Ocean Souls

Over millennia and across cultures, whales and dolphins are seen as guardians and guides to humans at sea. We know them to be intelligent, altruistic, and emotionally aware of each other and us. Before even our oldest ancestor, the first of the great apes, was born, cetaceans were the most intellectually and sensitively complex creatures the planet had ever seen.

Cetaceans, for us, are the spirit and voice of the ocean. They are a lot like humans. There is so much we don’t know yet, and we are only scraping the surface of their intelligence. They are the ocean souls, guides, and protectors, here to lead us towards a more connected future.

What if their intelligence and sense of family is not only linked to our origins but also to our future? What if whales, dolphins, humans, and all life on earth are meant to depend on each other, to coexist and learn from one another, to see and support each other as one family? Maybe our very survival depends on extending our sense of family across species and around the world.

Whales and dolphins build family bonds through play, language, touch, sharing food, teaching, and raising their young, nursing their sick, and caring for one another just as we do. We see compassion and awareness reflected so clearly in our underwater relatives. It’s hard not to see something profoundly familiar in the bond between a whale mother and her calf. Even in silence, it’s easy to recognize the joy from a loved one’s touch. There is a special tenderness in a whale’s embrace, an unlimited attention. The feeling exists beyond any language. As humans, we call it love.

Whales and dolphins demonstrate care for one another through touch, sound, and passionate play. Each species has its own unique language of affection. Courting humpback pairs rest on the ocean floor in complete stillness, nose to nose. Dolphin species, including orcas, show affection in an energetic and enthusiastic way. They will even make friendly physical contact with other species.

At times, dolphins seek out mates based on which males are the most popular among their social groups, showing that affection and friendliness are highly valued qualities in pods that are bonded by social care and love, not just genetic relationships. A mother can carry its calf’s small carcass over a thousand miles, as if she wouldn’t accept the loss of her child. What I find astonishing is that anybody ever questions whether other creatures feel pain in the same way that we do.

There’s also the example of J35, a southern resident killer whale in the Pacific Northwest. She gave birth to one of her calves, and the calf lived for 30 minutes. Sadly, the calf died. For 17 days after that, she carried around her calf on her nose, in her teeth, on her strom. It was called the tour of grief. It’s really hard to be a scientist and not see that as an emotion, not see it as mourning. I think that’s where scientists sometimes need to humanize that in the point that they do have emotions.

When these close family bonds are broken by death or capture, they call out in panic, searching for the relatives that make them feel safe. Even after decades in captive confinement, orcas and dolphins continue to call out to the families they’ve once lost. Whales and dolphins have suffered greatly at the hands of humans, and yet, when wild whales are approached with calm and respect, they view us with patience, curiosity, and compassion.

Whales carry the wisdom of memory. Many cetaceans living today have suffered anger, sadness, and the loss of a relative to hunting or entanglement. Yet they seem to view us with great forgiveness, beyond our human capacity to understand. Dolphins clearly express their joy while doing leaps and spins with visible exuberance. The more you see them and dive with them, hundreds of hours being in the water with dolphins, every time is different.

Some days are really surprising when they are playing football with a pufferfish. They are together, and it’s actually kind of teamwork when they balance the poor pufferfish in this way. We have such a strong emotional interest in these magnificent animals because their need for emotional connection so closely mirrors our own. When we witness their grief and fear, their joy and affection, we have a chance to remember our own ocean souls.

The dolphins and whales and other marine animals are communicating to one another. But can we tune in? Can we figure out what it means and maybe get a conversation going? It’s a wonderful dream. I hope it comes true. Communication is a matter of survival. It is how we ask for our needs to be met when we cannot meet them ourselves. As highly intelligent species, many cetaceans live and love in family groups, depending on each other for protection, food, and comfort even more than we do. It’s communication that makes social survival possible. Without it, each of us, human and animal, would be completely isolated within our own experience.

Language allows us to bond, build, and thrive together. The greatest skill that cetaceans have in terms of how they communicate with each other is not just the fact that they can communicate across huge distances, some species, but also the way they transmit information about the world around them, the three-dimensional world around them. Effectively, what we are seeing, what we are learning as the years go by, is that cetaceans have abilities which, to humans, are basically super sensory things that we could never replicate. Things that we are learning that these animals use to understand and exist in this very hostile, alien environment, things that have evolved over the course of about 50 million years or so.

Whales and dolphins rely on language and sound communication in an even bigger way. Hearing is their most critical sense and the basis of their daily survival. Cetacean sonic communication is more important than human sight. They cannot navigate without the listening and transmitting abilities of sound. A whale song might be what first comes to mind when thinking of their communications. However, dolphins are the most articulate and expressive. Dolphins have languages with more than 60,000 different words. That’s more than many human languages.

They combine distinctive combinations of clicks, whistles, and trills to communicate complex ideas to one another. The basic communication of survival begins at birth. Every species of whale and dolphin has its own unique assigned word. Immediately following the birth of a calf, mother dolphins repeatedly call out their own signature whistle. This allows time for the new baby to imprint on the unique voice and name of its own mother before hearing the names of the rest of the pod.

Two dolphins can even talk about a third animal who is not present by using the absent animal’s signature whistle, showing their ability to gossip or exchange information about each other. Toothed whales like dolphins, orcas, and sperm whales use sound to navigate, locate prey, and coordinate group hunting by echolocation. By sending out sonic pulses and reading the echoes that bounce back, they can create an image of what is around them, and each pod member receives the picture at the same time.

In quiet waters, they can navigate every element of their world without using sight, entirely dependent on sound. Humpback songs are emotive vocalizations made only by males at mating grounds, and they play a key role in attracting females. These songs evolve and change every year. Humpback calls, on the other hand, are the basis of their communication and remain remarkably static and consistent even over generations.

Now, can you imagine losing your ties to your loved ones? Your ability to communicate and connect, being forced into an ever-louder and lonelier existence as humans intrude into their habitats? The conditions underwater are hugely altered by the global daily traffic of over 50,000 shipping vessels, sonic explorations, and other human technologies, and whales and dolphins are struggling to keep up.

For these animals, sound is how they can see the environment. So if there’s any problem with sound production, emission, or reception, it’s like being blind. The stress, isolation, and psychological damage of noisy oceans mean no feeding, no meeting, no mating, no offspring, and no future. When survival is the only goal, life’s needs become very focused. We must be fed, protected, and sheltered, but if we receive more deliberate care and teaching from those that love us, if we are taught and nurtured by their careful attention, then it becomes possible for us not just to survive alone, but to thrive together as a family.

An orca family, or its pod, is its everything. Each of these groups has a unique social structure, often centered around several matriarchs, and its own style of communication that has been passed down from generation to generation, giving each pod its own culture. Killer whale societies are matriarchal, so grandma rules the roost. Even though the male is far bigger in size, it’s actually the female that’s the dominant one. The killer whale matrilineal society is grandmas, mothers, sisters, daughters, and they all live together. They care for each other. They feed together, they swim together. Family life for them is critical.

This is similar to what we do in the human world, and we can see it reflected in these animals and these different populations around the world, which makes us feel so much more connected to them. In a rare and tender display of care, there is even evidence of elder females acting as midwives, attending to the birth of calves. These elders support calves during their first breaths, gently bringing them to the water’s surface while the mother rests and recovers.

This evidence of care, that mother and baby are guided and supported during birth, changes the way that orca enter the world. Females also shape the family dynamic of sperm whales, living in related pods of grandmothers, aunts, mothers, and daughters who cooperate for life in raising the pod’s young together. While female sperm whales cooperate for life, males lead a more solitary existence, maturing slowly, spending around a decade within the care of the pod. They then migrate alone as they grow to maturity before forming short-term bachelor groups, moving back into the range of females when it’s time to battle for the right to mate.

Like elephants, lions, and great apes, large male whales engage in shows of strength and skill to drive off weaker competitors away from females. Groups of male dolphins form relationships early in life that continue for decades, and each friendship appears to serve a different purpose. Some are for hunting, some are for protection, and some are purely for playing and socializing. The ones that have the strongest social bonds to other males, the ones often seen together, those males also obtain the most females.

Cetacean family ties exceed the pure biological imperative. If a calf becomes an orphan, there is always someone in the pod to take on the guardian role. Even more incredible is their capacity for empathy, sometimes resulting in a truly special phenomenon, an interspecies adoption. In French Polynesia, we saw these dolphins that had adopted a melon-headed whale. We believe it was an orphan that got accepted by the group, and it behaves like a dolphin. It’s a unique behavior you don’t see very often.

This desire to nurture and nourish another being through adoptive care is altruistic, deliberate, and sustained through emotional connection. These conscious relationship bonds, the foundation of cetacean families, mirror how humans live and love each other. The minds of cetaceans have evolved much like ours. We are all dependent on caring for each other. It keeps us alive.

It is surprising that the best test we have for cognitive self-awareness, the neurological soul, involves a mirror. They can recognize themselves, they can recognize other individuals. It’s about visual recognition, but it’s also about using language to identify each other. It’s a highly complicated way, a highly effective way of communicating. Those levels of complexity suggest high levels of intelligence. The biggest brain on the planet is not a human brain. It’s a sperm whale.

What do they know? What can they do with all that gray matter that is equivalent to ours? They live in an environment where they use capabilities that we can only dream about, using sound to echolocate. We can’t do that, not with what we have built into our brains.

Whales and dolphins possess deep intelligence. Their enormous brains have complex capacities to remember, teach, communicate, and coordinate over vast distances. This enables their survival in every ocean on earth, from coral reefs to the polar ice caps. The connection between intelligence and social cooperation might begin with cetaceans’ capacity for emotional empathy, as evidenced by a high concentration of spindle cell neurons in their brains. In humans, these neurons are responsible for complex skills like language acquisition, memory, social intelligence, and compassion.

Orcas are also incredibly inventive hunters, constantly adapting to quickly changing circumstances. While stealing fishermen’s catches, they are able to outthink and outmaneuver every method used to try and curtail their feeding. People often wonder about cetacean intelligence. If they’re so smart, why haven’t they built what we’ve built? The answer is pretty simple. Cetaceans don’t have hands that would allow them to modify their environment.

They can’t write things down, they don’t have a library, but they’ve got a library in their heads—heads of experiences that get transmitted from generation to generation. Over time, the pod and the broader species develop tools, techniques, and social structures that evolve over time. Each generation builds on the wisdom of their ancestors, and since cetaceans lack the physical dexterity to modify their external environment, their intelligence is focused inward on cooperation, family bonds, and unique strategic friendships.

Orcas can live up to 80 years or more, and they have strong family bonds that will remain with them for their entire lives. They actually go through menopause, which is rare in the animal kingdom. It gives the females an opportunity to pass on the knowledge and experience they’ve acquired over the years and pass that on directly through cultural learning to these younger animals. That’s a remarkable thing, to take a backseat, not compete with your offspring, but to take part in learning and nurturing and passing on culture.

Bottlenose dolphins also bond over special cultural learning, like having a shower after waking up every morning. It’s like an on-the-water spa to clean themselves. We are analyzing the substances of this particular substrate, and it looks like they are antibacterial and even antifungal. They probably are aware of self-medication as well, as it could be a very nice prevention for skin disease. Obviously, they use their intelligence for problem-solving.

Many behaviors in dolphins remind us of our human capacity to care and nurture. Mothers show special strategies for watching over their calves even while they sleep. Dolphins sleep only with one brain side at a time; one side is awake, and the other is sleeping, and the opposite eye of the sleeping brain side is closed. The eye which is open looks towards the calf, so they are having a connection even during sleep.

This echoes the notion of sleeping with one eye open that is so familiar to human parents watching over a new baby. Planet Earth is our place in the universe, our one and only home, but humans are not alone here, and we are not alone in our experiences of love and family. The earth is a vast interspecies community with a capacity for intelligent interaction.

Like us, whales and dolphins in every ocean of the world live long lives rooted in relationships and learning alongside their family and friends. Normally, particularly with primates and humans, if you do something for someone, oftentimes there’s a reason—you expect some kind of payback in the future. But with cetaceans, what is the case? We know there are many documented cases of humpbacks intervening and protecting other species, non-cetacean species, like seals and sea lions, from attacks by sharks and sometimes from attacks by killer whales.

Our water-bound cousins have always shown us incredible levels of interspecies kindness. Some fishermen around the world wouldn’t fish without the help of their dolphin relatives. The ties between cetaceans and humans are physical, spiritual, and emotional. The ocean is a part of us.

Historically, around the world, whales were hunted in small numbers by ancient tribes for food, but advances in technology led to faster engines and larger boats. Whaling became a global commercial enterprise that pushed many species to near extinction. Some will never recover. Humans turned their fat into oil to provide heat and light for cities around the world, collected their ambergris for perfume, sold their meat, and carved their bones.

In the 20th century alone, nearly 3 million whales were killed by whalers. Today, commercial hunting continues in a handful of countries by choice, not necessity. Those who continue hunting cetaceans have not recognized that the animals they are killing are the most sensitive of all, the most intelligent of all, the most like us.

We’re still killing them, not so much deliberately today, but inadvertently through all the stuff we put in the ocean, the nets that entangle them, the noise that we put into the ocean that disrupts their hearing, disrupts their means to communicate. We can examine, we can excavate, and we can check levels of stress that the animal’s been exposed to because of the hormones present in the tissue of an earplug from the ear canal of a large baleen whale.

We can see the peak of commercial whaling and how that affected populations of whales. We can also see the period when the moratorium, the ban on commercial whaling, was brought into effect and the associated decrease in stress levels. But actually, since the 1970s and into the 1980s through to the present day, we’re seeing an increase again in the levels of stress hormones being produced by large whales.

Science can now explore more than just their biology. We are gaining a deeper understanding of the critical role that they play in the health of our oceans and our environment. Whales really are our allies in our battle to mitigate climate change. Whales also defecate at the surface, and this poo is rich in nutrients, particularly iron and nitrogen, which are essential for phytoplankton growth.

And it’s this phytoplankton, acting like trees do on land, that plays a key role in removing carbon from the air while forming the basis of the marine food chain that sustains all ocean life. Over its lifetime, a whale stimulates the growth of a rainforest of phytoplankton in the ocean, capturing as much carbon dioxide as thousands of trees. Even at its death, the whale can lock carbon at the bottom of the ocean for hundreds of years.

Whales and dolphins have enormous environmental and personal value to humans and the planet, as well as playing a critical role in our global economy. Worldwide, whale-related ecotourism generates over 2.5 billion US dollars and supports nearly 20,000 jobs. But more importantly, these encounters have the power to change people’s lives.

The first time I got eye-to-eye with an orca, it really changed my life. And what is remarkable is that this changes in the way of a better life, like if the orca had this power to repair your injuries. Encounters between humans and cetaceans enable transformation and healing. When wild whales and dolphins demonstrate compassionate curiosity, our hearts and souls are touched.

It is believed that people exposed to whale and dolphin sounds underwater, either on animal therapy sessions with wild animals or simply by an encounter, experience changes to the nervous system and immune function that facilitate healing. We have scientific proof of how important cetaceans are for the planet and for humankind. We now understand that we owe them our respect, admiration, and protection.

In so many ways, cetaceans are just like us. They have a rich family life, complex friendships, and form groups for life. They have individual names and speak in unique dialects. They mourn, grieve, and suffer as deeply as we do. And what’s so amazing is that their capacity for joy, empathy, and compassion exceeds even our own.

There is an endless amount we can learn from them. All we need to do is open our minds to the fact that we share this planet with a species that is, in many ways, more evolved than us.