolphin languages, just as there are about 10,000 human languages.

Absent asking them, how do we determine how brainy they are? The Encephalization Quotient (EQ) is one estimate. A logarithmic formula is used to calculate how heavy the brain of any animal "ought" to be for its body mass. The ratio of actual brain to theoretical brain is the EQ. The human EQ ranges from 6.5 to nearly 8. Even a clinical imbecile with an IQ of 40 and a low EQ can learn to speak and converse. The datum for EQ is the house cat. Dogs, cats and horses all have an EQ near 1. Elephants, some birds, large whales and most monkeys come in near 2. Orcas and Chimps range to 3.5. Dolphins, and porpoises generally, have EQ's that range from 4.5 to 6. If dolphins had hands, would they show themselves brighter than chimpanzees? Probably.

Now we come to the crux of the book. We have established that dolphins are self aware and intelligent, and probably communicate with languages. How are we to treat them? Considering the history of contact between members of "advanced" and "primitive" civilizations, the prospect is not hopeful. Indeed, although we now do our best to buy only "dolphin safe" tuna, there are still places, such as Taiji, Japan, where pods of dolphins are herded into a bay and slaughtered like sheep. Or, I should say, worse than sheep, because we take care these days to kill a sheep quickly and humanely. The residents of Taiji and other places just go after them with knives and gaffs, and frequently eviscerate them before they have died. I refrained from adding a picture, because all the ones I found were simply too disturbing.

Dr. Reiss is passionate about ending the dolphin slaughter. If we can end, or nearly end, the slaughter of harp seals (with an EQ of 0.8), why not the second-most intelligent creature we know about?

Secondly, she is passionate about ending captivity for "performing" dolphins. In the US, at least, no wild-caught dolphins have been introduced to aquariums for about twenty years. Captive breeding ensures sufficient supply. The author thinks the number of captive whales ought to be allowed to reduce by attrition (as they die off, of age or disease), until none remain.

How, then, shall we continue doing research with dolphins? There are two facilities I know about where wild dolphins are encouraged to interact with researchers, yet spend most of their time going their own way. Research proceeds more slowly this way, but the dolphins are free collaborators, so the research results ought to be more robust and meaningful.

What is happening in captivity? It is little thought of, but what happens if a captive dolphin is, shall we say, refractory? Maybe a little too aggressive with "trainers", perhaps less cooperative. Such an animal is either released or euthanized. So we are selecting for tolerance and even affection for humans among our aquarium dolphins. Let us recall the fox studies in Russia. The researcher there selected for just one characteristic: tolerance for humans. Over just six generations, the foxes became a lot like dogs. Their ears got soft, their tails curled, and they began to bark and play more. Now it is a couple of dozen generations, and the Russian foxes are just dogs with pointy noses. We are producing dolphin dogs. They are to a wild dolphin as a dog is to a wolf. Possibly able to survive in a feral state, but much better adapted to life with human companions.

For this reason, I reckon the research we do on captive dolphins is being skewed as they become water dogs. Like it or not, we will soon need to conduct research in more open environments, collaborating with wild dolphins, to get any meaningful results at all. And I suspect that one of the first things we will learn about dolphin language is that each oceanic region will have its own language, or perhaps several. Language studies performed at Monterrey Bay may be completely meaningless when compared to work done in South Africa or in Spain.

If someone from a distant star system is watching us, what do they think of the way we treat the other brainy creatures around us? We have nearly extincted the Chimps. Killing off the dolphins would be harder, but we are certainly capable of doing so. I think if any animal can pass the mirror self-recognition test, it ought to be banned from the menu. There are plenty of dumber animals out there to eat, both on land and in the sea and air. Remember the old show titled "To Serve Man", where the handbook turned out to be a cookbook? If someone ever arms the whales, watch out!

Pod feeding

kw: observations, musings, wildlife, whales

I watched the PBS Nature program on Humpback whales earlier this evening. I've been thinking ever since. In a segment on feeding behavior in Alaskan waters, their cooperative hunting technique was shown: about ten whales descend beneath a shoal of herring, and station themselves in a loose ring. One of them swims in a big circle blowing bubbles, which cause the herring to clump together and rise toward the surface. The whales communicate the whole time, and at some signal, all rise through the bubble net and swallow lots of herring. They do this over and over, eventually devouring almost the entire shoal, perhaps a few tons of little fish.

As a young person in the heyday of the "everything animals do is instinct" school of animal behavior, I was not satisfied with the reigning paradigm. I am even more convinced now that animals of all kinds learn from one another and from their environment. While it has been posited that some whales may exceed human intelligence, I don't think we can know, because their intelligence is of such a different kind than ours.

I have taken many IQ tests. All require the subject (me) to "do your own work". We need a different kind of intelligence test, in which the subject is required to obtain all answers from others, and the efficiency and speed of doing so determines the score. Oh, yeah, we have such a test; it is called being a middle manager or supervisor! Passing grades are rewarded with continued employment; superior grades garner promotions. Suffice it to say that I tried my hand as a supervisor, and asked to be relieved of such duty and return to "staff". I would not score very high on a networking-intelligence test, I suppose. (I am glad a big company is willing to pay me for what I can do!) Those whales, along with other cooperative hunters such as wolves, would score pretty high.

To accompany the BIG guys

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, whales, music

Thousand Mile Song: Whale Music in a Sea of Sound by David Rothenberg is not about whale sounds per se, but about whale-human musical collaborations. Or, at least, attempted collaborations. The book includes twelve tracks on a CD. Two of the tracks include no whale (or other nonhuman-animal) sounds at all; one is a riff by two musicians on the feelings inspired by a few months of listening to whales, and the other is a whalesque accompaniment to a song Pete Seeger wrote but never recorded, "The World's Last Whale." Seeger, being 87 at the time, declined to record it this time also, so Rothenberg's voice is heard instead.

As well as I can infer, the author was occupied for two or three years with planning and carrying out three major field expeditions. Recordings from these and from material placed at his disposal by others was used to produce the CD.

Throughout the book, Rotherberg recounts the stories of whale sounds and the surprisingly short time that they have been acknowledged by Westerners, though other peoples have records and legends of whales singing that go back centuries, at least. Whale song mby be behind the legends of Sirens. Considering that a singing humpback whale can literally shake a dory with its song, it is amazing that nearly no Europeans listened or even seemed to notice until the 1940s.

A characteristic attitude is displayed by many who now study Sperm Whale sounds, which are strings of clicks, both steady and syncopated. They consider that louder, steadier clicks are for echolocation ('sonar'), and quieter, more amorphous click strings are social in intent. However, the former are heard most often in social settings! Scientific training seems to predispose the mind to "either-or" thinking, but more inclusive thinking is called for here.

Humans use sight much more than sound for gathering information. Imagine someone saying that the glances we take in social settings are mostly for keeping our physical balance and finding our way around. True, some are, but most are socially motivated: checking out another's feelings towards us, leering or ogling, flirting or connecting, or looking for agreement. I have read that a whale or dolphin can see the insides of another; it is hard to keep secrets when your heart rate can be counted! If you hop into the water in an angry frame of mind, a dolphin will know it by the shape of your viscera.

Anyway, the author's interest is primarily to play ensemble music with whales. Listening to the CD, I can't be sure if he succeeded, and while he feels he did, just a little, he is not totally certain. A whale's emotions seem to be as unfathomable as its thinking. That hasn't changed, but the music is pleasant, and it is probably a bit more collaborative than playing a clarinet along with the moaning of the wind in the trees.

Whales Sing Because They Like It

kw: book reviews, science fiction, whales

Remember Pinocchio, and his brief sojourn in Monstro? What if (at least some) whales were like that, a vessel to voyage the sea? This is the great new idea presented by Christopher Moore in Fluke, or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings.

About midway through the book, Dr. Nate Quinn discovers that some whales are actually living submarines. Sabotage done to his work and data about whale song had the purpose of keeping him from finding out how digital messages are being transmitted, hidden in the songs.

There is a pivotal moment, where Quinn's coworkers have transcribed binary bits that seem to be found in the subsonics of whale song, and someone accidentally saves the file of 0 and 1 entries as text. Upon re-opening the file, which the computer now treats as an ASCII text file, some of the material is readable, and is clearly a message from one humpback submarine to another "occupied whale".

At that point, I thought, "OK, this is not just a time-is-now story, but perhaps one with a time frame prior to 1990." My reason? After 1990 data encryption and text compression became cheap and simple enough that the binary bits would not have been sent "in the clear," as ASCII text. The story states that they are getting 50-60 bit-per-second transmission rates using subsonics. Quite a trick, given that subsonics have a maximum frequency of 20 hz. Of course, they must use several different frequencies. However, when you are constrained to such a narrow band, text compression, which often gains a 3:1 or 4:1 advantage, is a great boon.

I know, the reality is the story wouldn't work without ASCII transcription. It would strain credulity too much if a cetologist somehow could de-compress the text and then read it.

(I'll just mention as an aside, a story I read in which the SETI project has finally found a transmission in space that indicates aliens are there and communicating. However, the transmission is similar to a modem signal, with encrypted text. The scientists there get scared, thinking, "Must be military. Who is really out there?" My response was, "Bankers." Bankers and businesses use encryption more than anyone.)

Fluke is a great yarn, with good ideas.