“She Pushed Her Wounded Calf to My Side of the Boat.”
Page Five of some remarkable, inexplicable stories of killer whale behavior toward humans in the wild.
In the early 1980s, a marine amusement park wanting whales to train for shows started asking for permission to resume captures of British Columbia killer whales. Captures had been banned in ’76, but talk turned to capturing a certain small family: the A-4 group. That family had already suffered. In 1983 someone – they were let off for lack of photographic proof – shot the whale A-10 and her youngster. Whale-watchers heard the shots and went right over. One of the witnesses said, “A-10 pushed her wounded calf to my side of the boat. We could see the wound oozing blood. It really seemed that she was showing us: Look what you humans have done.” Within a few months, both whales died.
The mere suggestion of capturing these whales she’d often seen – years after the capture ban – set Alexandra Morton’s blood boiling. At a meeting, even her own friends had to calm her down.
Were the whales trying to communicate something after she’d defended their family?
Over the years there was only one major waterway where Alexandra Morton had not seen killer whales: Cramer Passage, where Morton lived. Two days after the meeting where she’d spoken so passionately against their capture, Morton was following Yakat and Kelsey – who who were sisters of the dead whale A-10 – and a youngster called Sutlej. In front of the inlet to Cramer Passage the whales started milling around. Morton drifted with them. Then they “trapped” her, with the two sisters on either side and the youngster broadside at the front of the boat, all inches away. Each time she started the engine, they started buzzing around, keeping her trapped. They reminded her of whales hunting a sea lion and it unnerved her. But then they turned, leading her into Cramer Passage – the one place she’d never seen them go – and traveling up and down Cramer three times.
She allowed herself to wonder: were the whales trying to communicate something after she’d defended their family? She’d spoken at a meeting (not even out in a boat, where whales – if they were fluent in English – might have overheard her). “Sometimes I don’t know what to believe with whales,” Morton said. Reading her thoughts while she watched them would mean true telepathy. That, she knew, “flew in the face of reason.”
As Ken Balcomb might say, Alexandra Morton was deep into “woo-woo” territory.
She knew she was. She wrote, “I know this has no place in science (or even a sound mind perhaps), but could our parameters on reality be set just a little too tight?”
Decades earlier while watching two captive whales named Orky and Corky swim around their Marineland pool one day, Morton had asked a trainer to show her how one teaches a new idea to a whale. (Corky was the captured child of Stripe. Many years later Stripe would help lead Morton home in the fog, in the incident mentioned above.) Neither Morton nor the trainer had ever seen either captive whale slap its dorsal fin on the water. They decided they’d work on that trick the following week. “Then something happened,” Morton later wrote, “that has made me careful of my thoughts around whales ever since:” Corky rose and slapped her dorsal fin on the water’s surface. She did it several more times then charged around the tank, exuberantly smacking the water with her dorsal fin.
“That’s whales for you,” said the trainer, smiling. “They can read your mind. We trainers see this kind of stuff all the time.”
When a very young killer whale named Springer mysteriously showed up near Seattle, she had just recently been weaned and her mother had been missing. Ken found her playing with a small floating tree branch, pushing it around. “I picked it up and threw it and she’d go after it, very playful. I started slapping the water and she started slapping the water with her pec fin. Then I looked at her and for some reason I just made a circular motion with my finger, like a ‘roll over’ signal = and she rolled over! I just went, ‘Wow!’ To get a dog to do all that, you have to work on training them to do that trick. I mean; she knew what I had in mind, like her consciousness was just sort-of linked with mine. There are no words for something like that.”
Rolling when he moved his finger in a circle required an understanding that his finger represented a generalized geometric concept of ‘motion around an axis.’ Plus it required an ability to apply to her body the concept she understood in the motion of his finger. It required an innate desire to engage with another life form, a capacity for play and, it would seem, a sense of fun. And, she couldn’t do what he had in mind unless she indeed inferred that he had something in mind.
It was astonishing behavior.
Killer whales simply seem to specialize in acute consciousness.
In other words, Springer was just being a killer whale. Killer whales simply seem to specialize in acute consciousness. They don’t seem to be astonished by us; they take us matter-of-factly. We don’t need to continue being astonished at their behavior. Instead, we might simply fully accept them – and be astonished by one thing about ourselves: how long it’s taken us.
In the 1960s, Karen Pryor discovered that rough-toothed dolphins could understand the concept, ‘Do something new.’ She rewarded them only if they did something they’d never been taught and had never done. Then at a specific signal they, “thought of things to do spontaneously that we could never have imagined, and that we would have found very difficult to arrive at.”
When the Hawaiian bottlenose dolphins Phoenix and Akeakamai got the signal to “do something new,” they would swim to the center of the pool and circle underwater for a few seconds, then would do something like: both shooting straight up through the surface in perfect unison and spinning clockwise while squirting water from their mouths. None of that performance was trained.
“It looks to us absolutely mysterious,” researcher Lou Herman emphasized. “We don’t know how they do it.” It seems as if they confer using some form of language to plan and execute a complex new stunt. If there’s another way of doing it, or what that might be, or whether there’s some other way to communicate that humans can’t quite imagine – dolphin telepathy? – no human knows. Whatever it is, for the dolphins it’s apparently as routine and natural as human kids saying, “Hey let’s do this…”
Next – Page Six: “Did They Know What Had Happened on Our Boat?”
All posts in this series are excerpted from Beyond Words; What Animals Think and Feel by Carl Safina.