Fiat Flukes

By Philip Herrera

MIND IN THE WATERS

Assembled by JOAN MClNTYRE

240 pages. Scribners/Sierra Club. $14.95.

Genius in the Sperm Whale? Has the Sperm Whale ever written a book, spoken a speech? No, his great genius is declared in doing nothing at all.

--Herman Melville

What whales and their dolphin kin will not declare, this extraordinary book celebrates. It is a collection, really an orchestration, of appreciative views of the great creatures. Sober scientific articles and elegiac poems, naturalists' reports and scholars' musings, pencil drawings and underwater photographs jumble together, but all gently point to the possibility that whales are geniuses. The conclusion, of course, is unproved, yet most readers are likely to be convinced of its plausibility. Those with a mystical bent may even end up agreeing with Melville that if God ever returns to this planet, he would come as a whale.

The huge sea mammals live in an extraordinarily peaceable harmony with nature. They find food and avoid most dangers easily, have leisure, know rapture. Their history goes back 50 million years (v. 5 million for man) to the time the first cetaceans abandoned the land and took to the waters. Of the 87 species still extant, the biggest is the blue whale, whose tongue alone weighs as much as an elephant. Most highly developed is Orcinus orca, the "killer whale," which may be the only higher animal on earth that knows no fear. Then there is the humpback whale, renowned for its intricate but remarkably precise "songs," and the river dolphins that navigate far inland during floods, remembering underwater topography so well that they never get trapped by the receding waters.

While the human brain has been put to work creating tools and taking action, whales' enormous brains seem to be anatomically structured to emphasize humor, emotional self-control and abstract thought. Much of their brain is also designed to receive an almost unimaginably rich flow of perceptions. Modern technology gives a bare hint of what cetaceans might "think." Most communicate in part with a superior sort of sonar. They emit "clicks" and "pings," then read the echoes in three dimensions. "One dolphin scanning another," explains John Sutphen, a doctor at Connecticut's Lawrence Hospital, "does not just receive an echo from the other's skin but from his interior body as well."

Harpooned Brother. Careful observations of cetaceans show that they teach and discipline their young, sleep, hunt and even make love in ways that indicate a high order of social organization. In the seas, they often aid their wounded fellows; two fin whales spotted off Canada, for example, supported a harpooned brother on their flukes for five days. In aquariums, they cooperate with--and sometimes outthink--their captors. One group of dolphins being rewarded with fish ate until sated, then continued to perform while piling the excess fish on the pool bottom. When they got bored, they simply gave the fish back to the experimenters.

On the whole, cetaceans seem to like men. Indeed, ancient myths from India, Greece, Finland and the Pacific Northwest suggest that in the dim past the two animals were close. That makes man's present destruction of the sea creatures all the sadder. Every year, not only are 36,000 whales killed for food and commercial products but about 250,000 dolphins and porpoises die in tuna fishermen's nets. This book cogently and movingly urges a moratorium on the slaughter so that the species can rebuild their numbers--and so that we can perhaps learn from the marvels of the gigantic mammals.

qed Philip Herrera

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