I’m writing this in the noisy departure lounge of Nadi Airport, Fiji. The plane is delayed a couple of hours, so I thought I’d start thinking about one of the most thought-provoking encounters of our recent trip to Taveuni & the Yasawas: a wonderful encounter with mysterious Sperm Whales.
Many travellers are milling around me right now using Fiji as a hub to traverse the Pacific. It’s amazing the variety of cultures and nationalities that meet here. There are people foraging at the fast-food vendors. A family placates a distressed child. I can hear a guy muttering expletives about our flight delay. A jolly drunk American at the bar is trying to make sense of it all.
I’m imagining what two specific Sperm Whales are doing right now. They are the largest toothed predators that have ever lived on Earth and we met them last week in the Somosomo Strait near Taveuni. For the briefest of moments in time, two of the most sophisticated cultures our planet (perhaps our Universe) has ever known came together.
Imagining a different dimension of time and space
Take away fossil fuels and most humans travel only as far as their feet can take them to the next village. Sperm Whales on the other hand are true global travellers. The enormous length, ragged tail and bulbous head indicated that one of our two was a mature male. Males of his kind can spend their lives swimming around the entire planet. Hominins (humans) have a tiny home range. A Pacific planet-side view of Earth hides most of humanity’s homeland. Europe, most of the US and Asia, can’t be seen.
We evolved only two million years ago. Sperm Whales have occupied the world’s oceans for 50 million years. Our impact on this Earth is only a blip in the planet’s history, while these animals exist in a dimension of time and space larger than anything we can ever comprehend.
One might have taken a quick photo and moved on but we stopped. We extinguished the engines, listened to our own breathing and theirs. We imagined what they might be thinking and doing next. And we marvelled in one of the most powerful mysteries of our planet. How did such divine animals like this come to be? What does it mean to be a creature with the largest brain of any animal on Earth? How do they blindly ‘map’ the planet’s dark ocean using only listening?
Intelligent ecosystems
Sperm Whales are rare in the Pacific. They were the fossil fuel of 19th and 20th centuries, lighting cities all over the world and priming humanity for the industrial revolution. Meaning our civilisation wasn’t simply built on their blubber and spermaceti. It was constructed from the minds, knowledge and society of a species more alien and sophisticated than anything we will ever know.
Humanity is obsessed with knowledge and intelligence, artificial and otherwise. Which means we can easily understand how a species existence depends not just its physical form, but on what it knows and feels. The Sperm Whale’s ability to connect to landscapes and communicate to others of its kind is a driver over half of the world’s ocean ecosystemHow ecosystems function An ecosystem is a community of lifeforms that interact in such an optimal way that how ecosystems function best, is when all components (including humans and other animals) can persist and live alongside each other for the longest time possible. Ecosystems are fuelled by the energy created by plants (primary producers) that convert the Sun's heat energy More processes. The older of the two males may be among the few remaining with cultural knowledge sufficient to know how our planet works.
When the whales finally lifted their tulip-shaped tails and dove into the abyss, there was instant reaction and applause. Realising how little we know about animals invokes a strong emotional response. Part of being human is to humble oneself in the presence of things that are greater than us. It’s one of the reasons we seek experiences in nature. There is something about that immersion that resolves a part of our imagination we struggle to embrace in daily life.
Nature’s ticking clock
Watching such wildlife spectacles unfold reminds me we are not alone on this planet. Yet for the most part we consider animal behaviour mundane, that’s far from the truth. Nature is an ever-present ticking clock. Sooner or later its sounds and rhythms simply get absorbed into the background noise of everyday life.
Though on the time and geographic scale of Sperm Whales, encounters with human travellers are more ephemeral. Which means for us, these brief moments where we come together, are not insignificant at all. Far from it. These animals shaped our identity on Earth. It’s as much their connection to nature as ours, that has made us human.
