Travel Radio Show | This Week - 1/24/2007, The Mother is Coming Back, by Wade Hughes

The Mother is Coming Back

by Wade Hughes

Michael Costa laid his hand on my shoulder, leaned forward to speak close to my ear so that I would be certain to hear him through my wetsuit hood and over the drumming of the buffeting wind. "Remember. The mother is coming back." His matter-of-fact caution, offered as I sat on the pontoon of a dipping and rolling inflatable boat in rough seas, immediately raised a question; "When?"

There were two sperm whales out there, and we could only see one of them; the ten-day old calf. Obedient to embedded instinctive memory, it was resolutely thrashing along on the surface a hundred metres or so from our boat. Guiding it were the sonic signals transmitted by its mother as she hunted squid in the depths of the abyss, up to a thousand metres somewhere beneath us.

Newborn sperm whale calves cannot dive to the great depths that will yield them self-sufficiency: they can neither hold their breath long enough, nor are they adequately insulated against the intense cold of the abyss. At the most vulnerable time of their lives, they must remain on the surface, awaiting the return of their mothers—and their next meal. Protection against predators, and the comfort of companionship, is sometimes provided by other members of a herd, usually under the care of adult females, which take turns foraging in the depths and guarding the adolescents and infants on the surface.

Solitary pairs of mother and calf, though, have no choice. For up to three quarters of an hour at a time, they are separated, precariously balancing the life of the calf between its conflicting need for protection and sustenance.

Sperm whales, like all mammals, feed their young with milk. Lots of it. Calves are born after 16 months gestation. At birth, they are generally about four metres long, weigh a tonne, and demand around 20 kilograms of milk a day. More than 25% of this milk is fat, and the infant whale uses this to rapidly gain muscle and insulating blubber. The hard-working mother has to capture the energy required for this growth—as well as that needed for maintaining her own life—during frequent deep dives in pursuit of squid and other cephalopods.

While she's away, the calf has no camouflage. It can't hide. Very young calves, such as the one we were now watching, don't appear to swim well. Propulsion is achieved by inelegant, exaggerated convulsions of their whole body. This certainly causes the tail flukes to flail the water effectively, but it also results in the young animal's head plunging up and down. This might have the effect of allowing the calf to see what lies directly ahead of it—sperm whales' forward vision is obscured by their bulbous heads, and adults can often be seen "spy-hopping" on the surface, hanging almost vertically so that their down-facing vision can be oriented to scan the surface waters.

But back to the calf. Imagine Olympic swimmers attempting to compete in a butterfly event with their arms tied to their sides, and you'll have a reasonably accurate impression of a sperm whale calf under full steam. But swim they must.

In the course of her hunt, the mother can travel considerable distance, perhaps a kilometre or more. To avoid even lengthier separation, the calf must trace its mother's route on the surface, guided by her signals. Does the calf call its mother in return? We don't know, although given the sperm whale's finely-tuned hearing and unique sound-generating capacity, it seems reasonable to assume that it does keep its mother informed of its position and well-being.

That thought had been foremost in my mind as I made my first attempt to approach this same calf two days earlier. Then, it had been in loose company with two adults resting on the surface just a couple of kilometres or so off the southern shore of Pico Island, in the mid-Atlantic archipelago of the Azores.1

I'd swum slowly and quietly past the adults as they lay there, backs awash, snorting and blowing loudly through their blowholes. Just a few metres away, they loomed as great brooding shadows in the greenish underwater haze as I crept closer to the calf.

Every nerve in my body seemed afire with that now familiar infusion of fascination, fear, and sense of privilege that comes with every peep that I'm given into the lives of these giants. Apart from a few whalers killed by retaliatory clobberings from enraged and agonizingly impaled sperm whales, there's no reliable evidence of any attacks by sperm whales on humans. But taxing my body and mind to swim alone in the open sea with the largest of the toothed whales—indeed, the world's largest toothed predator—feeling their sheer size and bulk, willing the shrouds of mystery surrounding them to part, just a little, stirs all my emotions.

This calf crapped on my sense of adventure. Literally.

I saw the young creature take shape as a murky, darkening form, silhouetted in the cloudy water a couple of meters ahead. When it first saw me, its spindly lower jaw gaped open. Perhaps a threat gesture? A bleat to its mother, inaudible to me? A yawn? Who knows.

Barely daring to breathe, I glanced anxiously across the surface toward the two adults. They were still there, apparently unmoved by my intrusion. When I turned back to the calf, it had moved away a little and appeared to be floating just beneath the surface. I drifted closer, trying to make sense of what it was doing. It seemed to be contorting itself into a variety of shapes.

Perhaps sperm whales have learned some tactics in self defence from their principal prey. Squid, under menacing pursuit, eject clouds of sepia ink in the hope that dull-witted predators will mistake the stationary blob of ink for the squid itself. If the tactic works, aided by this momentary distraction, the speeding squid can make its escape.

Sperm whales don't have ink glands, but they do have an anus the size of a fire hydrant. The calf had put its to good use, and I found myself approaching, and then engulfed in, an enormous brown swirling cloud of whale feces. The odour—floating up to the surface, dissolving in the atmosphere, and permeating the air I was inhaling through my snorkel—would have stopped a galloping horse. Meanwhile, the calf and the adults had moved on, well out of my swimming range.

We met again the next day, but this time much farther out to sea and in clear water. In calm seas, the calf was head-bobbing its way on the surface in what appeared to be a dead straight line, parallel to the distant shore. Michael, one of the best whale guides in the Azores, kept our inflatable boat well clear while he studied the calf's movements. "It's alone," he said. "I'll put you in the water ahead of it and leave you there. If it maintains its direction it might swim past you."

Deep-blue water, empty of anything but microscopic life-forms and the occasional Portuguese man-o-war jellyfish, enveloped me while I waited.

In the sea, there are no barriers. Only water and distance separate us from the wildlife. Once we commit to unshielded entry into the water, we have no control over the distance. It's not good to dwell on the possibilities while you're floating out there alone!

So, I kept my eyes on the approaching calf, still heading toward me, on the surface and now only fifty metres away.

It hesitated momentarily when it first came into sight underwater. Just a slight pause in its clumsy rhythm while it assessed the strange life-form it had suddenly encountered. Then, perhaps hurried on by a call from its mother, it resumed its laborious efforts and swam past me within touching distance.

Its young, wrinkled skin was crosshatched with deep scratches in several places along its body. Skin appeared to be sloughing off its right-hand-side pectoral fin, and that fin, as well as its tiny dorsal hump, appeared to have been bitten, or at least mouthed by something with serious teeth. A triangular lump protruded from its face immediately in front of its right eye.

I gazed into that eye as it passed in front of my own and wondered if I had made as lasting an impression on the whale as it had made on me. Would it be interested in another encounter? Apparently not. When it had swum far enough away from me not to be bothered by the boat, Michael motored over to pick me up, and we set off on a long, arcing loop to get ahead of the calf again in an attempt to repeat the encounter.

We tried twice. Each time, the calf made a wide detour to avoid me just before swimming into underwater visual range. Once safely past, it resumed its original path.

While I'd been in the water, Michael and my wife, Robyn, had been continuously watching for the presence of adult whales, but none had been seen. Michael used the radio to call the vigias, former whalers, now employed as lookouts high up on the sides of mountainous Pico, but they, too, had not seen any adults in the vicinity of the calf all day. We began to fret that it was either lost or abandoned.

We could do nothing to help, of course, and motored off in the opposite direction in the hope of locating more whales off the western end of Pico.

An hour or so later, I encountered a large, solitary female. Ten metres long, she cruised watchfully into view and, as she approached to within a few metres, she slowly turned over onto her back and slid silently past me in an angled dive. I recognised her as a whale we had first seen in the same vicinity the previous year. She was easily identified by the distinctive white markings billowing across her wide upturned belly in the vicinity of her genital and mammary slits. The markings resembled spilled milk, smeared backward by her slipstream.

Early summer windstorms whipped up the seas the next morning, but we elected to go out anyway in the hope of finding shelter, and whales, in the lee of Faial Island, to the northwest of Pico. Despite the difficulties of sighting whales amidst the heavy swell and tumbling whitecaps, the vigia on Faial reported seeing a number of sperm whales in the roughest section of the Faial Channel, which separates that island from Pico.

It was uncomfortable in the inflatable as we bashed our way into the wind, riding up and down lumpy, agitated two-metre swells, but we saw several whales dive, flukes-up, in unison three hundred metres away. It was too rough to contemplate drifting along for nearly an hour in the hope of being close enough to swim to them when they surfaced, so we continued upwind—and there, battling its way toward us through these tough conditions, was the brave little calf.

Buried in cresting white-water one moment, head rearing up the next, it seemed hopelessly overwhelmed and vulnerable, but it never slowed.

I braced myself on the pontoon as Michael eased back the throttle till the outboard was doing little more than providing steerage. We watched the gap between the oncoming calf and the boat shrinking, and then Michael offered his cautionary observation: "The mother is coming back."

Staring out through my facemask across the heaving sea, with the rubbery taste of my snorkel in my mouth, I wondered when? And pondered the consequences of being alongside her calf when she answered that question.

Quite literally, a second or two later, just as I was wriggling my buttocks forward so that I could slide off the pontoon into the water, the mother did return. With a roar of exhaled air, and a spectacular explosion of foaming water, she rushed to the surface near the boat and ploughed through the swell toward the calf. Sheets of windblown spray erupted from her head and back from every collision with the waves. This was a most dramatic demonstration of the bond between mother and young, and it gave me goose bumps. Michael slapped me on the back and urged me to "Go! Go! GO!"

Inspired, involuntarily hyperventilating, eyes flared like a startled cat's by the adrenaline flooding my heart, I went in and finned as hard as I could in the hope of being at least close enough to see the moment when mother and calf reunited.

On expeditions like this, this is what I live for. I lie awake at night rehearsing in my mind what I will do in close encounters with these enigmatic giants. I try to instill in myself the discipline that's needed, in the chaos of overwhelming excitement and drama, to work camera and eye calmly and synchronously. Every photograph is paid for with a memory; I remember taking the shot, but the sensory imprint of the encounter at that moment is lost, so I try to balance observing and recording.

I have no photographs of the first sperm whale I encountered; a bull that Michael said was as big as they come. No photographs, but an unbroken memory that runs from the moment that it first emerged from the blue off to my right and approached at moderate speed, to the minutes that I floated staring disbelievingly into the empty blue to my left after watching its massive tail pump its eighteen-metre-long, fifty-ton bulk out of my sight.

It's not just the visual imagery that I have retained. I can still clearly retrace my emotional journey from exuberance at entering the water for my first encounter with a sperm whale, through puzzlement as I struggled to calibrate the dimensions of the looming mass, to fearful dismay as those calibrations clicked into place and electrified my unprepared mind with the realization that I had irrevocably entered the presence of an unpredictable, dwarfing force over which I had absolutely no control.

I can still feel myself soundlessly repeating "Oh, shit. Oh, shit. Oh, shit!!' as the most massive living organism, other than a tree, that I had ever seen approached and then swam past within a few metres of me. The idea of raising my camera to my eye never occurred to me—I was hypnotized into open-mouthed immobility. Somewhere between its blunt nose and its paddle-shaped ventral fin, my knee-trembling dismay morphed into knee-trembling elation at being allowed this privilege and remaining alive to talk about it! That whale frequently swims through my dreams.

But, if I spend all the too-short time available living in the moment, transcending my confined existence as a terrestrial being, dissolving from spectator to indivisible part of the spectacle, valuable data can go uncaptured. "WOW!!!!" isn't a very helpful answer when the question is "How do sperm whales….?".

So, over and over again, I mentally practice the routine. Quick check of the camera as soon as I enter the water. Shutter speed and aperture set in roughly the right combination for the conditions. Then, whether swimming hard to reach a position where the path of the whales might intersect my own, or floating motionless on the surface, waiting in suspense for the first underwater sight of an approaching whale, I run my fingers back and forth over the camera controls, exercising muscle memory so there'll be no fumbling when it matters most, and exposure and focus can be reliably adjusted without taking my eye from the viewfinder.

On contact with the whales, size them up. Imprint the first memories. Then, capture a few quick record shots. Then more memories. Then attempt something more than record shots. Consider framing, juxtapositions, foregrounds, backgrounds; something that captures on film some small part of the awe and mystery. Time bends at times like this. Jolted by adrenaline into hyperdrive, the brain captures the action in slow motion. But in what seems milliseconds, it is over. Memory tapes have to be rewound and replayed over and over to process the full sensory load. The photographs in the camera are someone else's; fragments of disconnected moments when the mind and body are forced to focus on the technology. Simultaneously, the camera becomes a conduit to greater awareness and understanding, and a barrier to perception. Simultaneously, I revere and resent it.

On this rough day in the Azores, I was too late to observe and capture the first moments of reunion of mother and calf—and at the point of exhaustion from the exertion of trying to get there in time. But when they finally came into sight, the whales revealed an extraordinary tableau.

Rumours have persisted for generations that newborn sperm whales are capable of suckling through their solitary nostril—their blowhole. It has never been proven, although researchers at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia are currently making serious attempts to test this assertion. Now, ahead of me, I could see the calf nuzzling the top of its head under the belly of its mother.

They were moving away and easily outrunning me, but I kicked on, squinting and staring, hoping to see something that defined whether or not the calf was suckling—a puff of burped milk, anything. But no answers came from that swim. Just a tantalizing photograph that does little more than prove how little we know about these whales. We don't even know for certain how they feed their young.

Three days later, on our last excursion for the summer, I swam with them again. I recognised the calf immediately from the triangular lump in front of its right eye. The mother seemed familiar, too. When she rolled over on her back and sank away from me, I could see why. White markings on her belly confirmed that she was the same whale I'd encountered days before, and last year.

I'd missed the instant of reunion, but I was there when they were wrenched apart again.

The mother sank into the abyss on her back, perhaps because that position afforded her a lingering view of her newborn, pathetically struggling to follow her into the depths before being forced to retreat to face alone the dangers of the surface wilderness.

We know little about sperm whale communication, but it was comforting for me to believe that the clicks and creaks I could plainly hear as the vertical distance between the whales widened were, for the calf, reassurances, and for me, echoes of Michael's warning. "Remember, the mother is coming back."

Notes from Wade

Ostensibly, this is about whales – but in reality it's another chapter in a 30+ year love story. Robyn entered my life, more than 30 years ago, like an uncharted reef suddenly discovered in familiar waters. She worked in a bank that I had been into many times and we had never noticed each other.

On one visit though, that changed. I convinced her that there was a pleasant evening to be had with a bottle of wine, and watching a couple of trays of underwater slides, and then I promised to introduce her, in person, to the fish and other creatures whose images had briefly colored my white-painted apartment wall.

On her first tentative snorkel swim at Carnac Island, off the Western Australian coast, a young adorable sea lion casually swam up to her, rolled over and lay on its back gazing up at her, and then blew a bubble-ring up towards her. Robyn squealed with delight. I could have kissed that sea lion! Rob and I have been soul mates, sharing our lives, travel and adventures ever since.

In our later years, we've both survived encounters with cancer and this has renewed our commitment, to each other, and to living every dive, every experience and encounter with those we love, as though it could be the last, and treating it with the same sense of awe and wonder as the first.

In that context, we consider our encounters with the sperm whales of the Azores – animals that few people ever get see alive, and fewer still get to swim with them – as extraordinary privileges. We're delighted to share them through words and pictures as some small contribution to their welfare, and, we hope, to improved appreciation of the spectrum of life that shares this planet, and to which we are all, in some way, connected.

-- Wade Hughes