“What is it Like to Be a Whale?” in Cabin Fever: The Best New Canadian Nonfiction

Cabin Fever: The Best New Canadian Nonfiction, edited by Moira Farr and Ian Pearson, Thomas Allen Publishers, 2009.

Finally, one answer to a question that is top of everyone’s mind: what is it like to be a 10-ton echolocating sperm whale with stumpy flippers but excellent aqua-dynamics?

Wrote this piece at the Banff Center in the Rockies. Its real subject is animal consciousness – that is to say, the felt texture of animal experience, as opposed to animal “cognition” or animal “problem solving” or any of the other boring mechanical euphemisms that pass as inquiries into animal consciousness these days. There is a revolution in perspective happening in the world of animals.

The whales are coming.

Hide the krill!

Here are a couple short excepts:

Imagine you are a whale.

Start by picturing the ocean. Picture yourself slipping into the water, naked. Hold your breath. Sink down. Imagine your body expanding with a comforting layer of fat. Imagine it lengthening. Feel each vertebrae click as your spine draws up and back, a little shiver as you shimmy out of your pelvic girdle, legs and hips set adrift. In their place you sprout a triangular fluke, which you force down now in a long, muscular undulation that drives you forward through the water. Your neck thickens, the back of your skull rolls forward and your face moves out to meet the sea. You fill your lungs with air and dive, plunging towards the sea floor. Your long smile extends back almost to your arms, which have retracted into your barrel chest, leaving four long fingers stiffened with webbing which you use to direct the massive energy of your surging body. They direct you down, into the dark, the light from the surface fading quickly. But new lights gutter in your head; soon the hunt will start, and the lights will turn to sound, and the sound will light the dark, and these are some of the things you feel, some of the things you know. The waters close around you.

≈≈

There is a debate in the world of comparative neuroanatomy about the relationship between brain size and intelligence. On the one hand, a lot of scientists think that a big brain is a big brain: more computational power = more smarts. This puts sperm whales, killer whales, and elephants at the top of the brain chain, with humans down somewhere below dolphins. Others point to the human “world-domination-we-know-quantum-mechanics” thing, and argue relative brain size is a better indicator, which puts humans near the top, though not so high as the shrew, who drags around a proportionally massive 2-gram brain, presumably weighted down with frustrated will-to-power scenarios (“If only we had more time!”).

From “What is it Like to be a Whale?” in Cabin Fever: The Best New Canadian Nonfiction.