A Beautiful Question

 

When the roughly forty-seven-foot-long, fifty-thousand-pound humpback approached marine biologist Nan Hauser—who was swimming near the whale—she assumed that he would swim around her. Instead, the massive whale started to push her around. He nudged her with his rostrum (snout) and tried to lift her out of the water onto his head, belly, and back. He pushed and pulled her with his huge pectoral fin and even tried to tuck her under it. In all of her twenty-eight years of swimming with whales, Hauser had never experienced a whale handling her the way this humpback was.

As the whale continued to graze and grope her, Hauser grew increasingly worried about her safety. She knew that if the whale bumped her too hard, he could very easily break her bones or cause internal injuries; and if he held her under his fin too long, she could drown. Even though the biologist believed that her life was in danger, she tried to stay calm and kept her underwater camera rolling. After about ten of the longest minutes of her life, she was finally able to disengage from the whale and swim toward the safety of her research vessel. Other than some scrapes from the barnacles on the whale’s body, Hauser was physically okay. But mentally, she was utterly perplexed by the whale’s behavior.

When Hauser had just about reached the boat, she looked back and saw a second humpback tail-whacking what appeared to be yet another—a third—whale. Just as this third whale started swimming toward her, she suddenly saw something that confirmed her life really had been in danger: what she had thought was a third whale was actually a fifteen-foot-long tiger shark. The humpback hadn’t been attacking her—he had been protecting her from the shark. And while her humpback hero was trying to keep her away from the shark, the second humpback had been doing his part by tail slapping it.

Once she was back on her research vessel, Hauser and others on board reviewed the video footage of the encounter and confirmed that the humpbacks appeared to be trying to protect her from the shark.

Hauser is president of the Cook Islands–based Center for Cetacean Research and Conservation in the South Pacific, and she has nearly three decades of experience researching whales. She had heard other stories of humpbacks protecting marine mammals from orcas and sharks, but as far as she knew, this was the first time a humpback had protected a human. When talking about her encounter, Hauser likes to point out that she had spent twenty-eight years protecting whales before she realized that they might have been protecting her, too.

Four days after the humpbacks protected her from the shark, Hauser was in her boat when she saw a humpback surfacing to check her out. Hauser entered the water with her camera, and the whale swam up underneath her until they were only four feet apart. The whale then placed both pectoral fins around her, in what felt to Hauser “like a hug.”

When asked in an interview with National Public Radio why a whale would behave altruistically, Hauser answered, “I’ve been studying humpbacks for twenty-eight years, and I plan on spending a lot more of my life trying to figure that question out because it’s actually a beautiful question to try to answer.”

A Compassionate Instinct?

The seal was floating on a raft of ice when marine ecologist Robert Pitman noticed her. A second later, Pitman saw a group of orcas working together to create a wave that knocked the seal into the water. Things looked pretty bad for the seal—until a pair of humpbacks arrived. The seal swam directly toward the humpbacks, and as she approached the whales, a wave lifted her right up onto the chest of one of the whales, who was floating on his back. Pitman assumed that being out of the water and safe on the humpback’s chest would only bring the seal a few seconds of reprieve, because once she slipped back into the sea, the orcas would finally get their dinner.

Orcas will sometimes beach themselves on land or jump onto an ice floe in order to catch a seal.

Then the strangest thing happened. As the seal started to slip off the whale’s chest, the whale gently nudged her back on with his flipper, keeping her away from the orcas. Later, after the marauding orcas had left, the seal slid off the whale’s chest and made her way to the safety of another island of ice.

This episode happened while Pitman and a team of scientists were in Antarctica researching orcas. The BBC had hitched a ride on their research vessel so that they could capture footage for a documentary, Frozen Planet. A few days before he saw the humpbacks rescue the seal, Pitman and the others on board saw orcas interacting with humpbacks. At that time, they thought that the humpbacks might be under attack. They moved closer to get a better look, but nothing much seemed to be going on between the humpbacks and orcas, and soon both species dispersed. But later, when they looked at the footage shot by the BBC film crew, they saw that a Weddell seal had been taking refuge between two humpbacks.

If that was all Pitman had seen, he might have written it off as just the seal’s good luck at having found a couple of humpbacks to hide between. But when he witnessed the second rescue, he started to wonder if something interesting was going on with humpback whales. So he reached out to others who regularly observe humpbacks and asked if they had ever seen them come to another animal’s defense. Pitman received 115 descriptions of similar encounters, many documented by photographs and videos. In 90 percent of those encounters in which the animal under attack could be identified, it was not another humpback, so it was clear the humpbacks were not simply defending one of their own.

No one knows why these gentle giants appear to come to the rescue of other animals, but it might have something to do with their gray matter. Humpback brains contain spindle neurons—cells that, in the human brain, are associated with the ability to feel empathy. So it’s possible that humpbacks are “wired” for feeling and understanding the emotions of others.

Beluga to the Rescue

Almost everyone has an idea of what their dream job would be, and for Yang Yun, it was being a whale trainer at China’s Polar Land Aquarium. In 2009, Yun had a shot at this career, but applying for it involved more than just submitting a résumé. Applicants had to participate in a free-diving competition, demonstrating how far they could dive into the twenty-foot-deep arctic pool that housed the beluga whales and how long they could stay underwater. The applicant who dove the deepest and lasted the longest would get the job.

Yun signed up to try out, and everything went well at first. But then, as she descended to about fifteen feet under the icy water, her legs stopped working. The arctic temperature of the water caused her muscles to cramp, preventing her from swimming to the surface. She panicked and began to choke, which only caused her to drop farther into the pool. Just as the aspiring whale trainer gave up hope and believed she was going to die, she suddenly felt herself being pushed to the surface.

Belugas are social, gregarious animals who migrate, hunt, and play together. In the wild, they exhibit curiosity toward humans and often approach boats and divers.

It turns out that two of the belugas in the pool—Nicola and Mila—had noticed Yun’s distress. Mila immediately took matters into her own . . . mouth. She gently grasped Yun’s leg in her mouth and pushed her up to the surface of the pool. Yun survived the ordeal without injury, profoundly grateful for Mila’s immediate action, which had saved her life. The spokesperson for the aquarium said that Yun was especially lucky because Mila had recognized that Yun needed help before any of the aquarium staff did, which saved precious time.

Why did Mila rescue Yun? It might be because belugas are social animals who hunt together and constantly communicate with one another. As a result of their social behavior, they develop a keen sensitivity to their pod mates. It’s possible that Mila, who was socialized with humans, had developed a sensitivity to people as well and so responded to Yun’s distress as if she were a pod mate.

A Whale of Gratitude

Given that whales behave altruistically toward other species, is it possible that they might be capable of recognizing—and even appreciating—altruistic behavior directed toward themselves? The divers who came to the rescue of a humpback believe they know the answer to this question.

James Moskito was one of a team of divers called in to try to rescue a humpback whale entangled in commercial crab traps near the Farallon Islands, about thirty miles west of San Francisco, in December 2005. He was the first to approach the whale, and when he saw the extent of the whale’s entanglement, his heart sank. She was floating near the surface of the sea, surrounded by buoys, each of which was tied with numerous weighted lines to about a dozen ninety-pound metal crab traps sitting on the ocean floor, roughly 250 feet below. The lines were so deeply embedded into the whale’s flesh that many were no longer visible. Moskito didn’t believe that the whale had a chance, but he was determined to do what he could.

Within minutes, Moskito was joined by another diver, Tim Young, and the two snorkeled around the distressed humpback to further evaluate the situation. They saw crab lines tightly wound around the whale’s pectoral fin, head, and mouth. When Moskito dove under the surface, he saw that her tail was tangled in the weighted crab-trap lines, which were pulling her downward, forcing her to struggle to keep her blow-hole out of the water.

Although scientists do not know if animals feel gratitude, there are many stories about animals showing pleasure after a human treats them kindly. When the animal on the receiving end of a kindness directs their pleasure toward the individual who treated them kindly, it seems reasonable to consider the possibility that the animal is expressing something akin to gratitude.

The two divers switched from snorkels to scuba gear and returned to the water with curved saws. They decided to try to cut through the lines wrapped around her pectoral fin, even though they realized they could be seriously injured if the whale slapped her massive fin while they were cutting. But as soon as they started, the whale stopped moving and remained calm. She watched the divers and seemed to cooperate, appearing to understand that they were there to help.

After freeing her fin, Young next removed the lines that were embedded in the whale’s mouth and head. At the other end of the whale, under many feet of water, Moskito worked tirelessly to cut the lines that entangled her tail. Two more divers joined Young and Moskito, removing other lines.

Finally, after five hours of working on the lines, the divers finally freed the whale. She immediately dove under the surface and disappeared. Or so Moskito thought. A moment later he saw the whale swimming straight at him, and his adrenaline spiked as he anticipated the worst. But the humpback did not charge him. Instead she came to an abrupt stop a few inches away from his chest and gently nudged him with her rostrum (snout), looked at him with one of her massive eyes, and swam next to him, gently brushing up against him. Moskito stroked her as she swam in circles. She also approached the other divers, nudging and nuzzling them, too. Moskito described the whale’s behavior as “affectionate, like a dog that’s happy to see you.”

As the whale swam around them, Moskito saw a line in her month that they had missed. He waited for an opportunity to cut it, and as he did, the whale made a deep humming sound. When that last line was removed, the whale circled around all of the divers a few more times, gradually widening her circles and moving away.

Although Moskito and the other divers cannot prove the whale was expressing gratitude for being released from what would have been a fatal tangle of lines, they nonetheless believe that the whale’s behavior was her way of saying, “Thank you.”

When Animals Rescue 

Belinda Recio