One of the overarching themes of our work is quintessentially Canadian. We study survival. {Margaret Atwood proposed that survival is one of the most central and enduring narratives in Canadian literature.} OK, we study the probability that whales and dolphins, not humans, will survive from one year to the next, given the amount of fish or noise or propellers in the sea, but bear with us for a minute.
We ran across a few quotes today about the environment from Margaret Atwood’s talk at this week’s “Big Thinking” lecture series in Ontario, and thought you’d want to read them:
With the growing awareness of human impacts on the environment, Atwood notes that there’s a sense that “we’re clinging on by our finger nails.” “We will kill it [the environment], and in doing so seal our own doom, because you are what you breathe and we and nature were joined by the hip all along.”
Amen. But listen to this perspective on the importance of story-telling. She called her talk “Bedtime Stories,” because that’s how children learn about their world from their parents. “People are natural storytellers,” she said. “Most people will put up with almost anything to engage in an act of communication. We must narrate or die.”
“The world is uncertain, and it has been dark, and it’s always been dark at bedtime,” said Atwood. “[But] we listen better in the dark.”
We’re still mulling this over, but this story resonates with our work on whales. Killer whales are rare among mammals in that they possess what can only be called culture. Our colleagues have shown that different families use different dialects, and that mothers teach their calves their vocal repertoire in much the same way that we learn our stories from our parents. Much of our work now focusses on increasing levels of human-made ocean noise that hinders the ability of whales to communicate with one another. Ocean noise is the aquatic equivalent of turning out the lights. We’re still struggling to understand what that means for the story-telling whales we study.
