Thriller Whales

One evening in November 2013, the noted whale researcher Salvatore Cerchio sat down to dinner with his team of scientists on Nosy Iranja, a small island known for its white sands and turquoise waters that’s located off the northwest coast of Madagascar. As he took his seat, Cerchio could barely contain his excitement. He’d spent the better part a decade working in the general region of Madagascar, heading up research into the local population of dolphins and whales with the Wildlife Conservation Society, and he was pretty sure that, earlier in the day, he and his team had encountered six Bryde’s whales, an exceedingly rare cousin of the humpback.

The Bryde’s whale was the only species he could think of that was both common to tropical waters and small enough to fit the profile of what he’d seen. Cerchio, A85, recognized that he suddenly had a rare opportunity on his hands. Bryde’s are a poorly known whale. They’re fast and small, and a challenge just to find, much less study. A lot of the most basic questions surrounding them, like courtship and mating habits, were still unanswered. If everything worked out, Cerchio might be the one to discover the answers.

Seated for dinner at the Nosy Iranja Lodge, surrounded by coconut palms, Cerchio addressed his team. “Look around the table,” he said. “Look at each other. Right now, you are looking at the people who know more about Bryde’s whales in Madagascar than anybody on the planet.”

Except they weren’t. A subsequent review of the underwater video that his team had taken during the encounter led Cerchio to the realization that the whales in question were no Bryde’s. They were something that Cerchio had never seen in his 30-year career. In fact, nobody had ever seen them alive and been aware of what they were looking at. These were the mysterious Omura’s whales, an ancient species that scientists didn’t even know existed until 10 years ago. If Bryde’s had incomplete science, these whales had nothing. Every single question lay open for the asking. This wasn’t merely a rare opportunity. Salvatore Cerchio had just won the scientific lottery.

In the late 1990s, five Japanese cetacean experts found themselves on a beach on Tsunoshima Island. They were very confused. Local residents had summoned them to evaluate an unusual whale carcass that had washed up three days prior, but nothing quite made sense. The animal had a coloring reminiscent of a fin whale, a head shape more like the blue whale and the body size of a Bryde’s.

Cetacean Mystery

Wada had by then spent two decades digging into old whaling pictures, genetic samples and archived skeletons. He’d been following a mystery that had haunted him since the 1970s, when he’d been doing basic research into the genetic markers of Bryde’s whales—work that would allow them to be more easily identified. But there was something off about eight whale specimens he was investigating. Those whales had been identified at the time of their discovery as Bryde’s, but Wada was convinced that they were actually a different, unknown species. He’d been trying to prove it ever since.

Now here was Yamada telling him about a strange whale that had washed up on Tsunoshima Island. Could this be an actual example of the unknown species that he suspected had been mistaken in the record books for a Bryde’s? Tests were conducted, and the body, bones and genetic markers recovered from the carcass all turned out to be a match for Wada’s unidentified whale—this was his whale. So he, Yamada and a third colleague, Masayuki Oishi, from the Iwate Prefectural Museum, began to collaborate on research into what they decided to call the Omura’s whale, named after a famed Japanese cetacean researcher.

The Whale Listener

What he didn’t know was that ORES was one of the most important whale research training programs in the world. Leading whale experts would come to either deliver lectures to students in Gloucester or sail on the Regina for their research. The program was shuttered years ago, but many of today’s major whale scientists can trace their own roots, or those of a mentor, back to that ship. During Cerchio’s winter in the program, the Regina set sail for Silver Bank in the Dominican Republic to study humpback whales at their breeding ground. The scientists on board took notice of the young, New Jersey–born student, a city kid out on his first real adventure. Each night when the ship anchored, Cerchio would throw an underwater microphone—a hydrophone—into the sea and stretch out on the deck to listen as the famed humpback whale song streamed in through his Sony Walkman. In the mornings, he would retreat to the lab and transcribe the recordings by hand.

“I remember him there with headphones, listening to it, and talking about the structure of the song,” said Phillip Clapham, a leading expert on large whales at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Alaska Fisheries Science Center in Seattle. “For somebody that young to have picked that up and been able to understand and break down the song into themes and understand what he was listening to was really unusual.”

Clapham, who was then a scientist with the Center for Coastal Studies on Cape Cod, immediately offered him an internship for the following summer. Cerchio accepted. That research into whale acoustics prepared him for his master’s work at the renowned Moss Landing Marine Labs in California. After that, he began a Ph.D. in ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Michigan. Over the next few years, Cerchio began to acquire a reputation as a risk-taker and adventurer—the kind of guy who would tackle massive research projects in order to answer foundational ecology questions that the field had simply stepped around until then, such as which male humpback whales got the girl, as it were, and what strategies they used to do it.

The day after their discovery of six Omura’s whales off the island of Nosy Iranja, Cerchio and his team spotted three more specimens, followed the day after that by a second encounter with a mother and calf from the first day. By the end of those three days, Cerchio and his team had collected seven skin samples (procured via a small crossbow that shoots biopsy darts) for genetic analysis, taken more video, and captured recordings of the Omura’s song—a throbbing, low-frequency, broadband pulse that lasts about 10 seconds: Bom bom bom bom bom. “This was a new vocalization that had never been described before,” Cerchio explained.