Short Wave - Whales' Vital Role In Our Oceans

Episode Date: August 3, 2021

Whales are more than just beautiful creatures — they play a vital role in the ocean's ecosystem. Today, Asha de Vos, marine biologist and pioneer of long-term blue whale research within the Northern Indian Ocean, explains why protecting whales is crucial for protecting the entire sea in this excerpt of TED Radio Hour.Listen to the full episode, An SOS From The Ocean, here.See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. What's up, Duterino's? Emily Kwong here with a very special treat from our friends at the TED Radio Hour. It's a conversation all about whales. Wales, by the way, some of the most beautiful creatures in the sea, if I can give my humble opinion. Host Manus Shomerooti talks with marine biologist Asha DeVos about the vital role that whales play in the ocean's ecosystem. It's an excerpt from their recent show on Saving R.C.'s. Okay, I'm going to let Manus take it from here after the break. It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manoosh Zamorodi.

And I want to start with the biggest underwater creature there is, the whale. Which, despite its size, can be really hard to spot. They're huge, but they live in this gigantic space. 70% of our planet, right? So you just stand and stare out of the horizon and you hope that an animal turn up. This is marine biologist Asha DeVos. And before she ever had a chance to see a whale, Asha fell in love with how they sound back in college. I did a project on sperm whales and their acoustics.

And I was listening to this cacophony. And I was just like, you know, this world sounds so. remarkable. These are the clicking sounds that sperm whales make. So spermers are the largest tooth whales, and so when we listen to them, they just have these beautiful patterns, series of clicks that they use for communicating with each other, for finding their food and stuff like that. And this is a humpback whale.

They have the most complex songs. They're super beautiful. They evolve. I mean, it's quite magical. But Asha says whale songs are more than beautiful. They help whales echo locate to find food and navigate their environment. Their eyesight isn't very good. And so their world really depends so heavily on their ability to hear.

And, of course, to communicate with each other. Like mothers probably reprimanding their babies. Partners looking for mates, right? Calling out, hey, beautiful, there's a response. Right? They have to talk to each other. How else are we going to have more whales in our future? Asha grew to love whales even more when she finally had the chance to observe them up close.

It all began with an encounter with six blue whales and a floating pile of whale poop off the southeast coast of Sri Lanka. And that's literally my Rewika moment. Because Asha says whale poop, yes, whale poop, is pretty spectacular. Oh my goodness. It is the most beautiful animal poop ever. Wait, what is so beautiful about whale poop? It's bright red. Literally, it's like brick red in color,

and that's because these whales feed on shrimp. So one thing is it's really easy to find for researchers like myself who think whale poop is the bees' knees. But, you know, it is like, poop is a clue to the secret world, right? like it allows us to learn more about what they feed on, but it's also incredibly important for our environment. Here's Asha DeVos on the TED stage. As whales dive to the depth to feed

and come up to the surface to breathe, they actually release these enormous fecal plumes. This whale pump, as it's called, actually brings essential limiting nutrients from the depths to the surface waters, where they stimulate the growth of phytoplankton that forms the base of all marine food chains. So really having more whales in the ocean's pooping

is really beneficial to the entire ecosystem. Whales are also known to undertake some of the longest migrations of all mammals. As they do so, they transport fertilizer in the form of their feces from places that have it to places that need it. But what's really cool is that they're also really important after their death. whale carcasses provide a feast to some 400-odd species, including the eel-shaped slime-producing hagfish. Whale carcasses are also known to transport about 190,000 tons of carbon,

which is the equivalent of that produced by 80,000 cars per year from the atmosphere to the deep oceans, and therefore help to delay global warming. So over the 200 years of whaling, when we were busy killing and removing these carcasses from the oceans, we likely altered the rate and geographical distribution of these whale falls and as a result probably led to a number of extinctions of species that were most specialized and dependent on these carcasses for their survival. You know, I don't think I ever realized how important whales are to all the life cycle. that are taking place in the ocean.

And it sort of sounds like 200 years ago, that was the ideal. Like the ecosystems were thriving. Whales are pooping. They're dying in exactly the right places. And life in the ocean is flourishing. Then, of course, we humans come along and we kind of screw everything up.

Yeah. So we basically reduced populations of whales by, you know, down to maybe like, 10 to 20% of prevailing numbers, right? Which is a huge blow because these are gigantic animals that, as you can tell, have many roles to play in the oceans, right? And these things are so deeply interconnected that, you know, it's almost like a game of Jenga.

You take a piece out and take another piece out and starts to wobble. And you take that third piece out and all collapses because everything's so deeply intertwined. Right. So you think about that drastic. impact that we had over those, you know, years of whaling and the long-lasting impacts, and we're still trying to recover from that. Over centuries, humans have treated the ocean as a place of endless resources. Now, between overfishing, carbon emissions, pollution, and more, our oceans are in trouble.

But it's not too late. And so today on the show, Saving Our Seas, SOS from the ocean. From our small individual actions to big community efforts, what we can all do to stop the destruction of our underwater ecosystems. And why conservation isn't just about saving marine life, but also saving our planet. This isn't the first time that we've tried to save the ocean and the whales. In the 70s, the Save the Whales movement became one of the most successful conservation campaigns ever. Mainstream culture fell in love with whales.

There were bumper stickers, t-shirts, flyers, petitions, and even entire albums like Roger Payne's Songs of the Humpback Whale. That concerted effort, those voices really made a difference because as a result, it was a domino effect. The International Whaling Commission moved forward and put down this moratorium. to stop whaling. And so it was a time of change. And the whales that are coming back today,

that's all thanks to the work that was done, you know, a few decades ago by people coming together and saying, this is not going to work. We have to protect our whales. Let's save the whales. So the Save the Whales movement really worked for stopping commercial whaling worldwide. But whales are still facing a lot of issues today. First, ship strikes.

All across the world, we have these massive shipping highways transporting goods throughout the world. And these shipping lanes often overlap with really important areas for these whales, like they're feeding grounds, for example. And so they can actually hit them, and it can be lethal, and these animals can die. Another problem?

Fishing gnats. If they get entangled at depth, they can't come up to the surface to breathe, so they drown. And as mammals, they do have to come to the surface to breathe. And if they get entangled at the surface, they can't dive down to the depths to feed so then they can stop. And finally, something we hardly ever think about in the ocean, sound pollution. Now in areas where you have heavy ship traffic, for example, what can happen, especially with species like blue whales,

is that the sound that the vocalization that they create is at the same frequency as noise created by the ship. So it's like being at a cocktail party, for example. Everyone's talking at the same time and you know someone said your name but you don't know where that sound is coming from. You know, it's just a murmur of sound. And so for Wales, if everything's at the same frequency, if I'm talking to you and someone's also talking across us

at the same volume, at the same frequency, then I can't hear you. So how do I find my mate? But it also must be like, like pretty exhausting for these animals to have noise, constantly bombarding them day in and day out. Yeah, you know, I think it is incredibly stressful. And there's this, I think a beautiful study that was actually done off the east coast of the U.S. and they were looking at stress hormones in whale poop samples, right? And so when 9-11 happened, they looked at the samples and very

surprisingly, they found that the whales were less stress soon after 9-11. Wow. Exactly. Right. So they stopped the shipping in the Bay of Fundy for a short period of time. Ship noise dropped. And that was reflected in the stress levels of these whales, right? So we don't think about that. And stress is, you know, it's a silent killer, right? Like it can impact reproductive capabilities. It can affect mother calf pairs, right? If there's too much noise. The mother and calf maybe can't communicate. What if they get separated, right? There's a lot of knock-on effects as a result as well.

Okay, so someone listening is like, all right, I get it. The ocean is interconnected. And whales, they affect so many other creatures. And clearly humans have a big impact too. But what if that person listening is like, I don't even live near an ocean? What can I possibly do? Yeah.

So, you know, I always tell people, You know, we always say all roads lead to Rome. I always say all waterways lead to the ocean. If you live anywhere, there's typically some water source, whether it's a tiny spring or the water in your tap or a big lake or a river, everything that goes in there washes out into the ocean, right? And so we are connected. I think we can all make a difference.

I think we can all start to think about our individual life. lives are individual capacities, our consumer habits, right? Like what plastics are we using? Where are we dumping it? But also just simple things like sharing the stories, right? You know, we talk so much about the conservation issues which create apathy, right? But I want people to talk about the conservation wins. I want people to talk about that magic, about how beautiful blue whale poop is, right?

How amazing their sounds are. and the fact that that's how they see their world. I want people to remember that there's a lot of amazing things that happen out there and that ocean does truly, truly keep us alive. That's marine biologist Asha DeVos. You can find her full talk at TED.com. Special thanks to our friends at TED Radio Hour for this episode. Shortwave is made by Thomas Liu, Rebecca Ramirez, Britt Hansen,

Maddie Safaya, Indy Kara, Viet Le, Giselle, Giselle, Giselle, Zelle Grayson and me, Emily Kwong. We're back tomorrow with more shortwave, the Daily Science Podcast from NPR. We live in a world, a country, and a moment in time where there's so much important news, and it is constantly changing. That's why Up First is here for you. It's NPR's Daily Morning News podcast. In about 10 minutes, you can start your day informed. Listen to Up First on the NPR One app or wherever you get your podcasts.