“Do you know what whale breath smells like?”
Our captain doesn’t wait for a reply.
“Rotten broccoli!” he bellows as a humpback spouts a few yards from our boat.
Awed by its size and unexpected stench, I almost forget that these majestic giants are, like us, air-breathing, warm-blooded, baby-nursing mammals. But unlike us, some whales have bodies as long as two school buses, tongues that weigh as much as an elephant and hearts the size of a small car, with an aorta (main artery) wide enough for a human to slip through.
The largest creatures on the planet, whales are classified, along with dolphins and porpoises, as cetaceans, from an ancient Greek word for sea monster. However, they descended from a terrestrial wolf-sized mammal that began adapting to an aquatic existence some fifty million years ago.
Over eons of time, forelimbs transformed into flippers. Hind limbs dwindled into vestigial traces. Whales acquired a layer of blubber as insulation and powerful, fluke-tipped tails to propel them through the sea.
Two different systems for the daunting task of feeding a voracious appetite evolved. Toothed whales, such as orcas and belugas, use conical teeth to snatch and devour their prey. Bigger and bulkier, baleen whales, such as blues, grays and humpbacks, gulp immense amounts of water into their cavernous mouths. Rows of baleen on their upper jaws filter krill, anchovies and other small organisms for ingestion.
With no gills to extract oxygen from water, whales must surface to breathe, inhaling and exhaling through blowholes atop their heads. Unlike humans, with an average lung capacity of about a gallon, a blue whale’s lungs can store about 350 gallons of air. Oxygen also binds to the proteins myoglobin in their muscles and hemoglobin in their blood, allowing whales to remain underwater for prolonged dives.
Adapting to the dim light at great depths, whales’ luminous eyes took on a spherical shape, with a reflective layer just behind the retina that enhances their underwater vision. Whales “hear” the sounds of the sea through their lower jaws as well as specialized bones in their ears. Employing a technique called “echolocation,” toothed whales emit clicking sounds and listen for their echoes as they hunt and navigate. Baleen whales rely on low-frequency sounds, sometimes called infrasonic calls, that can travel thousands of miles through water. All face a growing threat from underwater noise created by humans, which can impede their ability to navigate, find prey and communicate.
Like us, whales sing—in different ways and for different reasons. Male humpbacks serenade potential mates with intricate symphonies, repeating themes and adding variations. Beluga whales, dubbed the “canaries of the sea,” whistle, click and chirp in what sound like playful conversations.
Whale acrobatics include breaching (leaping clear or almost clear of the water), fluking (raising tail flukes above the sea surface when diving) and spy-hopping (lifting the head straight up out of the water, perhaps to look around).Onlookers at sea or on shore, myself included, often react to such displays with whoops and applause. Our distant mammal cousins—evolutionary marvels and oceanic Olympians—deserve the ovations.
“If God decided to become an animal,” a lifelong mariner once told me, “He’d be a whale.” I wouldn’t dare quibble with the choice.
Sonoma Coast Advisory: From January to May, the Whale Watch volunteers of the Stewards of the Coast and Redwoods offer information and interpretation of Pacific gray whale migrations on Saturdays and Sundays at Bodega Head from 10:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m.
