Ingham’s W RLD
HOW’S this for a lifestyle? (Blokes only, I’m afraid.) You spend six months of the year feasting with your mates in colder climes and the next six months in the tropics listening to new music and picking out the hits. Sadly none of you can apply. This way of life is available only to humpback whales who, along the way, develop something previously regarded as peculiarly human: culture.
The humpbacks of the South Pacific spend the southern summer in the Antarctic before heading north to breed where the males sing away and have their own hit parade.
Scientists first heard one song among humpbacks off eastern Australia in 2002. By 2003 it was all the rage in American Samoa and the Cook Islands and by 2004 it had reached French Polynesia.
By then the Aussie hipsters had moved on to a new tune, much like teenagers devouring the hits, says a new book by a St Andrews University team. So fickle, these whales.
The book, which accompanies the Natural History Museum exhibition Whales: Beneath The Surface, says whales are also leviathans in the true sense of the word. The blue whale, for instance, is the largest animal ever to have lived, weighing 160 tonnes or the equivalent of 12 doubledecker buses. That’s more than twice the weight of the largest ever dinosaur Argentinosaurus, which was a puny 70 tonnes. And it’s about 25 times heavier than a bull African elephant.
Yet in the sea a whale’s girth is effortlessly supported as they float in their natural element.
We also know whales can be very long-lived thanks to some chance discoveries such as an elderly bowhead whale in Alaska, which was carrying a 130-year-old Yankee whaling harpoon.
Whales are of course mammals, which makes their deep diving feats all the more remarkable. One sperm whale managed a two-hour dive to a depth of nearly two miles where it endured pressure of more than 200 times of that on the surface.
For all their hardiness they are far less numerous than they used to be largely due to centuries of hunting. In the 19th century there were about 250,000 blue whales but the Captain Ahabs of the time cut that to 2,500 by the late-1890s. Though legal protection since 1972 has helped, there are only about 20,000 alive today. It’s just another reason why the global whaling ban should stay and the countries that flout it – Japan, Norway, Iceland – should hang up their harpoons. Whales: Their Past, Present And Future (NHM, £14.99). ENVIRONMENT Secretary Michael Gove cloaked himself in green this week. He announced plans to slash air pollution by axing petrol and diesel cars by 2040. How can a Government that will be lucky to survive two years tell us what it will do in 23 years’ time? BABY birds kept me entertained in the South-west last week. Just below Golden Cap in Dorset I watched swallows feeding new fledglings chattering in a tree. And at a Devon nature reserve I saw a barn owl ferrying voles hanging limply in its talons to its greedy brood. It’s a wonderful time of year – unless you’re a bug or a vole. GREEN TIP: Put off trimming hedges till the end of August when most birds will have finished breeding. OUR most maligned garden animal may be a life saver. A team including Nottingham University scientists has developed a sticky substance that heals wounds after surgery. Their inspiration? Slug slime. They copied its properties and created a “tough adhesive” which seals wounds and is not toxic to humans, reports Science… …BUT if you still want to keep slugs off your prize petunias, you could do worse than using organic slug pellets. Early results from a Royal Horticultural Society study show that conventional pellets are “only slightly ahead” of their organic equivalents and the organic versions do better on hostas.