Wild Blue: A Natural History of the World's Largest Animal, by Dan Bortolotti, Thomas Allen, 315 pages, $26.95
Author's website: http://www.danbortolotti.com/
One of the paradoxes of 21st-century biology is that we know more about a virus than we do about the largest animal that has ever breathed on the planet.
For example, as Canadian journalist Dan Bortolotti notes in his brilliant natural history of the blue whale, scientists have yet to discover where blue whales meet to mate, and we don't even know where they give birth to their calves.
Despite the thousands that have been slaughtered by whalers claiming to do research, while we do know that baby blues gain eight pounds an hour until they are weaned at 40,000 pounds - all from mother's milk - we don't know how large they grew before their rapacious slaughter began.
Given their size, one would suspect that scientists might be a little further ahead in their knowledge of this species, but what they don't know far outweighs what they do.
Another annoying example of our ignorance is that, while we know blue whales make the loudest noises of any living creature, we haven't the foggiest notion of how they produce that sound. Unlike dolphins and the smaller whales, which have melons and other sound-focusing organs in their heads, the blue whale has yet to yield a single clue as to how it makes such massive noise, a noise so loud and at such a low frequency that it is believed blues communicate easily across hundreds - maybe even thousands - of kilometres.
Of course, they evolved this mechanism in the millennia before motored ships plied the waves; how the ever-increasing noise pollution of oceangoing vessels plays havoc with blue-whale communication, we do not know - but we can suspect it isn't for the better.
The lifespan of a blue whale is another unknown. Thanks to the Japanese and Icelanders who continue to "accidentally" kill blues (even though blues are protected and are about 10 times larger than the largest species they're allowed to harpoon), we know the ages of cetaceans who take about 30 minutes to die from a harpoon bomb in their backs, but not the age of blues who die a natural death. (By way of aside, some whales take as long as 28 hours to die from harpoons.)
Indeed, it is doubtful whether any blue whale has died a natural death of old age in either the 20th or the 21st century, since the larger the whale, the more profitable it was to kill. Just how profitable the enterprise used to be can be garnered from the staggering totals of the slaughter: Between 1900 and 1970, more than 330,000 blue whales were massacred, or as Bortolotti describes it, "humans killed about 999 out of every 1,000 Antarctic blue whales in less than 70 years."
Whalers would have continued this butchery at this pace after 1970, save for the fact that, like every commercial fishery in the world, they stupidly killed off the very species on which their livelihood depended.
The speed of the blue whale made its annihilation mostly a 20th-century phenomenon. It was not until two inventions were combined circa 1900 - the steamship and the steam-driven harpoon - that blues became vulnerable.
Peak speed for a fleeing blue is about 20 knots, but the chase was more than worth it for the whalers, because the yield in oil was awesome: The record yield from a single animal was about 13,000 gallons. It would take the slaughter of hundreds and hundreds of seals to match this one figure. All this killing primarily was simply to make foul-tasting margarine and bars of soap (and, by mid-century, much of the meat was used to make food for dogs and cats).
While the First World War slowed the devastation of blue whales somewhat, it was the poor animal's bad luck that scientists during that war discovered that the glycerine in whale oil made the perfect basis for nitroglycerine. In other words, blue whales were being hunted and killed so that humans could more easily carry on their slaughter of each other in Flanders.
The extermination reached its apex in the 1930s. Numbers began to fall, not through a lack of trying, but because of the dwindling supply. Then the Soviets entered the game with enthusiasm in the 1950s, and largely lied about how many animals they were killing. Twenty years after the fall of the Soviet Union, we are just now beginning to garner how big a fib they propagated. Russian whalers eradicated thousands of blues while describing their take to official bodies as that of smaller, more numerous species.
Every whale species should be lucky enough to have a chronicler such as Bortolotti. Following a well-told history of whaling in general, he discusses the scientists and their work in the Saint Lawrence River near Tadoussac, Quebec. Canadians are lucky because we are able to see blue whales from our shore, and the whale-watching cruises are well regulated by our government. Despite the easy access, though, science is still unsure if we are seeing the same whales each season, or new whales, or some combination of the two.
Bortolotti then thoroughly describes studies being made of a population discovered recently off the California coast, and of other groups of blues found in small numbers in other parts of the world.
Bortolotti has the enviable knack of translating the jargon of biologists and complex scientific ideas into not just plain English, but enjoyable English. He is especially good at finding metaphors to make comprehensible what is otherwise not.
While the history of blue-whale slaughter is enraging, Bortolotti wisely keeps his anger to himself and lets the whalers, via their utterances and their statistics, hang themselves. Given what we have done to the species, it is a wonder blues allow themselves to be approached by any whale-watchers. Perhaps it is because their hearts are as big as a car, and they have chroniclers like Bortolotti to tell us who their friends really are.
Greg Gatenby of Toronto is the author of Whale Sound and Whales: A Celebration.