Last breath of a lost leviathan

IT WAS like a state funeral, perhaps a little gaudier with the mourners in T-shirts and sandals but nevertheless we had gathered in our hundreds and were paying our respects.

The deceased was a sperm whale, the biggest creature that most of us had ever seen and the biggest creature that most of us will ever see, and the gazes of curiosity were tinged with awe.

The sperm whale might not be quite the biggest species of whale and this particular one was a fair way short of being the biggest of its own species, but they are the biggest predators on the planet. There isn’t anything we know of that trumps a bull sperm whale; not great white sharks, not that real-life Kraken, the giant squid and not the second largest predator on earth, the killer whale, which is only half the sperm whale’s length.

So why did this king of the seas wash up in Redcar? Why was it that the last thing that the largest brain to have ever existed knew of the world was dry sand and wooden groynes and the sound of passing cars?

Actually this happens quite a lot; according to the UK Whale and Dolphin Stranding Scheme run by the Natural History Museum in London, several hundred cetaceans – the collective name for whales, dolphins and porpoises – wash up on Britain’s coasts each year.

Most of these are already dead and pose no mystery other than the outcome of the autopsy. But this whale was alive when it grounded on the beach. What’s more, many whales strand alive each year, sometimes in large numbers.

In May this year a pod of around 60 pilot whales started to strand in Loch Carnen in the Outer Hebrides and were coaxed back out to sea by trained volunteers. On that occasion, only one whale died and the rest eventually headed back to sea, but often attempts to rescue the whales are ultimately futile and they are herded back out to sea only to strand again. The previous October some 30 pilot whales had been prevented from stranding in Loch Carnen but a week later 33 pilot whales, thought to be the same pod, stranded and died in Ireland.

As wildlife mysteries go, this one is proving hard to crack and there are a number of theories, not necessarily mutually exclusive, as to why whales strand. As is well known, whales use their own form of sonar to find their way around in the sea and to find food. They also communicate over huge distances using low frequency sounds.

One theory is that the vast array of loud noises that humans are making underwater is disrupting the whales’ sonar or, in some cases, causing sheer panic. Royal Navy exercises off Cornwall were strongly implicated in the stranding of 26 common dolphins in Falmouth in 2008. However, whale strandings are nothing new, they have been recorded all the way back to Aristotle. As we probably had a negligible influence on the oceans back then, some strandings at least must be a natural phenomenon.

Whales also have the ability to navigate using the earth’s magnetic field. Another theory for why they strand is that the animals have made some sort of navigational error and are lost and trying to get back on track. The Redcar sperm whale was almost certainly lost; they are very rarely seen around Britain’s shores and when they are, it is usually in North-west Scotland from July to December.

This was an animal of deep water that could dive down a mile to hunt giant squid; the shallow North Sea must have seemed like a swimming pool and in the 50ft of water over parts of the Dogger Bank a whale like this could just about touch the bottom. It makes sense then that an animal that was in the wrong part of the world and in a type of sea environment that it wouldn’t be used to might have trouble interpreting some of its sensory input. Nevertheless, I can’t help wondering if such a magnetic sense would be strong enough to over-ride the information that it would receive from all its other senses, which would have been informing it that continuing in the direction it was going meant that it would no longer be in the sea.

The simplest explanation to investigate is that stranded whales were suffering from some form of disease or parasite infestation. An investigation by Japanese scientists concluded that parasites affecting the nerves linked to the ears were the likely explanation in the case of a pod of eight stranded pilot whales.

However, you would think that within a group of animals, even where disease was rife, each of the animals would be affected to differing degrees and only certain ones would strand, so it is the mass strandings, where whole pods are beached together, that are the most puzzling.

The explanation in these cases may be down to the intense social bonds between the animals. If one animal, particularly a group leader, is in distress, then the rest may follow it and refuse to leave it, even if they end up in the same predicament.

In cases of disease, it seems likely that the whales don’t mean to keep going until they actually strand. It is the ultimate fate of all whales to drown (well technically to asphyxiate as whales have conscious control over their breathing) and weak or sick whales may just be looking for shallow water to enable them to keep their blowholes above water but then fall victim to the tides. Even so, that doesn’t seem to me to explain why it is only a small percentage of those in such difficulties that seem to take this course of action; whales don’t normally ground themselves to recuperate or die.

It is likely that all of these reasons are part of the answer and that there isn’t just the one reason why an animal that was last a land creature some 50 million years ago decides to end its days back there. In the end we are just left to wonder at the otherness of these creatures from a world that is almost as alien to us as space.

At Redcar, I’d only intended to have a quick look, to see something I’d likely never see again and to get a feel for just how big a whale really was, but in the end we stayed for hours and as the sun started to fall the hundreds had become thousands.

The King was dead!