Sea highs, sea lows: despite humanity's depredations, two biologists remain hopeful about the fate of the world's oceans

Natural History, May, 2002 by Jeff Fair

Listening to Whales: What the Orcas Have Taught Us, by Alexandra Morton (Ballantine Books, 2002; $26.95)

Eye of the Albatross: Visions of Hope and Survival, by Carl Safina (Henry Holt, 2002; $27.50)

As a naturalist, I believe that what we often need in order to enhance our understanding of the natural world is to step into it and apply our own senses. I was therefore skeptical about a book by a scientist who listens to cetaceans underwater through a microphone and about another book whose author follows an albatross's breeding cycle via satellite telemetry.

I needn't have worried. Listening to Whales, by Alexandra Morton, is a passionate memoir by a true field biologist. Morton won me over early on with her tale of escaping the confines of her San Diego laboratory for the waters off British Columbia. Subsisting on the fieldworker's diet of fresh air, peanut butter, and coffee, she searches for the free-ranging family pod from which one of her confined orca (killer whale) subjects at Sea World was taken years before. She finds the pod--as well as a permanent connection with the natural world.

All is not perfect in these wilder waters, however. Occasionally we hear a rifle report when the orcas come into view. And Morton finds the submarine environment polluted with noise: the deafening thrum of cruise-ship engines drives her from her headphones, as do the screams of submerged "acoustic harassment devices" employed by salmon farmers to keep seals away but devastating to the whale's ultrasensitive hearing.

Morton's text is generous with information about cetacean life in general and observations of killer-whale behavior in particular. Though she states that the interactions of mother orcas and their offspring are her deepest interest, Morton waxes most emphatic here about the species' intelligence. She offers empirical evidence of its language complexity, identifying a vocabulary of no less than sixty-two "codes"--distinct calls that carry easily across a hundred square miles of ocean.

She also offers anecdotal evidence of cetacean telepathy and acts of compassion toward humans. Once, lost in the fog and panicky in her inflatable boat, she finds herself surrounded by a familiar pod of orcas that usher her to safety. Alert to separating the "mythology" of whales from her scientific work, she nevertheless finds "profound evidence of something beyond our ability to scientifically quantify" Like the best biologists, she is unwilling to ignore what she has seen with her own eyes. Morton's sense of the orcas' intelligence leads her to risk her scientific reputation in advocacy: she sees these creatures as sentient beings subjected to continuing abuse in the sea and to the veritable torture of captivity. I'm sure Morton's willingness to speak out pleases her fellow orca biologists.

Carl Safina, founder of the National Audubon Society's Living Oceans Program and author of Song for Blue Ocean, donned the mantle of advocacy years ago. Now, in Eye of the Albatross, he surveys the Pacific by following a Laysan albatross he calls Amelia. "During their prodigious travels" writes Safina, "albatrosses cross paths with a spectacular array of creatures near the ocean surface, including other seabirds, fishes, seals, whales, sharks, sea turtles, and some extraordinary people."

His narrative begins in the Northwest Hawaiian Islands, "a series of dots and dabs in the wide sea" that extends a thousand miles west of what tourists usually think of as Hawaii. These remote islands are the breeding ground of 95 percent of Hawaii's millions of seabirds, including "some 600,000 breeding pairs of Laysan Albatross, and 60,000 Black-footed Albatross pairs--virtually their entire world populations." Once a satellite transmitter has been affixed to Amelia, Safina is able to follow the long vectors of her soaring junkets to gather food for her chick (one course of flight lasts twenty-nine days and covers 7,600 miles, touching the Aleutians). Because Amelia spends a large proportion of her time foraging far from her chick, Safina finds time to investigate the larger story: the plights, both historic and current, of Hawaiian monk seals, bluefin tuna, tiger sharks, sea turtles, and numerous species of seabirds, so many of them devastated by drift nets, egg gatherers, feather hunters, releases of rats and rabbits, toxins, and (most egregious) plastic litter in the sea.

Safina interweaves the natural history of marine life with vivid evocations of life in the field: lizards in the dining hall, the din and pungency of hundreds of thousands of seabirds, the sensation of donning brand-new, frozen underwear before setting foot on one of these protected islands (in an effort to keep alien grass seeds and other stowaways from being brought onto the islands in the wrinkles and fray of old clothing, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service requires that all visitors wear prefrozen brand-new, head-to-toe apparel). Safina powerfully portrays humanity's effect on ocean-dependent creatures. Perhaps his most moving scene occurs on Midway Island, a U.S. military base until 1993 and now a national wildlife refuge, where seabird nesting colonies have somehow survived despite feather hunters, rats ("erat-icated" as of 1997), and past efforts by the military to torch them alive with flamethrowers. Safina watches a mother albatross regurgitate clots of digested food, rich in oil, directly into her chick's gullet. Early in the feeding, however, food stops flowing, though the parent continues to retch pathetically. "Slowly, the tip ... of a green plastic toothbrush emerges in the bird's throat." Unable to dislodge the toothbrush, she walks away from her chick.