A special guest visited Taichung harbor recently--a 5-meter, 1000-kilo false killer whale. (A true whale, the false killer whale closely resembles the killer whale.) After six days of aimlessly swimming around in the harbor, the whale finally died on a beach 10 miles north. Why it came in from the sea and why it died remain mysteries.
Whales, like other mammals, are warm-blooded and viviparous and nourish their young with milk. Ages of life in the sea have caused them to evolve to the point where they can no longer leave the water, although they must periodically come up to breathe, this through blowholes on the tops of their heads. To make the most of their brief time on the surface, they begin expelling air on the way up, which creates their distinctive waterspout. Spouts for large whales may reach dozens of yards high, although that of the false killer whale, a rather small species, is just above a yard. Since whales must regularly come up to breathe, they take brief naps instead of sleeping deeply.
Whales are highly intelligent and especially sensitive to sound. Like bats, which use sound waves to "see" in the dark, whales have a kind of natural "sonar" system that enables them to determine the position, distance, and nature of objects ahead.
Two experiments with porpoises by Dr. Winthrop N. Kellogg of Florida State University have demonstrated some of the capabilities of the whales' sonar system. On a pitch-black, starless night, Dr. Kellogg placed a large and a small fish in a pond to test the porpoise's ability to distinguish sizes by sonar. The porpoise made a few mistakes at first. But in the last 140 trials, it correctly selected the smaller fish, which it was known to prefer.
In the second experiment, tape recordings of the porpoises' own sounds were broadcast to them as they swam an obstacle course in a dark pool. "Jamming" did not appear to affect their sonar ability at all.
The false killer whale that wandered into Taichung harbor had a scar on its snout, leading experts to believe that its sonar system may have been damaged and ceased functioning.
Just as people enjoy music and are annoyed by noise, whales have their likes and dislikes in sounds. "Whales like the sound of propellers and follow in ships' wakes so often that fishermen long ago stopped thinking it anything unusual," cetologist Yang Hung-chia notes. Besides propellers, they also like the sounds of mating calls and fish feeding.
Sounds are thus often used to send lost whales back out to sea. When a humpback whale swam several miles up the Sacramento River past San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge last year, U.S. experts at first employed a common ruse of Japanese whalers--beating metal tubes underwater to create a sound whales detest--to drive the whale back to sea. The method seemed to work at first, but soon afterwards the whale turned around again. After several failures, man and whale reached a stalemate, and the experts were stymied.
Then, a few weeks later, another group of scientists brought in a tape recording of feeding whales, which they broadcast through the water from a boat in front. Escorted by several other boats behind, the whale was eventually led in this way out Golden Gate Bridge and back into the sea.
According to a hypothesis advanced in 1978 by biologist F. G. Wood, whales may still retain some of the instincts of their amphibian ancestors. When they receive a severe shock or wound in the water, they may react by trying to keep their blowholes out of the water to avoid drowning or even by "blindly" trying to come ashore.
The largest case on record of whales "committing suicide" by swimming ashore also involved false killer whales. In 1946, some 800 of them swam up onto beaches in Argentina and died. There is still no satisfactory answer why.
Why did the false killer whale that visited Taichung harbor strand itself on the beach? Was it looking for an auspicious place to die? These riddles, too, must be left to the experts to solve.
We can say only that the unprecedented care and attention given to the whale by the Chinese people has further aroused their enthusiasm and concern for environmental protection, while the whale's "remains" have been preserved as a specimen for observation.
With these posthumous honors as a lasting legacy, the false killer whale should be smiling in the afterlife.
[Picture Caption]
The whale's sonar system.
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