Chicken Soup for the Ocean Lover's Soul (7 page)

The transition took some time. Keiko continued to undergo rehabilitation in a special baypen near Iceland’s Westman Islands and eventually began to take more interest in his natural environment. For the first two years, he seemed content to travel back and forth between his pen and the wild ocean, not quite certain about what to do with the strange underwater wilderness to which he had been returned. There was certainly nothing human about it, and for most of his life, that was all he had known. Then, during a training rendezvous with a small pod of orcas at the southernmost tip of the Westmans, Keiko bolted toward open sea. This time, however, he didn’t turn back. A satellite transmitter indicated later that he was headed for Norway and soon had taken up an active, healthy residence in Taknes Bay. Suddenly, for the first time since his capture more than twenty-two years ago, Keiko was not in a captive facility or a netted pen. His decisions were now guided by instinct and his innate orca intelligence— an intelligence that we have yet to fully comprehend.

No one can say for certain what the future holds for this special whale whose journey has taken him so far. But I, like millions of others, am hoping that after all these years of captivity, he can adapt and thrive in the wild and become truly free—not in the way of some Hollywood script—but as nature intended from the very beginning.

Wyland

“Matthew, did we agree to adopt a whale?”

© The New Yorker Collection 1993 J.B. Handelsman from
cartoonbank.com
. All Rights
Reserved.

Angus

I
t is an old dream: To travel on the back of a
benevolent sea beast down to some secret underwater
garden.

Stephen Harrigan

In June 1999, I was filming California sea lions at a rookery on Los Islotes in the Sea of Cortez with my friend and fellow marine biologist Seth Schulberg. Every day we took the scenic road out of La Paz, Mexico, past the fuming harbor of Pichilingue to the playa beyond, where we met our skipper, an Antonio Banderas look-alike named Jose Antonio. We began a session of calisthenics that consisted of passing two tons of cameras, dive gear and gas tanks from the car to the boat. From there we bounded through the Canal de San Lorenzo in our equipment-laden panga, toward the breathtaking desert island bluffs of Espiritu Santo and Isla Partida, until the foghorn of sea lions and their bleating, shivering pups announced the presence of Los Islotes.

The Mexican government had granted us permission to film, provided that we worked sensitively and did not cause undue disturbance. I had stationed myself in the water next to a huge, angular boulder and was getting good footage of the big dominant sea lion bulls when a four-thousand-pound male elephant seal appeared out of nowhere and charged at me with the obvious intent of inhaling me.

Strangely enough, while my face rested on the tongue of this animal, I remember recalling other stories of aggressive male elephant seals and that very little underwater footage existed of them. And, of course, there was the little issue of trying to figure out the proper response to this attack. There really wasn’t much else to do except let this enormous seal choke on me. I went limp. To my relief, the seal let go of my head. He was now looking at me with large, intense black eyes. Then his giant nose inflated, and he tried to swallow my head once more. This time, however, I gave him my camera instead.

Was he playing? Was this some kind of a secret elephant seal greeting ritual? Was he, gulp, aroused? And what was he doing in the Sea of Cortez? I knew that elephant seals are partial to the cold, rich waters of the Pacific Ocean. I had to wonder if this one was lost. My brain was running at high speed. Should I film this rare encounter, or should I flee to the safety of the boat? The giant seal appeared calm and friendly, and while he repeatedly tried to grab my head, he did so in a very gentle manner. So, what the heck, I stayed. When he came up from behind me, I wondered, yet again, if I had made the wrong decision. He wrapped his flippers around me in an elephant seal version of a bear hug from which there was no escape. But again, he let me go without even scratching the camera lens. Eventually, he grew bored with me, and after twenty-five minutes he took off.
Chewing on a big camera must not have been much fun after all,
I thought.

Back at the boat, I found my friend Seth basking in the Mexican sun. He had encountered the seal, too. He said it had caught him from behind in its customary embrace. Faced with the same set of decisions, Seth opted for swooning. Once he went limp, the seal let him go. Seth said that, at first, he had no idea what had gotten hold of him. He had never been hugged that tightly in his life. He said it felt like a scene from an old prison movie. “Not to mention,” he added, “that I was completely terrified.” We decided at that point to name the seal. For the rest of the trip, it would be known as Angus, from the Latin name
Mirounga angustirostris.

Later that evening, we went over the footage of the big elephant seal swimming through the waters off Los Islotes. As he moved around the camera, it became clear that Angus was exhibiting curiosity, not aggression. This unusual behavior left us counting the minutes until our next encounter. The next day, Angus greeted us as soon as we hit the water, as fascinated with our heads as ever. While I could offer the camera in lieu of mine, Seth had no camera and thus had a harder time keeping his head out of the lion’s mouth, as it were. All he could do was offer up an arm and shadow box with Angus.

The giant seal took turns embracing us and dragging us through the water. He managed to totally dismantle my camera, sending floats to the surface and lights to the bottom. At one point, he grabbed Seth’s arm, shook him like a doll, then swam off with Seth tucked under his flipper for a tour of the rock. On the second lap, Seth managed to recover a little dignity by rolling onto Angus’s back for what looked like an elephant seal rodeo ride.

We returned for four more days. But to our disappointment, Angus’s attitude had changed. His enthusiasm was gone. He seemed to want nothing more than to loll around on the rocks, his eyes relaxed and drooping, barely responding to the crabs crawling over him. Apparently, he was going to enjoy the sunshine, and that was that. With the star of our show suddenly uncooperative, we packed up our equipment and left.

The next season, Jose Antonio informed us that Angus had gone shortly after we did. Elephant seals like Angus were driven to the brink of extinction at the turn of the last century. Fortunately, their numbers are growing, as are their rookeries. Perhaps Angus was a pioneer exploring the brave new world. Maybe he was testing the reception that others of his kind would find at this barren outpost. I hope he found the experience to his liking. If he did, who knows, maybe he’ll return to Los Islotes with more seals to establish the first elephant seal rookery in the Sea of Cortez.

Florian Graner

[email protected]
© by UNIVERSAL PRESS SYNDICATE. Reprinted with permission. All
rights reserved.

Sound Behavior

It wasn’t very often that I got to enjoy all of the public exhibits and presentations at the aquarium where I worked. My job was behind the scenes in the volunteer department, where I helped coordinate the schedules of over five hundred volunteers, all with very different schedules and lots of questions. So when I was at work, I was always busy.

To complicate matters, I was six months pregnant. I constantly needed to get up and move around throughout the day to keep from getting stiff. So in one of those rare moments when I wasn’t swamped with work, I took a walk to the public marine-mammal presentation. As I sat in the large amphitheater waiting for the show, I wondered why I didn’t do this sort of thing more often. Clamoring for a look at the otters, seals, dolphins and beluga whales in the three-million-gallon tank were groups of excited children, their parents, out-of-towners, lovebirds, the simply curious and me.

The announcer welcomed everybody and explained some of the more fascinating characteristics of marine mammals. He said, for example, that the dolphins had an amazing ability to detect size, shape, distance, texture and movement by sending out a high-pitched sound and waiting for the echo to return. He called this echolocation. Dolphins have refined this sense to such a degree that they could even recognize when another animal is pregnant by detecting fluid in the pregnant animal’s amniotic sac. When the announcer said this, he caught my attention immediately.

After the show ended, I headed straight to the glass of the exhibit for a close-up view of the dolphins. I wanted to see just how refined this sense of echolocation was. Looking cool and inconspicuous, I waited for the crowd to file out of the amphitheater doors. As the area quieted, I tried to gain the attention of the dolphins. I whistled. I coughed. I grunted. I groaned. I said, “Pssst!” Nothing worked. So I did what any attention-starved individual does when nobody is looking: I started to run from one end of the glass to the other, flapping my arms up and down. After ten sprints I stopped, my heart beating fast, my breathing heavy. Puffing and panting, I looked at the pod of dolphins, expecting them to be riveted by the commotion, their powers of echolocation focused on the pregnant woman on the other side of the glass.

Nothing.

Frustrated, I went back to my office, seriously doubting the so-called phenomenon of echolocation.

Later that day, a dolphin trainer came up to me.

“Abby?” the trainer said.

“Yes.”

“Can I ask you a question?”

“Sure,” I said. “Do you need a volunteer for something?”

“Actually . . .” She stopped. She seemed a little reluctant to continue. “I, um, was watching you by the dolphin tank this morning. I was just wondering if you’re okay.”

I felt my face flush. I tried to explain my little “experiment.” The trainer tried to look serious. Then, unable to hold back any longer, she erupted in laughter. She didn’t seem to be showing any signs of stopping, either. Other people around us began to stare. Finally, after she caught her breath, she explained to me that echolocation definitely worked. It just didn’t work like that. “You need to be in the water,” she said. “That’s the only way the animals can sense you.”

The next day I formally requested permission to assist with a cleaning dive of the marine mammal exhibit. You can probably guess what the exhibit manager’s answer was.

Abby Murray

Genesis

Original painting by Wyland © 2003.