Marine Mammals and Humans

Abstract

Ever since I saw my first whale, I have been fascinated by these animals. Technically speaking, it was a small cetacean, a harbour porpoise (Phocoena phocoena), that I saw lying dead on a beach in western Denmark. Where I grew up, in north central Germany, we certainly did not have any whales and therefore seeing one was a quite life-changing experience. This feeling grew stronger even when I saw my first common minke whale (Balaenoptera acutorostrata) and then my first humpback (Megaptera novaeangliae) in Iceland. After having seen these whales I immediately felt that these incredible creatures need to be protected. It was almost like my own epiphany. After all, the common discourse on whales and whaling has always contrasted their intellect, their social life and, indeed, musicality to their victimhood of commercial whale hunts, additionally affected by noise and other pollutants, being struck by ships and being caught as by-catch in fisheries. While, along with newer threats such as the ingestion of plastic, noise, pollution and ship strikes are undoubtedly major causes for the decline of whale populations, today, overhunting is arguably no longer such a cause. We will delve more into this issue below. So what is it that makes us focus so much on whaling and not other threats? Are all whales really intelligent, social and musical, almost comparable to humans? As we have seen in Chap. 2, this highly depends on the species and, concerning their population status, also on the subpopulation. The narrative of ‘the whale’ is, obviously, a gross oversimplification and neglects many biophysical features of different whale species. This predominantly Western depiction of whales was coined the ‘superwhale’ by the late Norwegian anthropologist Arne Kalland. He claimed that without distinction, reference is made to this particular ‘superwhale’, making it impossible to justify any utilitarian aspects of different whale species in different regions of the world.