WEBVTT - What's the Secret Science Behind Whales? 0:00:02.320 --> 0:00:04.680 I guess what will what's that mango? So you know 0:00:04.760 --> 0:00:08.280 those Golden records that traveled on the Voyager spacecraft, Yeah, 0:00:08.280 --> 0:00:11.000 they were loaded up with greetings and different languages and 0:00:11.039 --> 0:00:14.800 these concertos. It wasn't actually Johnny be Good on there too. Yeah, 0:00:14.800 --> 0:00:17.200 that's right, there's some Chuck Berry on the record. But 0:00:17.560 --> 0:00:19.759 I was reading this new book by Nick Pines, and 0:00:19.920 --> 0:00:22.599 it's called Spying on Whales, and one of the things 0:00:22.640 --> 0:00:24.800 he says is that there are actually whale songs on 0:00:24.840 --> 0:00:27.840 that record as well. So in the venties, scientists had 0:00:27.920 --> 0:00:30.720 just discovered that whales have these complex songs that they 0:00:30.720 --> 0:00:34.040 repeat in loops, and each whale improvises on that loop. 0:00:34.080 --> 0:00:37.640 It's really remarkable. But Pines's point is that in the 0:00:37.680 --> 0:00:41.600 nearly fifty years since, we still don't really understand these songs. 0:00:41.880 --> 0:00:44.239 But even then we find them so intriguing and so 0:00:44.320 --> 0:00:46.360 beautiful that we're happy to throw them on a record 0:00:46.360 --> 0:00:49.920 in case aliens might find them interesting too. But reading 0:00:49.920 --> 0:00:52.440 this book made me think we should really dig into whales, 0:00:52.560 --> 0:00:55.520 like why are they so large? How do they sustain 0:00:55.600 --> 0:00:58.400 these massive bodies? I mean, these creatures are bigger than 0:00:58.560 --> 0:01:02.120 any dinosaurs that have relived and also, why do they 0:01:02.120 --> 0:01:27.319 have belly buttons? Let's dive in. Yea, hey there, podcast listeners, 0:01:27.360 --> 0:01:29.720 Welcome to Part Time Genius. I'm Will Pearson and as 0:01:29.760 --> 0:01:32.200 always I'm joined by my good friend man Guesshot Ticketer 0:01:32.600 --> 0:01:34.880 and the man on the other side of the soundproof glass. 0:01:35.080 --> 0:01:38.320 Not fully prepared today, Mango. I do see. He's got 0:01:38.680 --> 0:01:41.319 eBay up on his computer and he's looking up all 0:01:41.360 --> 0:01:46.520 of these Shammoo tshirts Shamoo coffee mugs. So he's probably 0:01:46.520 --> 0:01:48.120 gonna order some of those. I don't know when he's 0:01:48.120 --> 0:01:51.280 gonna wear them. I'm a little bit disappointed, but I'm 0:01:51.320 --> 0:01:53.280 sure he'll get something. But that's our good friend and 0:01:53.320 --> 0:01:57.000 producer Tristan McNeil. Now today on the program, we're chatting 0:01:57.000 --> 0:01:59.960 with Nick Pyinson. He's the curator of Fossil Marine may 0:02:00.000 --> 0:02:04.200 Emmals at the Smithsonian Institute's National Museum of Natural History, 0:02:04.240 --> 0:02:06.680 which is of course in Washington, d C. And he's 0:02:06.720 --> 0:02:10.040 the author of this wonderful new book called Spying on Whales, 0:02:10.360 --> 0:02:14.120 The Past, Present, and Future of Earth's most awesome creatures. 0:02:14.639 --> 0:02:17.519 Nick Piinson, Welcome to Part Time Genius. Happy to be here. 0:02:18.160 --> 0:02:20.120 So going way back, one of the one of the 0:02:20.200 --> 0:02:23.360 first things I stumbled into when when reading your book 0:02:23.360 --> 0:02:27.160 here was that the first whales were land dwelling creatures 0:02:27.200 --> 0:02:29.960 the size of a German shepherd, that they walked on 0:02:30.080 --> 0:02:33.040 four legs and even had the snout instead of a blowhole. 0:02:33.080 --> 0:02:35.280 And I have to admit, Nick, when when I first 0:02:35.320 --> 0:02:38.680 saw this fact, I thought, Oh, this guy might not 0:02:38.760 --> 0:02:42.320 know what a whale is like. That is not describing 0:02:42.360 --> 0:02:44.720 a whale. So can you explain them? I mean, that 0:02:44.880 --> 0:02:48.040 is so bizarre to both know that that connection is 0:02:48.080 --> 0:02:50.359 there and then to know how that connection is there. 0:02:50.400 --> 0:02:51.959 So can you talk us through this a little bit. 0:02:52.200 --> 0:02:54.079 Let's go back to have a whale in your head, 0:02:54.120 --> 0:02:56.800 and you're probably imagining a humpback whale or a killer 0:02:56.800 --> 0:03:01.960 whale and just looking at the basics of its DNA 0:03:02.080 --> 0:03:06.680 to know genealogical relationships. That whale in your head is 0:03:06.720 --> 0:03:10.960 most closely related to mammals that have four legs and 0:03:11.080 --> 0:03:14.000 live on land for the most part, so that those 0:03:14.040 --> 0:03:19.200 are deer, pigs, cattle, sheep, m hippos, which are semi aquatic. 0:03:19.400 --> 0:03:21.840 They swim in the water pretty well. But if you 0:03:21.919 --> 0:03:25.320 have four weight bearing limbs and whales really don't look 0:03:25.320 --> 0:03:28.040 like that. At all. So they released whales had four 0:03:28.080 --> 0:03:30.079 weight bearing limbs. It makes them look a lot like 0:03:31.000 --> 0:03:34.760 their near relatives today. But in the process of about 0:03:34.880 --> 0:03:38.760 ten million years, we have this great fossil record of 0:03:38.840 --> 0:03:43.000 how they've transformed, the loss of hind limbs, the transformation 0:03:43.040 --> 0:03:46.240 of four limbs into paddles, and then all the changes 0:03:46.280 --> 0:03:50.920 that happened to their skulls. Because when they undergo these transitions, 0:03:51.040 --> 0:03:53.840 especially like this one from land to see, well, you're 0:03:54.040 --> 0:03:56.480 you know, vision has to change, how you smell changes, 0:03:56.800 --> 0:04:00.280 how you here changes. We have that documented in the 0:04:00.320 --> 0:04:03.080 fossil record. What sort of timeline are we looking at here, like, 0:04:03.120 --> 0:04:06.480 what what when does this dog sort of appear on 0:04:06.480 --> 0:04:09.320 on Earth? You should be really careful and say dog like. 0:04:09.680 --> 0:04:16.080 Dog like dogs are a completely different group of mamma um. 0:04:16.279 --> 0:04:19.719 So this happens in about the space of a ten 0:04:19.800 --> 0:04:24.159 million years, from fifty to about forty million years ago. 0:04:24.680 --> 0:04:29.240 And this time period is interesting because it's during a 0:04:29.360 --> 0:04:32.960 period that was the last greenhouse Earth, and that's the 0:04:33.040 --> 0:04:37.000 last time in Earth history that we had global carbon 0:04:37.040 --> 0:04:40.800 dioxide concentrations that are closest to the ones that we 0:04:40.839 --> 0:04:43.520 may head to in the coming century or two. Whales 0:04:43.600 --> 0:04:48.200 evolved in an island archipelago that bordered the equator, so 0:04:48.560 --> 0:04:53.119 um territory that is now India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, the entire 0:04:53.120 --> 0:04:57.279 Middle East that used to be a giant equatorial seaway 0:04:58.000 --> 0:05:01.200 today that's now been reduced to the meta Ranian but 0:05:01.360 --> 0:05:04.520 fifty plus million years ago that was open waters, and 0:05:04.560 --> 0:05:07.760 there happened to be this giant archipelago of of land. 0:05:08.400 --> 0:05:11.080 And you know, if you read anything about evolution on island, 0:05:11.120 --> 0:05:13.919 you know, crazy stuff happens. So I'm not so surprised 0:05:13.960 --> 0:05:17.800 that the earliest whales happened in this setting. You know, Nick, 0:05:17.839 --> 0:05:20.480 there's some great illustrations in the book, and one is 0:05:20.520 --> 0:05:24.120 of this Basilosaurus, and I guess this was one of 0:05:24.120 --> 0:05:28.440 the first fully aquatic whales. And supposedly this whale had 0:05:28.640 --> 0:05:31.919 one of the strongest bites of any mammal ever, or 0:05:32.040 --> 0:05:34.080 at least as you've said here. So so how do 0:05:34.120 --> 0:05:37.200 we know this? That's a great question. So one of 0:05:37.200 --> 0:05:40.600 the ways that we can figure out how strong UH 0:05:40.640 --> 0:05:44.760 an extinct organism might bite UM is by modeling it. 0:05:44.920 --> 0:05:47.599 So you can create a computer model based on the 0:05:47.680 --> 0:05:53.000 digital data the geometry of that animal's teeth or its 0:05:53.040 --> 0:05:56.400 skull I'd say especially teeth plus skull, because you want 0:05:56.440 --> 0:06:00.240 to know the bone that's holding the business end of 0:06:00.279 --> 0:06:03.560 whatever is chomping down. And when people have done those 0:06:03.600 --> 0:06:06.840 computational analyzes and they do it with basil Saurus, which 0:06:06.880 --> 0:06:09.960 again had a three ft long skull, So one, they're 0:06:10.000 --> 0:06:12.320 not that many mammals with teeth that have three ft 0:06:12.360 --> 0:06:15.560 long skulls. A polar bear may have a skull that's 0:06:15.720 --> 0:06:19.960 um for long, that's barely that's not even a foot 0:06:20.000 --> 0:06:22.919 and a half. But basil Saurus had a three ft 0:06:22.920 --> 0:06:26.080 long skull with these giant teeth that are the size 0:06:26.120 --> 0:06:29.400 of your palm um. So the numbers that you get 0:06:29.400 --> 0:06:32.039 are that it has a bite force unrivaled by any 0:06:32.040 --> 0:06:34.400 other mammal. So Nick, well, one thing I still don't 0:06:34.480 --> 0:06:37.440 understand is how did wales get so big and why 0:06:37.440 --> 0:06:40.440 did they stop growing? Like why does a hundred ten 0:06:40.560 --> 0:06:42.600 foot body work for them? But maybe not a two 0:06:42.800 --> 0:06:46.400 d foot body. So that's that's a question I tried 0:06:46.440 --> 0:06:50.000 to explore in the book, which and emphasize that um 0:06:50.040 --> 0:06:55.600 getting big over evolutionary time is really a set of tradeoffs. 0:06:55.920 --> 0:06:58.920 There's a lot of reasons that it might be advantageous 0:06:58.960 --> 0:07:01.760 to get really big. Okay, then there are a lot 0:07:01.760 --> 0:07:03.680 of reasons why it may not be. It seems like 0:07:03.760 --> 0:07:05.919 for filter feeding whales they only get big in the 0:07:05.960 --> 0:07:09.320 last few million years. Uh. And what's interesting about that 0:07:09.400 --> 0:07:13.720 time frame is, in contrast to greenhouse Earth, during the 0:07:13.720 --> 0:07:17.160 first few million years of whale evolution, the last few 0:07:17.160 --> 0:07:21.040 million years have been happening under ice age Earth, a 0:07:21.160 --> 0:07:24.000 time when we have ice caps both south and north. 0:07:24.440 --> 0:07:28.720 Global oceans became patchier in space and time in terms 0:07:28.720 --> 0:07:31.520 of their resources with the onset of the ice ages. 0:07:31.960 --> 0:07:34.520 So these kind of these natural history films where you 0:07:34.560 --> 0:07:38.760 see giant schools of fish and bait balls and kill 0:07:38.840 --> 0:07:42.240 aggregations that happen off the coast of South Africa or 0:07:42.280 --> 0:07:45.240 off of Chile or off of California, those are very 0:07:45.280 --> 0:07:48.600 recent geologic phenomena which haven't really been around that long. 0:07:48.920 --> 0:07:52.520 And we think this is deeply tied to the selective 0:07:52.520 --> 0:07:57.080 forces that allowed whales to become big. So migrating the 0:07:57.120 --> 0:08:00.480 long distances to arrive at those places where food is 0:08:00.640 --> 0:08:04.040 very dense in space and time, being big helps, But 0:08:04.120 --> 0:08:06.960 on the cost side, if you're a lunch feeding whale, 0:08:07.400 --> 0:08:09.640 you really can't be much bigger than about a dred 0:08:09.680 --> 0:08:13.040 and ten feet otherwise you can't close your mouth fast enough. 0:08:13.560 --> 0:08:16.400 So that's those are the trade offs with getting big. Now, 0:08:16.480 --> 0:08:19.200 could a different kind of whale get much bigger? Maybe, 0:08:19.720 --> 0:08:22.640 but that hasn't yet evolved in as far far as 0:08:22.640 --> 0:08:25.240 we know. I think you talk about the whales traveling, 0:08:25.280 --> 0:08:29.080 I'm curious. I know different types of whales travel different distances, 0:08:29.120 --> 0:08:31.680 but but how long are we talking for some whales? 0:08:33.040 --> 0:08:36.120 So some whales don't range that far, but others do. 0:08:36.320 --> 0:08:39.200 In these filter feeding whales, So ones that are like 0:08:39.480 --> 0:08:42.800 um humpbacks or blue whales or minky whales, they can 0:08:42.960 --> 0:08:47.240 range over tens of thousands of miles. Um gray whales, 0:08:47.280 --> 0:08:51.680 for example, have no problem, it seems, migrating twenty thousand miles. 0:08:52.200 --> 0:08:56.800 Humpbacks will migrate from Maui in Hawaii to the Panhandle 0:08:56.800 --> 0:09:00.800 of Alaska every year. That's a scale that I really 0:09:00.800 --> 0:09:02.959 tried to convey in the book, is that whales range 0:09:02.960 --> 0:09:06.880 over entire ocean basins in many cases, so they're living 0:09:06.920 --> 0:09:09.839 at these big scales. That's a way that whales are 0:09:09.840 --> 0:09:12.920 teaching us about these bigger ideas about how oceans work. 0:09:13.640 --> 0:09:16.280 Um that I think is really important. Nick. We've got 0:09:16.360 --> 0:09:18.599 so many more questions, but we've got to take a 0:09:18.600 --> 0:09:37.480 little break first. Welcome back to Part time Genius. We're 0:09:37.480 --> 0:09:40.160 here with Nick Pinson. You know what, when you were 0:09:40.160 --> 0:09:43.520 discussing the size of a whale and how they can 0:09:43.520 --> 0:09:46.920 only get so large because they need their jaws to 0:09:46.920 --> 0:09:50.320 climb fast enough to get the food. I was fascinated 0:09:50.360 --> 0:09:53.079 by some of the different strategies that whales used to 0:09:53.200 --> 0:09:55.400 hunt that you've described, and I was curious if you 0:09:55.400 --> 0:09:57.400 could sort of go through some of those, because like 0:09:57.440 --> 0:10:00.200 the way they can hold their breath and die, I've 0:10:00.280 --> 0:10:03.440 deep or or almost turned their jaws into parachutes, or 0:10:03.440 --> 0:10:06.040 how some pirouette when they lunch. It was just really 0:10:06.040 --> 0:10:08.559 beautiful and I'd love for the listeners to be able 0:10:08.559 --> 0:10:10.520 to hear some of that stuff. Sure, I mean, I 0:10:10.520 --> 0:10:13.360 think it goes back to this idealized whale that you 0:10:13.400 --> 0:10:18.000 have in your head. Um it oversimplifies the incredible diversity 0:10:18.120 --> 0:10:21.040 of living whales to say nothing about all the crazy 0:10:21.040 --> 0:10:24.560 extinct ones that we know of. But among the living whales, 0:10:24.800 --> 0:10:27.720 you'll see some have a mustachioed fringe hanging from the 0:10:27.760 --> 0:10:32.040 top of their mouth that's baling, and so those are 0:10:32.040 --> 0:10:34.880 the filter feeding whales. That's one group. The other one 0:10:35.080 --> 0:10:38.199 are toothed whales. Now some of the tooth whales have teeth, 0:10:38.320 --> 0:10:42.800 others don't, but they all echolocate. They use a form 0:10:42.840 --> 0:10:47.320 of biological sonar to navigate to hunt. The filter feeding 0:10:47.360 --> 0:10:52.440 ones will use their mustachioed fringe of baleing to capture 0:10:53.240 --> 0:10:56.800 aggregates of prey in bulk, so you're making the highest 0:10:56.800 --> 0:11:00.320 return on the investment of feeding style. And some of 0:11:00.320 --> 0:11:02.840 these filter feeders will lunge the way a blue whale 0:11:02.840 --> 0:11:08.000 whelle or a humpback um. Others do a style of 0:11:08.200 --> 0:11:10.679 filter feeding called skim feeding. So these are like bowheads 0:11:10.679 --> 0:11:14.480 and right whales where they'll hover around the surface and 0:11:14.600 --> 0:11:17.640 they're not team gulps, they're just kind of passing through 0:11:17.679 --> 0:11:21.439 a giant super organism of prey. For the other group 0:11:21.679 --> 0:11:24.960 of whales, the tooth whales, they use echolocation and in 0:11:25.000 --> 0:11:27.840 some cases, these are the deep diving ones that will 0:11:27.880 --> 0:11:32.559 dive thousands of feet deep in search of prey sperm whales, 0:11:32.679 --> 0:11:36.400 beaked whales, um, even many oceanic dolphins. A bottom nosed 0:11:36.400 --> 0:11:40.360 dolphins will dive very very deep um beyond the reach 0:11:40.400 --> 0:11:42.800 of light for their prey and The way how you 0:11:42.840 --> 0:11:44.280 can do that is if you have a way of 0:11:44.400 --> 0:11:48.440 navigating an underwater world without light, and that's using sound. 0:11:49.080 --> 0:11:53.240 This is an outstanding question, is why haven't um whale 0:11:53.280 --> 0:11:56.880 prey tooth whale prey evolve defenses against echolocation because it 0:11:56.920 --> 0:12:01.120 seems like a supremely advantageous tour and to hunt um. 0:12:01.160 --> 0:12:03.800 And that's it's still not entirely well known. And that's 0:12:03.800 --> 0:12:06.840 in part because we don't actually see whales feeding at depths. 0:12:07.000 --> 0:12:10.000 I mean, this whole story of the squid in the whale, 0:12:10.559 --> 0:12:13.959 sperm whales feeding on giant squid, nobody's ever seen that. 0:12:14.120 --> 0:12:17.520 We see the effects of that. We would all love 0:12:17.600 --> 0:12:18.959 to see it. I mean, that's just one of these 0:12:19.000 --> 0:12:21.600 amazing you know, if you could ever get a BBC 0:12:21.840 --> 0:12:24.800 film crew to film it, that would be awesome. That's 0:12:24.840 --> 0:12:26.560 we've never seen it, so we have to infer it 0:12:27.120 --> 0:12:31.040 either from gut contents or the scars or chunks of 0:12:31.880 --> 0:12:37.560 giant squid tentacles that float around sperm whales after they 0:12:37.559 --> 0:12:39.960 come to the surface. Um. It's just there's a lot 0:12:40.000 --> 0:12:42.120 about whale science that we don't see directly, so we 0:12:42.160 --> 0:12:44.520 have to be clever about how we study it. Well, 0:12:44.720 --> 0:12:46.760 it seems for you know, not for lack of trying 0:12:46.800 --> 0:12:50.760 that because you talk about that echolocation and how it's 0:12:50.800 --> 0:12:54.559 so sophisticated in some whales that you know, even our 0:12:54.559 --> 0:12:58.160 military has invested, especially in the sixties, so much in 0:12:58.800 --> 0:13:03.680 studying that ability to echolocate. Why is it so much 0:13:03.679 --> 0:13:06.760 more sophisticated than what we're able to create with you know, 0:13:06.800 --> 0:13:10.360 computers and all the technology that we have. Well, I mean, 0:13:10.559 --> 0:13:14.040 whales had the advantage of evolution of tens of millions 0:13:14.080 --> 0:13:20.000 of years of evolution for that, right, um, evolution in 0:13:20.000 --> 0:13:23.360 an in an environment that's actually really complex and has 0:13:23.360 --> 0:13:25.080 properties that are very different from the one that we 0:13:25.120 --> 0:13:27.959 operate in daily. I mean, water is a different medium 0:13:27.960 --> 0:13:32.120 and has different properties for the physics of signals moving 0:13:32.160 --> 0:13:35.160 through it, whether it's sound or light. Whales have had 0:13:35.160 --> 0:13:38.520 tens of millions of years to evolve solutions to that. 0:13:38.920 --> 0:13:42.080 So one thing I didn't realize before this was how 0:13:42.160 --> 0:13:45.080 long a whale could live. And in your chapter on 0:13:45.240 --> 0:13:48.320 architect time machines, you talk about bowhead whales and how 0:13:48.679 --> 0:13:51.719 finding harpoons actually helped us determine their lifespens. Can you 0:13:51.720 --> 0:13:55.000 talk a little bit about that? Absolutely, I mean, it's 0:13:55.080 --> 0:13:59.840 I think surprising people to realize that Americans whale today. 0:14:00.240 --> 0:14:03.080 It just doesn't happen typically in the lower forty eight States, 0:14:03.200 --> 0:14:08.600 but many indigenous cultures in the Arctic require marine mammal 0:14:08.640 --> 0:14:13.160 met as sustance, that's food for how people live and 0:14:13.360 --> 0:14:17.160 um this is ongoing in the North Slope of Alaska, 0:14:17.760 --> 0:14:23.080 and by recovering some of these bowhead whale carcasses, what 0:14:23.560 --> 0:14:27.680 scientists have found is tools embedded in these uh in 0:14:27.720 --> 0:14:30.640 the bodies of these bowhead whales that clearly came from 0:14:30.640 --> 0:14:34.520 a different era of hunting. These harpoon heads are almost 0:14:34.600 --> 0:14:37.440 like iPhones or smartphones in some ways, and that you 0:14:37.480 --> 0:14:41.040 can tell when they must have been embedded in the 0:14:41.080 --> 0:14:46.400 body based on their technologic so you know exactly so 0:14:46.440 --> 0:14:49.640 there was a changeover from stone harpoons to metal harpoons 0:14:49.640 --> 0:14:53.000 in the nineteenth century. And you know that the whale 0:14:53.040 --> 0:14:56.680 that was um an unsuccessful strike must have been an 0:14:56.720 --> 0:14:59.200 adult when it was hit, because the juvenile would not 0:14:59.200 --> 0:15:01.600 have survived. So that whale that was collected in the 0:15:01.640 --> 0:15:04.360 late twentieth century in this case must have been well 0:15:04.360 --> 0:15:07.000 over a hundred years old, and the best guess was 0:15:07.000 --> 0:15:10.360 about a hundred and thirty and that exactly parallels the 0:15:10.440 --> 0:15:13.160 kind of data you can get from biological tissues from 0:15:13.200 --> 0:15:16.560 their ovaries, so different lines of evidence. You're telling us 0:15:16.640 --> 0:15:19.920 that bowhead whales are able to live much more than 0:15:19.960 --> 0:15:21.840 a century, and some of the Muno acity it was 0:15:21.880 --> 0:15:25.240 coming back with data of two hundred years, and so 0:15:26.880 --> 0:15:29.880 that's that's I mean, it seems unbelievable. But I think 0:15:29.920 --> 0:15:32.400 the implication of that is that there are whales that 0:15:32.440 --> 0:15:37.280 have lived through the entire rise and fall of major 0:15:37.440 --> 0:15:41.400 historical events in human history, like industrial whaling, or the 0:15:41.520 --> 0:15:44.880 rise of atomic weapons testing um or you know, you 0:15:44.960 --> 0:15:47.880 name it. In terms of our technological innovation or the 0:15:47.880 --> 0:15:51.320 things we put out in the environment. Whales, individual whales 0:15:51.320 --> 0:15:54.400 have persisted through that. So by if we were able 0:15:54.480 --> 0:15:58.040 to study these whales in whatever form, they probably could 0:15:58.040 --> 0:16:01.320 tell us a lot about what has happened to the environment. Fortunately, 0:16:01.360 --> 0:16:04.160 in places like the Smithsonian we have bohead balin that 0:16:04.240 --> 0:16:06.760 goes back while well over a hundred and fifty years. 0:16:07.240 --> 0:16:11.240 If balein is able to tell us about isotopic history, 0:16:11.320 --> 0:16:15.960 so the chemical history of the environment, then these these 0:16:16.000 --> 0:16:19.160 pieces of bohead balein from the nineteenth century before fossil 0:16:19.200 --> 0:16:21.360 fuels were burned. Could tell us a lot about how 0:16:21.400 --> 0:16:25.960 the world has changed. That's really interesting. So you know, 0:16:26.240 --> 0:16:29.200 one thing you mentioned there was whaling, and I was 0:16:29.240 --> 0:16:32.280 fascinated that you actually worked or observed at a whaling 0:16:32.320 --> 0:16:35.320 station in Iceland. And I kind of wouldn't have expected 0:16:35.320 --> 0:16:39.000 that commercial whaling and this pure scientific study would have 0:16:39.040 --> 0:16:41.200 intersected like that. Can you talk a little bit about 0:16:41.200 --> 0:16:43.680 like why you chose to work there and how it 0:16:43.720 --> 0:16:47.920 benefited your understanding of wales. Whaling is something that's happened 0:16:47.960 --> 0:16:50.680 for thousands of years in human history and it still 0:16:50.680 --> 0:16:55.440 goes on today. Um, many people have emotional reactions to it, 0:16:55.920 --> 0:17:00.440 for sure, and it's hunting like any other mammal hunting, 0:17:00.920 --> 0:17:03.960 so it goes All the issues that you may have 0:17:04.040 --> 0:17:07.679 with big game hunting are certainly applied to whaling. And 0:17:07.720 --> 0:17:11.439 there's two main forms today that it happens in commercial whaling, 0:17:11.800 --> 0:17:15.359 which is undertaken by Iceland and Norway, so they see 0:17:15.359 --> 0:17:20.000 whaling as no different from a fishery um, and they 0:17:20.119 --> 0:17:24.600 sell the meat that's collected that's that's from a killed whale. Uh. 0:17:24.600 --> 0:17:26.560 And then the other form of whaling is so called 0:17:26.600 --> 0:17:29.600 scientific whaling that happens in Japan, you know, and for 0:17:29.680 --> 0:17:32.880 the ladder, I would say that that's agenda driven science, 0:17:32.880 --> 0:17:36.479 and we should always be skeptical of agenda driven science 0:17:36.880 --> 0:17:38.840 because that's saying that you kind of know the answer 0:17:38.920 --> 0:17:41.680 before you go out and look for it. UM. And 0:17:42.080 --> 0:17:44.320 you know, whaling happens in a social context. And it's 0:17:44.320 --> 0:17:48.320 clear that scientific whaling in Japan is not really about 0:17:48.320 --> 0:17:50.840 the science, because we can answer those questions that they 0:17:50.880 --> 0:17:54.840 have using non lethal waves. That is certainly true. So 0:17:55.240 --> 0:17:58.720 scientific whaling really doesn't have that much of a reason 0:17:58.760 --> 0:18:02.160 for existing commerce. Show whaling, well, that's within the sovereignty 0:18:02.160 --> 0:18:05.600 of those nations UM. And from my standpoint as a 0:18:05.680 --> 0:18:13.000 scientist UM, having a relationship with those industrial operations, especially 0:18:13.040 --> 0:18:16.400 in Iceland, has been a boon to understanding some key 0:18:16.440 --> 0:18:19.760 parts of the anatomy of these lunch feeding whales, and 0:18:20.200 --> 0:18:23.320 it's providing information that we wouldn't otherwise have, and that 0:18:23.359 --> 0:18:25.800 has to do with the logistics of working with very 0:18:25.880 --> 0:18:30.480 large carcasses. So a seventy foot fin whale carcass that's 0:18:30.520 --> 0:18:33.800 freshly killed gives you information that you really couldn't otherwise get, 0:18:33.960 --> 0:18:37.960 certainly from a stranded whale when whales strand one, you 0:18:38.000 --> 0:18:40.359 don't have the equipment at your disposal. Usually don't have 0:18:40.400 --> 0:18:43.879 twenty men with giant knives and steam driven winches to 0:18:43.960 --> 0:18:48.040 manipulate and rotate the carcass and pull different parts of 0:18:48.040 --> 0:18:51.560 the anatomy into some way that you can actually study it. 0:18:52.119 --> 0:18:54.679 Um And certainly the tissue is not as fresh, and 0:18:54.720 --> 0:18:57.640 when tissue decays, it's far less useful for some kinds 0:18:57.680 --> 0:19:00.399 of questions, especially if you're looking at nervous tissue or 0:19:00.480 --> 0:19:03.919 muscle tissue. So um, the kind of opportunity you have 0:19:04.040 --> 0:19:07.760 at a commercial whaling station is really different from any 0:19:07.760 --> 0:19:10.879 other opportunity. That situation is the same that's applied to 0:19:10.960 --> 0:19:16.000 indigenous hunting. I've colleagues who work in Alaska and opportunistically 0:19:16.119 --> 0:19:20.560 sample from bowhead once. It's the same kinds of anatomical 0:19:20.640 --> 0:19:23.760 questions that you can't answer from a stranded whale. So 0:19:23.800 --> 0:19:27.240 that was what those are kind of the the circumstances 0:19:27.320 --> 0:19:30.119 that allowed us to work in Iceland and yielded all 0:19:30.160 --> 0:19:32.960 the insights that I talked about in the book. Well, 0:19:32.960 --> 0:19:35.680 what is the population of you know, many of the 0:19:35.960 --> 0:19:39.159 better known species of whale these days, and how does 0:19:39.200 --> 0:19:42.120 that compare to where it was, you know, a couple 0:19:42.240 --> 0:19:45.320 hundred years ago or a thousand years ago. How are 0:19:45.400 --> 0:19:48.320 whales doing in general? I guess that's the question many 0:19:48.320 --> 0:19:50.919 of the whales that were hunted during industrial whaling, especially 0:19:50.960 --> 0:19:53.960 in the twentieth century, when many of the populations for 0:19:54.080 --> 0:19:58.840 many species were brought down plus percent from their baselines. 0:19:59.480 --> 0:20:03.359 So blue whales now, um, the global population of blue 0:20:03.359 --> 0:20:08.360 whales is probably around one to five of its starting 0:20:08.400 --> 0:20:11.320 point in the twentieth century, and some two hundred three 0:20:11.359 --> 0:20:15.040 hundred seven hundred thousand blue whales were killed in the 0:20:15.040 --> 0:20:19.720 process of the twentieth century alone. Uh. That's certainly lower 0:20:19.800 --> 0:20:23.760 genetic diversity. That's lowered the individual number of the population. 0:20:24.640 --> 0:20:26.960 It's changed where those whales are in the world, and 0:20:27.240 --> 0:20:31.159 maybe even where they migrate, and maybe by extension, the 0:20:32.080 --> 0:20:35.119 structure and function of ocean food webs, by removing that 0:20:35.160 --> 0:20:38.560 scale biomass. And it's not just blue whales of course, humpbacks, 0:20:38.640 --> 0:20:42.760 minky whales, say whales. So the legacy of whaling on 0:20:42.880 --> 0:20:47.760 world's whales uh is vast, and we don't in many 0:20:47.800 --> 0:20:52.240 cases have that pre whaling baseline. So it's left whale 0:20:52.280 --> 0:20:54.760 scientists to infer that and the two main ways to 0:20:54.800 --> 0:20:59.920 infer it are either from calculations using current genetic diver 0:21:00.520 --> 0:21:03.160 to estimate what the population size was in the past 0:21:03.280 --> 0:21:06.480 using DNA, and the other approaches look at whaling records 0:21:06.640 --> 0:21:09.400 and look at catch records and try to infer and 0:21:09.640 --> 0:21:12.040 we get different magnitudes when we look at those two 0:21:12.040 --> 0:21:14.040 lines of evidence, but in both cases they tell us 0:21:14.080 --> 0:21:17.400 there were many, many more whales before whaling. Now, whaling 0:21:17.440 --> 0:21:21.440 today doesn't really happen at that scale. A fewer than 0:21:21.480 --> 0:21:26.320 a thousand whales are killed every year by whaling total globally, 0:21:27.119 --> 0:21:31.000 whaling has some serious ethics and geopolitics with it. Um. 0:21:31.000 --> 0:21:33.640 It doesn't seem like it's going away, and it doesn't 0:21:33.680 --> 0:21:36.560 seem like as big of a problem to me as 0:21:37.000 --> 0:21:40.359 global fisheries and our appetite for seafood. That's really what's 0:21:40.400 --> 0:21:44.960 causing a lot of the major harm towards whales. Um. 0:21:45.000 --> 0:21:47.040 You know, I think a whale killed by a harpoon 0:21:47.480 --> 0:21:51.040 probably dies in a more humane fashion than whales that 0:21:51.240 --> 0:21:54.240 are entangled in nets. What's ethical and what's humane about 0:21:54.320 --> 0:21:57.800 whales is not just a question for scientists, but when 0:21:57.840 --> 0:21:59.920 we come to the facts of just how many more 0:22:00.000 --> 0:22:02.360 palities there are per year. You know, that's I think 0:22:02.359 --> 0:22:04.720 where we should listen to scientists, and science shouldn't form 0:22:04.760 --> 0:22:08.040 policy much better. Okay, well, we have several more questions 0:22:08.040 --> 0:22:09.640 for you, Nick, but before we get to those, let's 0:22:09.680 --> 0:22:26.760 take a quick break. Welcome back to Part time Genius. 0:22:26.760 --> 0:22:28.920 We're here with the author of a wonderful new book 0:22:28.920 --> 0:22:31.879 called Spying on Whales, the past, present, and future of 0:22:31.960 --> 0:22:35.680 Earth's most awesome creatures. You know, I think when people 0:22:36.119 --> 0:22:39.800 imagine whales other than size, one of the things they 0:22:39.800 --> 0:22:42.439 think about it first are are the whale sounds? The 0:22:42.440 --> 0:22:47.040 whale noises and communication. Over the past few decades, are 0:22:47.080 --> 0:22:51.159 we getting a better sense of what exactly these whales 0:22:51.160 --> 0:22:53.159 are trying to communicate with one another or is it 0:22:53.280 --> 0:22:56.399 still this great mystery? Oh, I'd say it's still a 0:22:56.440 --> 0:23:00.199 great mystery. I mean, it's clear that whales communicate to 0:23:00.320 --> 0:23:06.160 each other with uh information rich waves. That content of 0:23:06.200 --> 0:23:08.959 the signal that they're using to communicate with each other 0:23:09.000 --> 0:23:13.720 acoustically is saying a lot. Now what it means we 0:23:13.800 --> 0:23:16.320 don't really know. We don't have a context for that meaning, 0:23:16.640 --> 0:23:18.640 so we don't know if they're saying, like, hey, lunch 0:23:18.680 --> 0:23:22.560 is over there, or the answer to the universe is blank, 0:23:22.880 --> 0:23:27.239 you know. I mean, it's just it's fundamentally inscrutable. We 0:23:27.280 --> 0:23:29.280 really haven't hacked that, and I think that has a 0:23:29.280 --> 0:23:33.560 lot to do with the complexity of whales on the 0:23:33.560 --> 0:23:35.960 one hand and the environment they live in on the other. 0:23:36.320 --> 0:23:39.000 And our best ways to investigate that are whales in captivity, 0:23:39.040 --> 0:23:41.720 which may be doing something very different from what whales 0:23:41.720 --> 0:23:44.960 in the wild are doing. Uh. And again that's logistically 0:23:45.000 --> 0:23:48.680