Somewhere out there is the loneliest whale in the world
Somewhere in the North Pacific Ocean there is a whale.
It may be a fin whale, or perhaps a blue whale, the largest whale of them all. It may even be a hybrid — an unusual but not unheard-of scenario.
Nobody is certain because nobody has claimed to have seen it. But several people have heard it. And many more have heard of it. And what this latter group has heard about it has turned the whale into an unwitting celebrity, a cultural icon and a cipher for the feelings of many unconnected people around the globe. It is, allegedly, the Loneliest Whale in the World.
While we may think of the underwater world as relatively tranquil, it is dominated by sound. Most famous of all those sounds are the melodic “songs” of humpback whales.
The first time I heard a blue whale vocalization was when scientist Roger Payne played a recording at a conference in Monterey, Calif., in the late 1980s. Normally, these rumblings are at a frequency that is too deep for the human ear or, at best, at the very fringes of a person’s hearing, but Payne had sped up his recording so that it was easily audible. The vocalizations reverberated through the conference room, rattling the windows and jarring the bones with their low, relentless thunder.
The fact that we were able to listen to such sounds was due in large part to the Pentagon, which had established a network of low-frequency hydrophones (underwater microphones) throughout the world’s oceans in the 1950s. Their target was Soviet submarines, but as an unexpected bonus they were able to eavesdrop on some whales, which operated on a similar frequency to communist submariners. As the Cold War began to thaw, the military opened up access to its listening buoys to scientific institutions.
Among those who made the most of the opportunity was William Watkins of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts. One of the pioneers in the field of marine mammal bioacoustics, he discovered a unique and unexpected signal in the North Pacific in 1989. The signal was of a whale travelling in much the same way and area as blue and fin whales in the region, but this one was vocalizing on an entirely different frequency: 52 hertz (Hz). Still profoundly deep by human standards but far higher than the 15-to-25-Hz range of most blues and fins.
Watkins and his team recorded the whale again in 1990 and 1991, and every year over a 12-year span, each time picking it up sometime in August or September and following it until it swam out of range sometime in January or early February.
Watkins’s team’s findings were published in the journal Deep Sea Research in 2004, shortly after Watkins died. To the team’s great surprise, the study was picked up in the general media, and the repeated theme was: If the whale was communicating at a different frequency than others of its kind, then could others even hear it? Was this whale swimming across the North Pacific, calling into a void and hearing nothing back in return? Was it ... lonely?
“CNN was on my case, the BBC, BBC Scotland,” said Mary Ann Daher of Woods Hole, when I first contacted her a few years ago. She became the corresponding author after Watkins’ death. “And they were hounding me.”
Eight years after the paper’s publication, and six years after she left that specific field of work within Woods Hole, Daher said of the whale that, “Obviously, he’s able to eat and live and cruise around. Is he successful reproductively? I haven’t the vaguest idea. Nobody can answer those questions. Is he lonely? I hate to attach human emotions like that. Do whales get lonely? I don’t know. I don’t even want to touch that topic.”
There was a pattern to those who reached out to her, as if she could somehow help. “It’s amazing. I get all sorts of emails, some of them very touching, genuinely.
It just breaks your heart to read some of them — asking why I can’t go out there and help this animal. We as humans, we are very soft-hearted, caring creatures. It’s mostly females who write to me — not always; I also get males — but there are a lot of females who identify, feeling they’re not part of a pack.”
In a story for the Atavist Magazine published in 2014, author Leslie Jamison chronicles a sampling of those who have been moved by the 52 Hz whale: “A ... singer in Michigan wrote a kids’ song about the whale’s plight; an artist in upstate New York made a sculpture out of old plastic bottles and called it 52 Hertz.” A 19-year-old English major at the University of Toronto thought 52 Blue was “the epitome of every person who’s ever felt too weird to love.” A 26-year-old photo editor in Poland “decided to get the outline of 52 Blue tattooed across his back after a bad breakup, the end of a six-year relationship.”
There are plays and books about the whale and music videos that use it as inspiration. The whale makes a guest appearance in an episode of an animated children’s show about animals that explore the ocean under the command of an anthropomorphized polar bear with a British accent. The whale’s story has been used to sell cellphones in Ireland.
“It’s not physically the whale,” says documentary maker Joshua Zeman. “The whale itself — honestly, if you talk to scientists, they will tell you that it’s not lonely. Other whales can probably hear it. Other whales can probably understand it. But my next question is: Why do we prescribe that emotion, and why does that emotion affect us as human beings?”
Zeman was writing a screenplay at an artists’ retreat in 2012 when he read about the whale in the galleys of a book by animal psychologist Vint Virga. While he was there, he discussed the story with some of his fellow residents; about a week after he returned home, one of them called to let him know that, “Hey, I wrote a short one-act play about that whale,” and about one week after that, a sculptor emailed to say that she had created a piece about it. Zeman, who most recently created the documentary series “The Killing Season” on A&E, found himself poring online through the multitudinous emails, letters, poems, songs and other paeans to the whale. As he did so, he saw a story in the creators and the reasons for their inspiration.
In an age where, as Zeman argues, “we eschew real interpersonal face-to-face relationships in favour of 140-character anecdotal relationships,” it is not the whale that is the lonely one. “Humans are lonely. I think that people are transferring their own loneliness onto this creature.”
For close to four years now, Zeman has been working on a documentary about the whale and the surrounding phenomenon, which he hopes to release, perhaps at a movie festival, later this year. But while its focus is on the human response to the 52 Hz whale, it does not ignore the whale itself. Which is why, in October 2015, Zeman and a team of scientists set out in search of it.
“When we first approached scientists with the idea of trying to find this whale, everyone scratched their heads and said, ‘Hmm, I wonder if we can do that.’ And so we used these sonar buoys that had been repurposed from the U.S. navy to try and zone in on the signal from this whale, and at the same time had these visual surveyors who were going out on rigid hulled inflatables to try and locate it.
“It’s a crazy idea to go out and try to find one whale in the entire ocean,” he explained over the phone from his New York office. “It’s kinda like Moby Dick in a number of ways. And I came to realize that everyone in the film has their own Ahabian quest. Whether it’s the bioacoustician who wants to find something, whether it’s the whale tagger who wants to find something, whether it’s the person at home who hopes we find it, whether it’s the other person at home who hopes we don’t find it.”
Zeman isn’t saying whether they succeeded in their quest — he didn’t want to give away his film’s ending. But he insists that finding the Holy Grail was incidental to undertaking the quest.
“I will tell you: When we pitched the story, some places were like, ‘Oh yeah, that’s great; I love the story. But can you produce the whale?’ They would finance it if we knew we were going to find the whale. But what happens when we find the whale? What are we going to do? Are we going to hug it? The power is in the metaphor. The power is in the motif. The power is in all these people coming together over an idea.”
As the lonely-whale myth spread, many of those who studied whales for a living gnashed their teeth. Christopher Clark of Cornell University, one of the world’s foremost authorities on whale vocalization who recorded the 52 Hz whale in 1999, told the BBC in 2015 that, “The animal’s singing with a lot of the same features of a typical blue whale song. Blue whales, fin whales and humpback whales: All these whales can hear this guy; they’re not deaf. He’s just odd.” Adding to critics’ ammunition was that the whale was clearly proving pretty successful at being a whale: It had been first recorded in 1989, after all, and it was still going strong in 2015. The voices of whales, like those of humans, deepen as the animals age and grow, and the Loneliest Whale was no exception; initially recorded at 52 Hz, it now vocalizes closer to 46 Hz.
“Sometimes, you need a story that people can grasp on to,” says actor Adrian Grenier. “And that’s what Lonely Whale has done for me: allow me to tell stories that people can relate to and understand. Not just the loneliness connection but also the disconnect story. The fact that the whale has a disconnect from his species: Well, I think we do, too. Are we making the true spiritual, empathic connections with one another that will enable us to reach the shared goals for ourselves? I really think the unified goal is a safe home and planet for us to live on.”
Grenier — best known for starring as Vincent Chase in “Entourage,” the HBO series that was a paean to celebrity culture — shares the story of the first time he saw a whale.
“I was on jet skis, shooting a scene for ‘Entourage’ in Hawaii,” he recalls. “We’re shooting a scene where I have two girls on the back of my Jet Ski. Jerry [Ferrara, who played Turtle, Chase’s friend and driver] is on another Jet Ski with another girl, and we’re having the best life ever. And the guy who is guiding us says, ‘Turn off your engines.’ So we turned them off, and we were just floating there, and this family of whales swam right beneath us. It was incredible.
“I couldn’t help but clock the irony: Here I am on a show that’s promoting conspicuous consumption, indulgence, escapism, consumerism, and here we are, floating on the surface above these creatures that have so much to tell us. I’ve always been struggling to reconcile what I did to make consumption so sexy, and, ironically, that’s what’s given me the power to do what I do.”
What he is doing is undergoing something of a career transformation, from leading man to passionate advocate for ocean conservation, as the face of the Lonely Whale Foundation, which he founded shortly after agreeing to coproduce Zeman’s documentary. The foundation describes itself as “dedicated to bringing people closer to the world’s oceans through education and awareness, inspiring empathy and action for ocean health and the well-being of marine wildlife.”
The foundation explicitly seeks out solution-oriented ocean conservation projects to support.
While the story of the Loneliest Whale helped inspire its namesake foundation, the latter now exists without need of the former. At the same time, the story remains compelling, even as Grenier is aware of the importance of not allowing it to get ahead of the science.
“I’ve had this conversation with several scientists, especially those we’re trying to work with,” he says. “Scientists are a special breed; they’re scientists because they have a certain discipline to uphold a standard, and they are held to a different standard, and rightfully so. You don’t want a bunch of storytellers making stuff up and calling it science . ... But I think in a lot of ways, these scientists are little lonely whales themselves. Their lifestyle is often isolated, they’re unable to connect with others, they speak another language. I think in a lot of ways what we’re trying to do is become a translator. We’re trying to translate the wisdom of the whale and the knowledge of the scientists in a way that’s understandable to humans. The reality is, that’s how we understand things: with simple stories that are relatable.”