DAWN M. SMITH
A Whale Alone
A few lights shine in the tent we use as our base of operations. They are far enough away to ignore. The only sound is Alex’s breathing; a sharp whoosh when his head clears the water, his blowhole snapping open, forcing air out, followed by a gentle inhalation, ending with a soft slap as it closes before he sinks underwater again.
I float on my back, warm and buoyant in my wetsuit. Alex suckles my finger as we drift across the veterinary pool. Beaked whale calves have the most incredible tongues. The long, fingerlike papillae along the edges flutter until they wrap around the nipple of a bottle, or a finger, to suckle. He has had his formula for the day; this is comfort suckling.
My evening with Alex is bittersweet. We have failed him; unable to give him appropriate nourishment, or even sufficient companionship. He is losing weight and becoming less active. And yet, how can I not be content, this one night, just to share the pool with a neonatal beaked whale?
We understand so little about these rare whales, whose approximately twenty separate species live far offshore, spend most of their time underwater, and look very similar. Beaked whales have only one or two teeth, and only in their lower jaw. The position and shape of these teeth are different in each species and these differences help scientists identify individual species. Alex is too young for those teeth to have erupted. It will be several years before we learn he is a Hubbs’ beaked whale. For now, he is just Alex, a whale calf in need of help.
Alex wasn’t alone when he stranded. Another young beaked whale was with him. I was reviewing animal care charts at The Marine Mammal Center when someone yelled,
“Dolphins on the beach! In front of the Cliff House! Park rangers want to know when we can get there!”
We contacted the California Academy of Sciences (Cal Academy). Their biologists could get to the beach in minutes. We wouldn’t get there for at least half an hour. We called volunteers who lived in the city to help them.
Once at the scene, Marc Webber, a Cal Academy biologist, stopped me before I could get to the beach.
“Before you go out there you need to know these animals aren’t dolphins. They’re beaked whales.”
“Okay . . . What does that mean?”
“That we know almost nothing about them. But these two appear to be very young. We’re trying to contact a couple of beaked whale biologists to help us.”
I scanned the crowded beach. Nothing like a five o’clock stranding on one of the hottest, sunniest days of that 1989 San Francisco summer when the fog that normally dominates the coastline was held offshore for weeks by a rare high-pressure system. The press was there already, multiple television and radio stations, plus newspapers, competing for attention. To be fair, they might have already been there to cover the unusual weather and its attendant crowds.
We struggled to take the animals’ respiration rates while preventing well-meaning citizens from ‘helping.’ The rangers finally got everybody behind a line of caution tape. The whales’ respiration rates were steady, they were in reasonable weight, and they had no obvious injuries. All good signs.
Onlookers kept asking why we didn’t push the whales back into the water. I lost track of how many times we explained that mass strandings of whales and dolphins were not common on the West Coast, that the animals stranded here were sick, injured, or otherwise in need of care. However, technically this was a mass stranding, as there was more than one animal and they were not a mother-calf pair.
This differs from three other areas, most notably Cape Cod in the eastern US and certain spots in Australia and New Zealand, where mass strandings often occur. Many of those whales survive after returning to sea. While we don’t know why these mass strandings happen, scientists suggest that topography, weather and environmental issues may be factors, rather than simply illness or injury.
Our vet asked us to try to get a blood sample, not an easy task, and give intravenous steroids and antibiotics as precautionary treatments. We didn’t know what was wrong with the whales, but infections are common, and steroids may counteract some of the stress-related problems often seen in stranded cetaceans.
I turned to Marc in panic.
“I’ve never taken blood from a cetacean. Can you do it?”
“I’ll show you where the vein is, but you’d better draw the blood. I’d probably shake so hard I wouldn’t get the needle in the right place.”
“And you think I won’t?”
“But you take blood from animals all the time. You’re more likely to get it. I’ll hold the flukes, so you have a better shot at it.”
“Ok, let me get the drugs ready, in case I can pull this off.”
Marc showed me where the vein was. I took a deep breath, inserted the needle, got the samples we needed, and kept the needle in place long enough to get the drugs into the first whale. And the second. Mission accomplished, my hands began to shake.
We gathered the volunteers so Marc could explain how to get the whales into slings for carrying. Volunteers placed the sling next to the smaller animal, then shifted it onto the sling in a smooth rolling motion.
Under Marc’s quiet guidance, they loaded the whale onto our small 4X4. Well, most of the whale. His flukes hung off the back. Marc assigned two people to keep him from slapping them, as he could injure his back in doing so. I went with this smaller whale. Vic, the other vet nurse, stayed with the animal still on the beach.
The whale was quiet until we started going uphill. Then he started thrashing. We stopped, steadied him, then traveled forward at a slower pace. After what felt like forever, the two trucks were bed to bed and we moved the whale onto Cal Academy’s flatbed truck, which was large enough to transport both animals. I took the whale’s respirations, hoping he would settle. The team moved the second whale without incident.
Once together, the whales breathed as one, syncopated eruptions of air, like snorting horses, escaped their blowholes. Their breathing slowed and steadied. I relaxed just a little as well. The short, frequent breaths of the smaller whale as it was being moved were obvious signs of agitation.
The sun was settling into the sea as we drove off into the heavy, lingering rush hour traffic. Soon the smaller whale became agitated again. I spent my time torn between monitoring his heart and respiration rates and listening to Marc give a crash course in beaked whale natural history. The whales got their names on the drive to the marine park, where our vet was waiting. They were now Nicholas and Alexander.
Within days, Nick began to struggle, often unable to remain upright, staying near the side of the pool for support. His body ballooned up. Our vet contacted both veterinary and human medical specialists. Those from the human side, used to dealing with subcutaneous emphysema (air under the skin), put drains in Nick as they would a person. It didn’t help.
Ultrasound, radiographs, and other diagnostic tools didn’t reveal the cause of the problem. Everyone’s best guess was that a small puncture wound allowed air to get under Nick’s skin, but we found no obvious wounds. After sixteen days, Nick died. His post-mortem examination gave us no answers as to what killed him.
It was not until we began to understand the damage that human-created ocean noise can cause that we finally had a clue. Beaked whale dive behavior and response to sudden noise may drive this deep ocean species to shore and induce a condition similar to the bends that human divers experience. So, it was possible that an underwater noise incident contributed to this unusual stranding. But we would never know for certain, as at the time we didn’t know to look for this potential problem.
And now, Alex has only human company. He allows us to care for him, making his dislikes known with a slap of his flukes or by moving away. A routine develops. There are other animals and responsibilities to attend to, but everyone finds time for Alex.
I often wonder what is like it to be this animal, living in an alien world with no mother, no family group, and unable to communicate with us except in very basic ways. I worry about what will become of him. He won’t return to the wild.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which oversees marine mammal rescue and rehabilitation in the US, does not allow non-weaned cetaceans to be released back to the wild, based on a genuine concern that they will be unlikely to find others of their species, or learn where and how to feed, and would thus be unlikely survive.
Should Alex live, he will go to a marine park or zoo where he will have the company of other whales, dolphins, or porpoises. Marine World staff hope they will become the only facility in the world with a beaked whale. My volunteers, fellow staff and I are dedicated to getting animals back to the wild, so we struggle with this reality. But it’s out of our hands. And no one wants ‘our’ whale to die alone at sea.
Alex and I drift. He doesn’t move except for the occasional slow downstroke of his flukes. His breaths come soft and regular. The whoosh soothes me. I stay in the water for over an hour before he lets go of my finger and swims off alone. Since he has been with us we have at least learned that when he has had enough, he swims away. I get out of the pool, pause to listen to him breathe, then shower, change, and head home for a few hours of sleep before my next TMMC shift.
Next morning, before I finish my coffee, I get the call. Alex is dead. I rest my head against the wall and will myself not to cry. This never gets easier, even when the outcome is staring me in the face. We discuss Alex’s post-mortem exam, who is requesting what samples, and who will help. We need to learn as much as we can from this animal.
I am comfortable with post-mortems. The Alex I knew is dead, but the body that remains may teach us important things about beaked whales. His short time with us gave us a glimpse, just the tiniest glimpse, into the world of a species we know so little about.
I hang up, allowing the tears to come, feeling the frustration of the days and weeks of watching him, knowing we were losing him, and knowing we didn’t know enough about his species to give him the care he needed.
As the pain ebbs, I remember my concerns about Alex spending his life in captivity. He might have been young enough to adjust, to learn to live with species other than his own, in a limited world. But never again would he have experienced the open ocean, nor travelled in sync with another beaked whale, as he had with Nick. Perhaps it is as it should be.
A fascination with the natural world guides most aspects of Dawn Smith’s life, including her writing. When not writing, she hikes, binoculars in hand, in the southwest and any other place that catches her fancy.