The Biggest Balls and the Biggest Brains on Earth

The biggest balls in nature are the one ton ones possessed by the right whale, whose mating behaviour assures the reproductive success of males with the largest amounts of sperm. This is only half the story of evolutionary success however -- of the extraordinary social advancement of whale species. They also have the biggest brains. The mothers teach "emotional intelligence" to the young, meaning those survive who show most aptitude for reciprocal altruism -- and then go on to have most offspring with the intelligence genes.

Whales live in complex families and we know that offspring live with and know their mothers throughout their lives, as do humans. We know that orcas and others live in matriarchal societies, but in Among Whales (Scribner, 1995) Roger Payne talks about altruism between fathers and sons as well.

Identity, memory and sanity (dependent on memory) depend for whales on accoustic perception, received through their specially structured skulls from sound echoes bouncing off the objects and seabed geography around them -- as for us visual information comes from light bouncing off everything around us. Whale brains process meaning differently, and react to interference in the soundscape in ways we can only imagine (interference for instance such as comes from shipping noise and naval underwater sonar). Sound is transmitted differently through water than air, and because cells are 3/4 water, whales can "see" right through each other. They can echo-locate an unborn fetus in a female's uterus, which explains why dolphins have been seen to swim differently with pregnant women.

As an expert in whale communication, Payne tells us much about their languages and the huge variation in cultures that has evolved among them -- each species communicating and hearing, for one thing, in different frequencies. Their personal, social, and cultural complexity makes of whales in some ways a mirror image in the kingdom of the sea, of ourselves, the powerful and complex ape on land. We can but sense the power of their consciousness however, our own brains being so narrowly evolved by the genetic/cultural selection pressures of our own history on Earth. We can perhaps deduce however that underwater life creates an entirely different reality of movement, territoriality and co-existence. The big whale brain was able to evolve in a less competitive environment than that which our smaller brain evolved in, and the concept of "the biggest balls" would have different (or no) significance within the cetacean nation.

Perhaps it is a power trip, a tough show of nationalistic balls, that makes certain countries hang on to their traditional whale hunt over 20 years after the commercial whale hunt was supposedly banned. It was in fact subverted by what some nations have mendaciously called "research" killing, but now things look worse once again: according to Humane Society International "the whaling nations have failed to make a single concession towards ending, or even substantially reducing, their whaling programs, and one has even resumed commercial whaling. Moreover, more whale meat has been traded internationally under reservations to the CITES ban in the last year than in the whole previous decade." The Humane Society proposes a Global Sanctuary for Whales, and none too soon. What with pollution, shortage of prey, fish net entanglement, shipping collisions and insanity caused by underwater sonar, whales are having an increasingly hard time surviving at all. HSI's aims: "improving the conservation status of whales" and making the IWC "an effective organization dedicated to the conservation and protection of cetaceans." (This comes from a statement by Patricia Forkan, current Senior Envoy to the Obama Administration for The Humane Society of the United States.)

www.hsus.org

SEE ALSO: "Whales and Starvation, Pollution and Underwater Noise" Animalit, Jan. 24/09.