WEBVTT - Why Are Whales So Big? with Nick Pyenson! 0:00:02.480 --> 0:00:03.960 Guess what will? What's that mango? 0:00:04.200 --> 0:00:06.559 So you know those Golden records that traveled on the 0:00:06.640 --> 0:00:08.360 Voyager spacecraft. 0:00:08.080 --> 0:00:10.760 Yeah, they were loaded up with greetings in different languages 0:00:10.920 --> 0:00:14.400 and these concertos. Wasn't actually Johnny be Good on there too? 0:00:14.600 --> 0:00:16.960 Yeah, that's right, there's some Chuck Berry on the record. 0:00:17.040 --> 0:00:19.800 But I was reading this new book by Nick Pinson. 0:00:19.920 --> 0:00:22.640 It's called Spying on Whales, and one of the things 0:00:22.640 --> 0:00:24.799 he says is that there are actually whale songs on 0:00:24.840 --> 0:00:27.680 that record as well. So in the nineteen seventies, scientists 0:00:27.680 --> 0:00:30.520 had just discovered that whales have these complex songs that 0:00:30.560 --> 0:00:34.080 they repeat in loops, and each whale improvises on that loop. 0:00:34.080 --> 0:00:37.680 It's really remarkable. But Pines's point is that in the 0:00:37.720 --> 0:00:41.640 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 0:00:44.360 --> 0:00:46.360 beautiful that we're happy to throw them on a record 0:00:46.400 --> 0:00:48.680 in case aliens might find them interesting too. 0:00:49.040 --> 0:00:50.559 But reading this book. 0:00:50.360 --> 0:00:52.680 Made me think we should really dig into whales, like 0:00:53.040 --> 0:00:55.840 why are they so large? How do they sustain these 0:00:55.920 --> 0:00:58.880 massive bodies? I mean, these creatures are bigger than any 0:00:59.040 --> 0:01:02.080 dinosaurs that have ever lived, and also, why do they 0:01:02.160 --> 0:01:03.120 have belly buttons? 0:01:03.440 --> 0:01:04.040 Let's dive in. 0:01:26.160 --> 0:01:28.759 Hey their podcast listeners, Welcome to Part Time Genius. I'm 0:01:28.800 --> 0:01:31.080 Will Pearson and as always I'm joined by my good 0:01:31.080 --> 0:01:33.480 friend Mangesh hot Ticket and the man on the other 0:01:33.520 --> 0:01:37.200 side of the soundproof glass not fully prepared today, Mango. 0:01:37.319 --> 0:01:40.200 I do see. He's got eBay up on his computer 0:01:40.319 --> 0:01:43.480 and he's looking up all of these Shamoo T shirts 0:01:43.920 --> 0:01:47.400 Shamoo coffee mugs, so he's probably gonna order some of those. 0:01:47.440 --> 0:01:49.080 I don't know when he's gonna wear them. I'm a 0:01:49.120 --> 0:01:52.400 little bit disappointed, but I'm sure he'll get something. But 0:01:52.440 --> 0:01:55.880 that's our good friend and producer Tristan McNeil. Now today 0:01:55.920 --> 0:01:58.520 on the program, we're chatting with Nick Pynson. He's the 0:01:58.560 --> 0:02:02.360 curator of Fossil Marine Man at the Smithsonian Institute's National 0:02:02.400 --> 0:02:05.880 Museum of Natural History, which is of course in Washington, DC, 0:02:06.360 --> 0:02:08.880 and he's the author of this wonderful new book called 0:02:08.960 --> 0:02:12.760 Spying on Whales, The Past, Present, and Future of Earth's 0:02:12.800 --> 0:02:16.560 most awesome creatures. Nick Pyenson, Welcome to Part Time Genius. 0:02:16.760 --> 0:02:17.519 Happy to be here. 0:02:18.200 --> 0:02:20.880 So going way back, one of the first things I 0:02:20.880 --> 0:02:24.680 stumbled into when reading your book. Here was that the 0:02:24.720 --> 0:02:27.960 first whales were land dwelling creatures the size of a 0:02:28.040 --> 0:02:31.280 German shepherd, that they walked on four legs and even 0:02:31.320 --> 0:02:33.480 had the snout instead of a blowhole. And I have 0:02:33.520 --> 0:02:37.960 to admit, Nick, when I first saw this fact, I thought, uh, oh, 0:02:38.000 --> 0:02:40.000 this guy might not know what a whale is like. 0:02:40.400 --> 0:02:44.200 That is not describing a whale. So can you explain them? 0:02:44.400 --> 0:02:47.320 I mean, that is so bizarre to both know that 0:02:47.320 --> 0:02:49.520 that connection is there and then to know how that 0:02:49.560 --> 0:02:51.440 connection is there. So can you talk us through this 0:02:51.480 --> 0:02:51.920 a little bit. 0:02:52.200 --> 0:02:54.120 Let's go back to have a whale in your head, 0:02:54.120 --> 0:02:56.840 and you're probably imagining a humpback whale or a killer 0:02:56.840 --> 0:03:02.000 whale and just looking at the basics of its DNA 0:03:02.120 --> 0:03:06.680 to know genealogical relationships. That whale in your head is 0:03:06.760 --> 0:03:11.000 most closely related to mammals that have fore legs and 0:03:11.080 --> 0:03:14.000 live on land for the most part, so that those 0:03:14.040 --> 0:03:19.240 are deer, pigs, cattle, sheep, hippos, which are semi aquatic. 0:03:19.440 --> 0:03:22.040 They swim in the water pretty well. But you have 0:03:22.120 --> 0:03:25.480 four weight bearing limbs and whales really don't look like 0:03:25.480 --> 0:03:28.320 that at all. So the earlased whales had for weight 0:03:28.360 --> 0:03:31.200 bearing limbs. It makes them look a lot like their 0:03:31.280 --> 0:03:35.119 near relatives today. But in the process of about ten 0:03:35.160 --> 0:03:39.080 million years, we have this great fossil record of how 0:03:39.120 --> 0:03:43.160 they've transformed, the loss of hind limbs, the transformation of 0:03:43.200 --> 0:03:46.360 fore limbs into paddles, and then all the changes that 0:03:46.480 --> 0:03:50.840 happen to their skulls. Because when they undergo these transitions, 0:03:51.040 --> 0:03:53.920 especially like this one from land to sea, well your 0:03:54.040 --> 0:03:56.600 you know, vision has to change, how you smell changes, 0:03:56.840 --> 0:04:00.320 how you hear changes. We have that documented in the 0:04:00.360 --> 0:04:01.080 fossil record. 0:04:01.280 --> 0:04:03.120 What sort of timeline are we looking at here, like, 0:04:03.440 --> 0:04:06.960 when does this dog sort of appear on Earth? 0:04:07.560 --> 0:04:09.960 You should be really careful and say dog like. Dog 0:04:10.120 --> 0:04:16.440 like dogs are a completely different group of mammoed. So 0:04:16.520 --> 0:04:20.599 this happens in about the space of a ten million years, 0:04:21.240 --> 0:04:24.960 from fifty to about forty million years ago. And this 0:04:25.080 --> 0:04:29.880 time period is interesting because it's during a period that 0:04:30.240 --> 0:04:33.760 was the last greenhouse Earth, and that's the last time 0:04:33.960 --> 0:04:38.480 in Earth history that we had global carbon dioxide concentrations 0:04:39.279 --> 0:04:41.320 that are closest to the ones that we may head 0:04:41.320 --> 0:04:44.080 to in the coming century or two. Whales evolved in 0:04:44.120 --> 0:04:49.719 an island archipelago that bordered the equator, so territory that 0:04:49.839 --> 0:04:54.000 is now India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, the entire Middle East that 0:04:54.120 --> 0:04:58.640 used to be a giant equatorial seaway. Today that's now 0:04:58.720 --> 0:05:02.560 been reduced to the metatre Tranian, but fifty plus million 0:05:02.640 --> 0:05:05.080 years ago that was open waters, and there happened to 0:05:05.120 --> 0:05:08.960 be this giant archipelago of land. And you know, if 0:05:08.960 --> 0:05:11.760 you read anything about evolution on island, you know, crazy 0:05:11.760 --> 0:05:14.640 stuff happens. So I'm not so surprised that the earliest 0:05:14.640 --> 0:05:16.320 whales happened in this setting. 0:05:17.400 --> 0:05:19.680 You know, Nick, there's some great illustrations in the book, 0:05:19.720 --> 0:05:23.680 and one is if this basilosaurus and I guess this 0:05:23.800 --> 0:05:27.760 was one of the first fully aquatic whales. And supposedly 0:05:27.800 --> 0:05:30.719 this whale had one of the strongest bites of any 0:05:30.839 --> 0:05:33.520 mammal ever, or at least as you've said here. So 0:05:33.880 --> 0:05:34.640 how do we know this? 0:05:35.279 --> 0:05:37.680 That's a great question. So one of the ways that 0:05:37.720 --> 0:05:42.120 we can figure out how strong an extinct organism might 0:05:42.200 --> 0:05:46.039 bite is by modeling it. So you can create a 0:05:46.080 --> 0:05:50.320 computer model based on the digital data the geometry of 0:05:51.360 --> 0:05:54.920 that animal's teeth or its skull I'd say especially teeth 0:05:54.960 --> 0:05:57.440 plus skull, because you want to know the bone that's 0:05:57.800 --> 0:06:02.719 holding the business end of whatever's chomping down. And when 0:06:02.760 --> 0:06:05.560 people have done those computational analyzes, and they do it 0:06:05.600 --> 0:06:08.560 with Basilsaurus, which again had a three foot long skull, 0:06:09.440 --> 0:06:11.520 So one, they're not that many mammals with teeth that 0:06:11.640 --> 0:06:14.800 have three foot long skulls. A polar bearer may have 0:06:14.839 --> 0:06:19.400 a skull that's forty centimeters long, that's barely that's not 0:06:19.480 --> 0:06:22.479 even a foot and a half. But Basilsaurus had a 0:06:22.480 --> 0:06:25.600 three foot long skull with these giant teeth that are 0:06:25.680 --> 0:06:29.159 the size of your palm. So the numbers that you 0:06:29.200 --> 0:06:31.840 get are that it has a byte force unrivaled by 0:06:31.880 --> 0:06:32.640 any other mammal. 0:06:33.000 --> 0:06:35.320 So Nick, well, one thing I still don't understand is 0:06:35.520 --> 0:06:37.760 how did wales get so big and why did they 0:06:37.760 --> 0:06:40.520 stop growing? Like why does a one hundred and ten 0:06:40.560 --> 0:06:42.640 foot body work for them? But maybe not a two 0:06:42.680 --> 0:06:43.520 hunderd foot body. 0:06:44.880 --> 0:06:46.920 So that's that's a question I tried to explore in 0:06:46.960 --> 0:06:52.120 the book, which and emphasize that getting big over evolutionary 0:06:52.160 --> 0:06:56.240 time is really a set of trade offs. There's a 0:06:56.279 --> 0:06:59.360 lot of reasons that it might be advantageous to get 0:06:59.440 --> 0:07:02.360 really big, then there are a lot of reasons why 0:07:02.360 --> 0:07:04.520 it may not be. It seems like for filter feeding 0:07:04.520 --> 0:07:07.320 whales they only get big in the last few million years. 0:07:08.160 --> 0:07:12.400 And what's interesting about that time frame is, in contrast 0:07:12.440 --> 0:07:15.080 to greenhouse Earth, during the first few million years of 0:07:15.120 --> 0:07:19.040 whale evolution, the last few million years have been happening 0:07:19.680 --> 0:07:22.160 under ice age ears, a time when we have ice 0:07:22.200 --> 0:07:27.480 caps both south and north global oceans became patchier in 0:07:27.560 --> 0:07:30.360 space and time in terms of their resources with the 0:07:30.400 --> 0:07:33.320 onset of the ice ages. So these kind of these 0:07:33.360 --> 0:07:36.560 natural history films where you see giant schools of fish 0:07:36.600 --> 0:07:41.040 and bait balls and krill aggregations that happen off the 0:07:41.040 --> 0:07:43.400 coast of South Africa or off of Chile or off 0:07:43.400 --> 0:07:47.480 of California, those are very recent geologic phenomena which haven't 0:07:47.520 --> 0:07:48.640 really been around that long. 0:07:48.920 --> 0:07:49.720 And we think this is. 0:07:49.680 --> 0:07:54.240 Deeply tied to the selective forces that allowed whales to 0:07:54.840 --> 0:07:58.480 become big, so migrating the long distances to arrive at 0:07:58.480 --> 0:08:02.320 those places where food is very dense in space and time. 0:08:02.840 --> 0:08:05.880 Being big helps, But on the cost side, if you're 0:08:05.920 --> 0:08:08.880 a lunch feeding whale, you really can't be much bigger 0:08:08.880 --> 0:08:11.520 than about one hundred and ten feet otherwise you can't 0:08:11.520 --> 0:08:14.880 close your mouth fast enough. So's those are the trade 0:08:14.880 --> 0:08:17.320 offs with getting big. Now, could a different kind of 0:08:17.320 --> 0:08:21.320 whale get much bigger? Maybe, but that hasn't yet evolved 0:08:21.680 --> 0:08:22.960 in as far as we know. 0:08:23.480 --> 0:08:25.800 So, Nick, you talk about the whales traveling, I'm curious. 0:08:26.120 --> 0:08:29.160 I know different types of whales travel different distances, but 0:08:29.480 --> 0:08:31.720 how long are we talking for some whales? 0:08:33.040 --> 0:08:36.240 So some whales don't range that far, but others do 0:08:36.360 --> 0:08:39.240 in these filter feeding whales, So ones that are like 0:08:39.840 --> 0:08:43.240 humpbacks or blue whales or minky whales, they can range 0:08:43.280 --> 0:08:47.800 over tens of thousands of miles. Gray whales, for example, 0:08:47.840 --> 0:08:52.720 have no problem, it seems, migrating twenty thousand miles. Humpacks 0:08:52.760 --> 0:08:56.920 will migrate from Maui in Hawaii to the Panhandle of 0:08:56.960 --> 0:09:01.080 Alaska every year. That's a scale that I really tried 0:09:01.080 --> 0:09:03.160 to convey in the book, is that whales range over 0:09:03.320 --> 0:09:07.080 entire ocean basins in many cases, so they're living at 0:09:07.120 --> 0:09:10.160 these big scales. That's a way that whales are teaching 0:09:10.240 --> 0:09:14.120 us about these bigger ideas about how oceans work. That 0:09:14.200 --> 0:09:15.280 I think is really important. 0:09:15.679 --> 0:09:15.839 Nick. 0:09:15.880 --> 0:09:18.400 We've got so many more questions, but we've got to 0:09:18.440 --> 0:09:37.320 take a little break first. Welcome back to part time genius. 0:09:37.320 --> 0:09:40.040 We're here with Nick Pines, and you know, when you 0:09:40.040 --> 0:09:43.360 were discussing the size of a whale and how they 0:09:43.360 --> 0:09:46.839 can only get so large because they need their jaws 0:09:46.840 --> 0:09:49.800 to climb fast enough to get the food. I was 0:09:49.840 --> 0:09:53.040 fascinated by some of the different strategies that whales used 0:09:53.040 --> 0:09:55.360 to hunt that you've described, and I was curious if 0:09:55.360 --> 0:09:57.040 you could sort of go through some of those, because 0:09:57.320 --> 0:10:00.600 like the way they can hold their breath and die deep, 0:10:01.040 --> 0:10:03.880 or almost turn their jaws into parachutes, or how some 0:10:04.040 --> 0:10:05.160 pirouette when they lunch. 0:10:05.200 --> 0:10:06.359 It was just really. 0:10:06.080 --> 0:10:08.559 Beautiful and I'd love for the listeners to be able 0:10:08.559 --> 0:10:09.440 to hear some of that stuff. 0:10:09.760 --> 0:10:12.040 Sure, I mean, I think it goes back to this 0:10:12.120 --> 0:10:16.800 idealized whale that you have in your head. It oversimplifies 0:10:16.840 --> 0:10:20.360 the incredible diversity of living whales, to say nothing about 0:10:20.400 --> 0:10:23.400 all the crazy extinct ones that we know of. But 0:10:23.480 --> 0:10:26.760 among the living whales, you'll see some have a mustachioed 0:10:26.760 --> 0:10:30.800 fringe hanging from the top of their mouth. That's baileing. 0:10:31.480 --> 0:10:33.800 And so those are the filter feeding whales. That's one group. 0:10:34.280 --> 0:10:37.160 The other one are toothed whales. Now, some of the 0:10:37.200 --> 0:10:41.079 toothed whales have teeth. Others don't, but they all echo locate. 0:10:41.200 --> 0:10:45.960 They use a form of biological sonar to navigate to hunt. 0:10:46.520 --> 0:10:50.240 The filter feeding ones will use their mustachioed fringe of 0:10:50.280 --> 0:10:56.120 baileen to capture aggregates of prey in bulk, so you're 0:10:56.120 --> 0:10:59.280 making the highest return on the investment of feeding style. 0:10:59.800 --> 0:11:02.199 And some of these filter feeders will lunge the way 0:11:02.200 --> 0:11:07.640 a blue whale will or a humpback. Others do a 0:11:07.640 --> 0:11:10.000 style of filter feeding called skim feeding. So these are 0:11:10.040 --> 0:11:13.559 like bowheads and right whales where they'll hover around the 0:11:13.600 --> 0:11:16.520 surface and they're not teen gulps, they're just kind of 0:11:17.040 --> 0:11:20.880 passing through a giant super organism of prey. For the 0:11:20.920 --> 0:11:24.520 other group of whales, the toothed whales, they use echolocation. 0:11:24.679 --> 0:11:27.120 And in some cases these are the deep diving ones 0:11:27.520 --> 0:11:31.480 that will dive thousands of feet deep in search of prey, 0:11:31.760 --> 0:11:36.400 sperm whales, beaked whales, even many oceanic dolphins. A bottomnosed 0:11:36.400 --> 0:11:40.439 dolphin will dive very very deep beyond the reach of 0:11:40.520 --> 0:11:43.000 light for their prey. And the way how you can 0:11:43.040 --> 0:11:45.000 do that is if you have a way of navigating 0:11:45.040 --> 0:11:49.280 an underwater world without light, and that's using sound. This 0:11:49.320 --> 0:11:53.959 is an outstanding question, is why haven't whale prey toothed 0:11:53.960 --> 0:11:57.240 whale prey of all defenses against echolocation, because it seems 0:11:57.240 --> 0:12:01.520 like a supremely advantageous tool and to hunt. And that's 0:12:01.880 --> 0:12:04.480 still not entirely well known. And that's important because we 0:12:04.480 --> 0:12:07.360 don't actually see whales feeding at depth. I mean, this 0:12:07.400 --> 0:12:11.200 whole story of the squid and the whale, sperm whales 0:12:11.200 --> 0:12:14.640 feeding on giant squid, nobody's ever seen that. We see 0:12:14.679 --> 0:12:17.680 the effects of that, and we would all love to 0:12:17.679 --> 0:12:19.520 see it. I mean, that's just one of these amazing 0:12:20.000 --> 0:12:22.120 you know, if you could ever get a BBC film 0:12:22.160 --> 0:12:25.280 crew to film it, that would be awesome. We've never 0:12:25.280 --> 0:12:27.559 seen it, so we have to infer it either from 0:12:27.600 --> 0:12:32.640 gut contents or the scars or chunks of giant squid 0:12:33.360 --> 0:12:37.840 tentacles that float around sperm whales after they come to 0:12:37.880 --> 0:12:40.920 the surface. It's just there's a lot about whale science 0:12:40.920 --> 0:12:42.480 that we don't see directly, so we have to be 0:12:42.480 --> 0:12:44.319 clever about how we study it. 0:12:44.400 --> 0:12:46.959 Well. It seems for you know, not for lack of trying, though, 0:12:46.960 --> 0:12:51.079 because you talk about that echolocation and how it's so 0:12:51.080 --> 0:12:55.160 sophisticated in some whales that you know, even our military 0:12:55.320 --> 0:12:59.400 has invested, especially in the sixties, so much in studying 0:12:59.480 --> 0:13:03.640 that ability to echo locate. Why is it so much 0:13:03.720 --> 0:13:06.800 more sophisticated than what we're able to create with you know, 0:13:06.840 --> 0:13:08.960 computers and all the technology that we have. 0:13:09.720 --> 0:13:12.439 Well, I mean, whales have the advantage of evolution, the 0:13:12.800 --> 0:13:16.440 advance of tens of millions of years of evolution for 0:13:16.480 --> 0:13:22.760 that right, evolution in an environment that's actually really complex 0:13:23.000 --> 0:13:24.880 and has properties that are very different from the one 0:13:24.880 --> 0:13:27.360 that we operate in daily. I mean, water is a 0:13:27.360 --> 0:13:31.880 different medium, has different properties for the physics of signals 0:13:31.880 --> 0:13:34.920 moving through it, whether it's sound or light. Whales have 0:13:35.000 --> 0:13:38.480 had tens of millions of years to evolve solutions to that. 0:13:38.960 --> 0:13:42.120 So one thing I didn't realize before this was how 0:13:42.200 --> 0:13:45.120 long a whale could live. And in your chapter on 0:13:45.280 --> 0:13:48.280 Arctic time machines, you talk about bowhead whales and how 0:13:48.720 --> 0:13:51.520 finding harpoons actually helped us determine their life spans. 0:13:51.559 --> 0:13:52.640 Can you talk a little bit about that. 0:13:53.200 --> 0:13:57.880 Absolutely. I mean, it's I think surprising people to realize 0:13:57.920 --> 0:14:01.840 that Americans whale today. It just doesn't happen typically in 0:14:01.840 --> 0:14:05.800 the lower forty eight States, but many indigenous cultures in 0:14:06.440 --> 0:14:11.199 the Arctic require marine mammal meat as sustenance. That's food 0:14:11.280 --> 0:14:15.920 for how people live, and this is ongoing in the 0:14:15.960 --> 0:14:21.360 North Slope of Alaska. And by recovering some of these 0:14:21.400 --> 0:14:26.520 bowhead whale carcasses, what scientists have found is tools embedded 0:14:26.560 --> 0:14:29.560 in these in the bodies of these bowhead whales that 0:14:29.760 --> 0:14:33.520 clearly came from a different era of hunting. These harpoon 0:14:33.560 --> 0:14:37.040 heads are almost like iPhones or smartphones in some ways, 0:14:37.080 --> 0:14:40.200 and that you can tell when they must have been 0:14:40.440 --> 0:14:44.240 embedded in the body based on their technology generation, So 0:14:44.680 --> 0:14:48.040 you know exactly so there was a changeover from stone 0:14:48.080 --> 0:14:51.800 harpoons to metal harpoons in the nineteenth century. And you 0:14:51.960 --> 0:14:56.360 know that the whale that was an unsuccessful strike must 0:14:56.360 --> 0:14:58.400 have been an adult when it was hit, because a 0:14:58.440 --> 0:15:01.160 juvenile would not have survived. So that whale that was 0:15:01.160 --> 0:15:03.800 collected in the late twentieth century in this case must 0:15:03.840 --> 0:15:06.360 have been well over one hundred years old, and the 0:15:06.440 --> 0:15:08.880 best guess was about one hundred and thirty. And that 0:15:09.240 --> 0:15:11.480 exactly parallels the kind of data you can get from 0:15:11.520 --> 0:15:15.880 biological tissues from their ovaries. So different lines of evidence. 0:15:15.920 --> 0:15:18.800 You're telling us that bowhead whales are able to live 0:15:19.400 --> 0:15:21.600 much more than a century, and some of the immunoacidy 0:15:21.680 --> 0:15:24.680 it was coming back with data of two hundred years, 0:15:24.840 --> 0:15:29.680 and so that's I mean, it seems unbelievable. But I 0:15:29.680 --> 0:15:32.320 think the implication of that is that there are whales 0:15:32.320 --> 0:15:36.560 that have lived through the entire rise and fall of 0:15:36.720 --> 0:15:41.280 major historical events in human history, like industrial whaling, or 0:15:41.320 --> 0:15:45.400 the rise of atomic weapons testing, or you name it. 0:15:45.440 --> 0:15:48.240 In terms of our technological innovation or the things we 0:15:48.280 --> 0:15:52.040 put out in the environment, whales, individual whales have persisted 0:15:52.080 --> 0:15:54.960 through that. So by if we were able to study 0:15:55.000 --> 0:15:58.360 these whales in whatever form, they probably could tell us 0:15:58.400 --> 0:16:01.360 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 bowhead bailein that 0:16:04.280 --> 0:16:06.800 goes back well well over one hundred and fifty years. 0:16:07.240 --> 0:16:11.280 If bilein is able to tell us about isotopic history, 0:16:11.360 --> 0:16:16.480 so the chemical history of the environment, then these pieces 0:16:16.480 --> 0:16:19.520 of bowhead baileen from the nineteenth century before fossil fuels 0:16:19.520 --> 0:16:21.480 were burned could tell us a lot about how the 0:16:21.480 --> 0:16:22.280 world's changed. 0:16:24.000 --> 0:16:24.960 That's really interesting. 0:16:25.040 --> 0:16:28.120 So you know, one thing you mentioned there was whaling, 0:16:28.360 --> 0:16:31.640 and I was fascinated that you actually worked or observed 0:16:31.640 --> 0:16:34.360 at a whaling station in Iceland, and I kind of 0:16:34.400 --> 0:16:38.239 wouldn't have expected that commercial whaling and this pure scientific 0:16:38.280 --> 0:16:40.600 study would have intersected like that. Can you talk a 0:16:40.600 --> 0:16:43.080 little bit about like why you chose to work there 0:16:43.120 --> 0:16:45.240 and how it benefited your understanding of wales. 0:16:45.840 --> 0:16:49.480 Whaling is something that's happened for thousands of years in 0:16:49.560 --> 0:16:53.720 human history and it still goes on today. Many people 0:16:54.040 --> 0:16:58.560 have emotional reactions to it, for sure, and it's hunting 0:16:58.640 --> 0:17:03.160 like any other mammal hunting, so it goes all the 0:17:03.200 --> 0:17:05.840 issues that you may have with big game hunting are 0:17:05.840 --> 0:17:09.200 certainly applied to whaling. And there's two main forms today 0:17:09.240 --> 0:17:12.920 that it happens in commercial whaling, which is undertaken by 0:17:13.000 --> 0:17:17.080 Iceland and Norway, so they see whaling as no different 0:17:17.119 --> 0:17:21.879 from a fishery and they sell the meat that's collected 0:17:22.000 --> 0:17:25.440 that's from a killed whale. And then the other form 0:17:25.440 --> 0:17:28.679 of whaling is so called scientific whaling that happens in Japan, 0:17:29.200 --> 0:17:31.040 you know. And for the latter, I would say that 0:17:31.040 --> 0:17:34.600 that's agenda driven science, and we should always be skeptical 0:17:34.920 --> 0:17:38.160 of agenda driven science because that's saying that you kind 0:17:38.160 --> 0:17:39.880 of know the answer before you go out and look 0:17:39.920 --> 0:17:44.000 for it, and you know, whaling happens in a social context. 0:17:44.040 --> 0:17:47.800 And it's clear that scientific whaling in Japan is not 0:17:47.840 --> 0:17:50.560 really about the science, because we can answer those questions 0:17:50.600 --> 0:17:54.520 that they have using non lethal ways. That is certainly true. 0:17:54.600 --> 0:17:58.399 So scientific whaling really doesn't have that much of a 0:17:58.440 --> 0:18:02.200 reason for existing. Whaling well, that's within the sovereignty of 0:18:02.240 --> 0:18:07.560 those nations, and from my standpoint as a scientist, having 0:18:08.520 --> 0:18:14.240 a relationship with those industrial operations, especially in Iceland, has 0:18:14.280 --> 0:18:16.960 been a boon to understanding some key parts of the 0:18:17.000 --> 0:18:21.480 anatomy of these lunch feeding whales, and it's providing information 0:18:21.560 --> 0:18:23.800 that we wouldn't otherwise have, and that has to do 0:18:23.880 --> 0:18:27.560 with the logistics of working with very large carcasses. So 0:18:27.600 --> 0:18:31.560 a seventy foot fin whale carcass that's freshly killed gives 0:18:31.640 --> 0:18:34.520 you information that you really couldn't otherwise get, certainly from 0:18:34.520 --> 0:18:38.280 a stranded whale. When whales strand one, you don't have 0:18:38.320 --> 0:18:41.080 the equipment at your disposal, usually don't have twenty men 0:18:41.119 --> 0:18:44.600 with giant knives and steam driven winches to manipulate and 0:18:44.720 --> 0:18:49.680 rotate the carcass and pull different parts of the anatomy 0:18:49.760 --> 0:18:52.720 into some way. That you can actually study it, and 0:18:52.800 --> 0:18:55.720 certainly the tissue is not as fresh, and when tissue decays, 0:18:55.760 --> 0:18:59.080 it's far less useful for some kinds of questions, especially 0:18:59.080 --> 0:19:01.719 if you're looking at nervous tissue or muscle tissue. So 0:19:02.560 --> 0:19:05.080 the kind of opportunity you have at a commercial whaling 0:19:05.119 --> 0:19:09.760 station is really different from any other opportunity. That situation 0:19:09.880 --> 0:19:13.240 is the same that's applied to indigenous hunting. I've colleagues 0:19:13.280 --> 0:19:18.000 who work in Alaska and opportunistically sample from bowhead mounts. 0:19:18.560 --> 0:19:21.639 It's the same kinds of anatomical questions that you can't 0:19:21.680 --> 0:19:25.320 answer from a stranded whale. So that was what those 0:19:25.320 --> 0:19:28.399 are kind of the circumstances that allowed us to work 0:19:28.520 --> 0:19:31.120 in Iceland and yielded all the insights that I talk 0:19:31.160 --> 0:19:31.880 about in the book. 0:19:32.800 --> 0:19:35.800 Well, what is the population of you know, many of 0:19:35.840 --> 0:19:39.040 the better known species of whale these days, and how 0:19:39.040 --> 0:19:41.919 does that compare to where it was, you know, a 0:19:41.920 --> 0:19:45.240 couple hundred years ago or one thousand years ago. How 0:19:45.240 --> 0:19:47.480 are whales doing in general? I guess that's the question. 0:19:48.160 --> 0:19:50.359 Many of the whales that were hunted during industrial whaling, 0:19:50.480 --> 0:19:52.800 and especially in the twentieth century, when many of the 0:19:52.840 --> 0:19:57.679 populations for many species were brought down ninety plus percent 0:19:57.800 --> 0:20:03.159 from their baselines. Blue whales now the global population of 0:20:03.160 --> 0:20:07.399 blue whales is probably around one to five percent of 0:20:07.440 --> 0:20:10.640 its starting point in the twentieth century, and some two 0:20:10.760 --> 0:20:14.639 hundred three hundred several hundred thousand blue whales were killed 0:20:14.840 --> 0:20:19.400 in the process of the twentieth century alone. That's certainly 0:20:19.480 --> 0:20:23.719 lowered genetic diversity, that's lowered the individual number of the population. 0:20:24.640 --> 0:20:27.240 It's changed where those whales are in the world, and 0:20:27.280 --> 0:20:31.159 maybe even where they migrate, and maybe by extension, the 0:20:32.080 --> 0:20:35.159 structure and function of ocean food webs by removing that 0:20:35.200 --> 0:20:38.600 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 0:20:42.920 --> 0:20:48.200 world's whales is vast, and we don't in many cases 0:20:48.400 --> 0:20:52.840 have that pre whaling baseline, so it's left whale scientists 0:20:52.840 --> 0:20:55.080 to infer that. And the two main ways to infer 0:20:55.160 --> 0:21:00.879 it are either from calculations using current genetic diverse to 0:21:01.000 --> 0:21:04.000 estimate what the population size was in the past using DNA, 0:21:04.480 --> 0:21:07.000 and the other approaches look at whaling records and look 0:21:07.040 --> 0:21:10.000 at catch records and try to infer and we get 0:21:10.240 --> 0:21:12.800 different magnitudes when we look at those two lines of evidence, 0:21:12.880 --> 0:21:14.680 but in both cases they tell us there were many, 0:21:14.680 --> 0:21:18.680 many more whales before whaling. Now, whaling today doesn't really 0:21:18.720 --> 0:21:22.480 happen at that scale. A fewer than a thousand whales 0:21:22.480 --> 0:21:28.000 are killed every year by whaling total globally. Whaling has 0:21:28.040 --> 0:21:31.640 some serious ethics and geopolitics with it. It doesn't seem 0:21:31.680 --> 0:21:34.360 like it's going away, and it doesn't seem like as 0:21:34.400 --> 0:21:38.240 big of a problem to me as global fisheries. In 0:21:38.280 --> 0:21:41.640 our appetite for seafood, that's really what's causing a lot 0:21:41.680 --> 0:21:45.560 of the major harm towards whales. You know, I think 0:21:45.720 --> 0:21:48.199 a whale killed by a harpoon probably dies in a 0:21:48.200 --> 0:21:52.399 more humane fashion than whales that are entangled in nets. 0:21:52.680 --> 0:21:55.760 What's ethical and what's humane about whales is not just 0:21:55.760 --> 0:21:58.399 a question for scientists. But when we come to the 0:21:58.440 --> 0:22:01.120 facts of just how many more there are per year, 0:22:01.600 --> 0:22:03.680 you know, that's I think where we should listen to scientists, 0:22:03.720 --> 0:22:05.800 and science shouldn't form policies much better. 0:22:06.400 --> 0:22:08.520 Okay, well, we have several more questions for you, Nick, 0:22:08.560 --> 0:22:13.160 but before we get to those, let's take a quick break. 0:22:25.520 --> 0:22:27.359 Welcome back to part time Genius we're here with the 0:22:27.400 --> 0:22:30.320 author of a wonderful new book called Spying on Whales, 0:22:30.320 --> 0:22:33.680 the past, present, and future of Earth's most awesome creatures. 0:22:34.680 --> 0:22:38.920 You know, I think when people imagine whales other than size, 0:22:39.000 --> 0:22:40.879 one of the things they think about at first are 0:22:41.280 --> 0:22:45.439 the whale sounds, the whale noises and communication. Over the 0:22:45.480 --> 0:22:49.040 past few decades, are we getting a better sense of 0:22:49.840 --> 0:22:52.560 what exactly these whales are trying to communicate with one 0:22:52.560 --> 0:22:54.760 another or is it still this great mystery? 0:22:55.440 --> 0:22:57.399 Oh, I'd say it's still a great mystery. I mean, 0:22:57.440 --> 0:23:03.280 it's clear that whales communicate to each other with information 0:23:03.440 --> 0:23:07.760 rich ways. That content of the signal that they're using 0:23:07.800 --> 0:23:11.679 to communicate with each other acoustically is saying a lot. 0:23:12.040 --> 0:23:15.040