Ch. 16

PRACTICAL CETOLOGY

Spout, Senses, and the Dissection of Heads

Down to this blessed minute (fifteen and a quarter minutes past one o’clock P.M. of this sixteenth day of December, A.D. 1850), it should still remain a problem, whether these spoutings are, after all, really water, or nothing but vapor—this is surely a noteworthy thing.

Ishmael, “The Fountain”

“Where, I should like to know,” Ishmael says as the Pequod continues sailing east in the Indian Ocean, “will you obtain a better chance to study practical cetology than here?”

Presumably for superstitious purposes, and conveniently for Ishmael’s explanations of sea candies and whale anatomy, Ahab orders the head of a right whale and the head of a sperm whale lashed along either side of the hull of the Pequod. Ishmael devotes no fewer than six chapters to various considerations of the whale’s head: its internal physiology, its sensory life, and then, as the ship nears Indonesia, the exact composition of the whale’s spout.

THE SPOUT

Tall, with a bowl-style haircut, Dr. Justin Richard is so genuinely enthusiastic about whales that you barely raise an eyebrow when he uses “snot” or “bonkers” in his speech. He studies reproductive success in beluga whales, which are also, if smaller, white toothed whales with oil-filled heads. Richard travels up to the Arctic to study belugas in their natural habitat, but he has spent far more time working with them at Mystic Aquarium, just down the road from the Charles W. Morgan and that chart of the Commodore Morris. Richard was a trainer at Mystic Aquarium for a decade, and here he now continues to work with belugas in these controlled conditions for his research. He’s been developing tools to study the response of beluga whales to rapidly rising ocean temperatures and decreasing ice. He works in particular on ways to monitor whale health by sampling their blow. In his scientific papers, Richard refers to the whale’s spout as “respiratory vapor” or “exhaled breath condensate.”1

Ishmael concludes accurately in “The Fountain” that the spout is a condensed mist that is often mixed with a bit of seawater resting around the blowhole. This was not settled at the time. Dr. Bennett devoted pages to both sides of the issue, explaining that “the entire question is involved in much perplexity.” Several others, such as Surgeon Beale, had arrived at the conclusion that it is indeed condensed mist.2

“Melville gets the spout mostly right,” Richard says as we look over the rail at the beluga exhibit. “But it’s not just mist. Like he said, part of it is the seawater that’s been sitting in the depression over the blowhole, which combines with this super powerful exhale, filled with carbon dioxide. This condenses with the outside air.”3

Kela, the female beluga whale at the aquarium, takes a quick breath, which we cannot see, before she dives back under the water.

Richard continues: “The spout is also not just mist in the sense that it’s also a complex biological matrix that has lots of stuff in it. There’s mucus in there, snot, which lines the respiratory tract. And there’s skin cells and microorganisms that get carried up from their upper respiratory passages above the lungs, just like you have bacteria inside your nose. There’s so much there in whale blow. It’s bonkers. That’s why it’s such an exciting tool for research.”

Working with other colleagues, Richard has been using whale blow to provide information about reproductive status and other hormone levels. They also use blow to sample DNA, microorganisms, and traces of other cellular debris. It’s far less invasive than a blood sample and easier to collect. Scientists are even now exploring ways to collect whale blow in the wild with hovering drones.

“I really loved reading that passage in ‘The Fountain,’” Richard says, “about how the whalers were too afraid to get close because their skin might melt off from the spout. I love this! Having had so much of it on me, I can attest my skin has not melted off! Was Melville kidding?”

I think so. But Bennett did write that it smelled fetid and felt acrid on the skin. And Ishmael quotes a source in the “Extracts” that whale blow smells and “brings on a disorder of the brain.” I ask Richard if whale blow smells bad.4

“It can. It can. I find that different individuals tend to have a distinct smell, and I wonder if it has to do with their particular flora, like normal bacterial growth, just as some people have distinctly smelling breath that you can pick up on, probably dependent on what microorganisms are growing in there at the time. But remember, the whale’s mouth, the trachea to the lungs, has no connection, no little valve, to this spout—despite what Melville says. So this scent in the blow is not from rotting food or anything like that.”

We watch the male beluga named Juno surface, exhale, and submerge again. Juno is notorious here at the aquarium for playing with kids by spraying water over the glass. He even targets staff members when they’re giving talks with their back to him. But visitors sometimes don’t recognize that Juno does not, cannot, get them wet by way of his spout. The beluga whale spits up a gulp of water out of his mouth.

From a boat or from the shore, the first view of whales out in the wild could be a fin, an arching back, or a tail, but it’s usually first the whale’s blow. The spout was essential to whalemen, who could identify species, distance, and sometimes even the animal’s swimming and diving behavior. The nineteenth-century whalemen who drew pictures in their journals more often illustrated spouts and fins rather than full profiles of whales or fish.5 (See fig. 31.)

In “The First Lowering” Ishmael explains how Tashtego, the Native American harpooner, identifies the presence of a whale from the merest spray off in the distance, even when sitting in a whaleboat: “To a landsman, no whale, nor any sign of herring, would have been visible at that moment; nothing but a troubled bit of greenish white water, and thin scattered puffs of vapor hovering over it, and suffusingly blowing off to leeward, like the confused scud from white rolling billows.”6

Indeed, nineteenth-century mariners hunting throughout the world’s oceans could diagnose species of whales by their spout characteristics, just as whale watch captains and naturalists do today. In 1858, the Danish zoologist Daniel Fredrik Eschricht wrote about how impressed he was with the observational skills of these mariners, their ability to distinguish species only by “the shape of the vapor.” In “The Grand Armada” Ishmael describes the difference between sperm and right whale spouts. Daggoo, the African harpooner, confirms with his captain that he’s seen the White Whale by referring to the individual’s blow, which is particularly “bushy” and “quick.” Mariners knew that toothed whales, such as sperm whales and belugas, have a single, forward-spraying spout from a single blowhole, while baleen whales have double-spouts from a pair of nostrils. A right whale, for example, blows two puffs that make a “v” shape. A fin whale, as Ishmael says in “Cetology,” exhales a single tall, thick, columnar blow that’s a combination from its two blowholes, a “straight and single lofty jet rising like a tall misanthropic spear upon a barren plain.”7

Once I went on a whale watch on Monterey Bay, California, with a captain named J. J. Rasler, who drives the only tourist whale-watch boat on the California coast that uses biodiesel. Although a young man, he is a bit of a local legend, having grown up in the area as a fisherman. His boss told me that Rasler turned down a law school scholarship to stay out on the water. Rasler has read Moby-Dick at least three times. He tells me a story of a humpback whale that came up under one of their boats and bent their propeller. During a whale watch he is on the radio most of the time with his fellow captains to find whales, but it really comes down to his ability to see and identify spouts off in the distance.

“Melville’s actually not too far off in a lot of it,” Rasler tells me while driving the boat and pausing to listen to the VHF radio. “Although it was kind of funny how Melville twisted certain things to be entertaining.” Rasler explains how he also identifies different whales by their blow, but there’s variability within species and situations. While we are out there, we see a shockingly high and tall spout of a blue whale far in the distance. “Sometimes when they’re feeding, and staying in the same area, they don’t breathe as hard. You just take little pieces and try to put it all together. I’ve been out here working for thirteen years, and I’m still seeing new things.”8

With all this in mind, it’s intriguing that Melville chose the whale’s spout as the first instance in the novel that moves into the realm of the magical. Melville chose the spout as his primary symbol for the fantastical, the alluring, and the sometimes dangerous unknown. It is in “The Spirit-Spout” that Fedallah, the eerie, satanic fourth harpooner—the only human character whom Ishmael pushes beyond human—first sees a “silvery, moon-lit jet.” Fedallah believes this distant spout to be a sperm whale. When the whalemen try to lower after it, the blow disappears. And so this happens night after night until “no one heeded it but to wonder at it.”9

THE WHALE’S SENSE OF SMELL

The whale’s “sense of smell seems obliterated in him,” declares Ishmael. Justin Richard confirms that any extreme halitosis from the spout would be unrecognizable to fellow whales—at least for toothed whales, such as sperm whales and belugas. Over millennia, toothed whales lost their olfactory bulbs and the nerves that anatomists believe to be necessary for smell. There is, however, an active line of thinking today that the baleen whales might have at least some ability to detect some scent. Maybe it helps them find food?10

THE PHYSIOLOGY OF THE DEEP-DIVING SPERM WHALE

In “The Fountain” Ishmael claims that a sperm whale spends “one seventh or Sunday of his time” breathing on the surface, while the rest of the animal’s life is fully underwater with the blowhole shut tight. Ishmael declares: “Every one knows that by the peculiar cunning of their gills . . . a herring or a cod might live a century, and never once raise its head above the surface. But owing to his marked internal structure which gives him regular lungs, like a human being’s, the whale can only live by inhaling the disengaged air in the open atmosphere.”11

Surgeon Beale wrote that an experienced whalemen could predict “to a minute” when a given sperm whale, once observed for a while, will surface to breathe. Since humans live in the air, we breathe automatically. But living primarily underwater, whales need to be aware of their breathing. This means they can’t sleep in the same way we do. Whales have adapted a way to sleep with only one side of their brain at a time. It’s hard to calculate the fraction of one-seventh of their time at the surface, though, which Melville enjoys for its religious parallel. A study in 1995 tracked a single sperm whale in the southeastern Caribbean for over four days with a radio tag, revealing that this sperm whale, likely a male, spent a little over half of his time on deep dives, 23.4 percent on shallow dives, and 22.6 percent “in activities at or near the surface.” A study published in 2017 found that sperm whales in the Gulf of California spent closer to 30 percent of their time at or near the surface. Sperm whale expert Hal Whitehead observed a ratio that was almost the same as Ishmael’s one-seventh of the time. He described a “group of twenty or thirty sperm whales, each diving for forty minutes or so and then coming to the surface for about eight minutes at a time.”12

Justin Richard and I can’t see this as we watch the two belugas at the aquarium, but they expire and inspire when at the surface in a fraction of a second, far faster than land animals, since they need to keep water out of their respiratory tract. Scientists and poets, then and today, have been appropriately astounded at the sperm whale’s ability to dive so deeply and for so long—which involves two factors that Ishmael understood: the efficient use of oxygen and the ability to withstand the pressure.

During his examinations of the sperm whale’s head and when describing the old, sick, injured sperm whale in “The Pequod meets the Virgin,” Ishmael recognizes the pressure that the sperm whale must withstand at depths of 1,200 feet, which they do seem to dive to on a regular basis. Sperm whales dive far deeper than anything a beluga whale or any baleen whale could withstand. Among the cetaceans, only the beaked whales can dive as deep and for as long. Ishmael calculates the water pressure the whale needed to withstand at that 1,200-foot depth to be about fifty atmospheres, which he overestimates at nearly the same ratio as did his source on this, whaleman William Scoresby in Arctic Regions. Naturalists in Melville’s time wondered whether the rubberlike nature of the whale’s skin might protect them during these dives. Scientists know now, that as all whales evolved, they lost their frontal cranial sinuses, so they wouldn’t have that trapped air when they dove. In addition, the sperm whale’s lungs likely collapse to expel any air, while other cavities, such as in the middle-ear, are lined with veins that fill the cavity with blood to expel any other trapped air that would be susceptible to pressure changes.13

When humans take a breath to dive underwater, we generally store about half of our oxygen in our lungs, and then store the rest of the oxygen in our blood and, in the smallest proportion, in our muscles. By contrast, in order to thrive and hunt in the deep ocean, sperm whales store the majority of their oxygen, about half, in their blood, distributing this in a manner more efficient than humans do. Ishmael explains that the sperm whale’s ability to make air last is related to a “labyrinth of vermicelli-like vessels” between the animal’s ribs and around the spine, which stores the “oxygenated blood.” Melville’s description of these spaghetti-like blood vessels is accurate in that cetaceans do indeed have specially adapted blood vessels that look like that, although physiologists are still not certain of their function even today. The blood vessels are known as the retia mirabilia, which means “wonderful nets,” and they might help deep-diving mammals with thermoregulation, protecting against the effects of pressure at depth on the lungs, and/or nitrogen regulation to protect against possible decompression sickness—what scuba divers call “the bends.” Long before Melville’s time, anatomists had identified the retia mirabilia in dolphins. The nineteenth-century naturalists had connected these vessels to the sperm whale’s ability to stay underwater for more than an hour. Melville would’ve read about this in his Penny Cyclopædia and even seen an illustration of them there (see fig. 32). Here Melville also read explanations by the English naturalists Hunter and Owen that whales and dolphins have an “almost total absence of valves,” which they believed explained how harpoons can kill and bleed out a huge whale. In “The Pequod meets the Virgin,” Ishmael uses this same explanation to describe the pools of blood and gore surrounding a recently killed old sperm whale. But the truth is, even if whales have fewer valves, this doesn’t have much to do with their ability to stop bleeding. Marine biologists today know that sperm whales simply have a far greater volume of blood in relation to their body weight than humans, which is part of their ability to dive and stay down, so perhaps the naturalists and whalemen were just amazed at the sheer volume of blood that they saw in the water.14

WHALE DISSECTION IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

While writing Moby-Dick Herman Melville was only a decade from the chance to observe toothed whales in a way similar to that of Justin Richard at the aquarium. The first cetacean kept in captivity in the United States seems to have been a beluga whale captured from the St. Lawrence River. In 1860 it was delivered by crate on a locomotive to the newly opened Boston Aquarial Gardens, not long after Louis Agassiz and Harvard opened their natural history museum across the river in Cambridge. The beluga whale survived for more than a year. During the beluga’s life in the tank it was occasionally strapped with reins around its head in order to tow a woman on a clam-shaped boat, replicating a sort of Venus scene for visitors. P. T. Barnum loved the idea. Over the next couple years he paid to bring a few “white whales” of his own to New York City. Barnum had more difficulty keeping them alive, however, despite building a pipe under several city blocks that pumped in water from New York Bay. On July 13, 1865, his American Museum burned down in a fire. The two belugas boiled to death.15

In addition to the inability to observe whale behavior in a controlled setting behind glass, the naturalists of Melville’s day had only barely begun to understand the internal anatomy of large marine mammals. In 1839 Thomas Beale did not provide for his readers an illustration of the internal organs of the sperm whale. No one anywhere at the time had published these types of drawings. This was in part because the body of a whale itself was usually too large to bring on deck or to access, half-sunk, even after all the blubber had been stripped off. The sperm whale’s head, especially that of the male, can be over twenty feet long. So only occasionally did they hoist a sperm whale head up on deck. (See fig. 33.) Ishmael says in “The Sphynx” that “the beheading of the Sperm Whale is a scientific anatomical feat,” since the whale has no distinguishable neck and this part of the whale is the “thickest part of him.” In “The Great Heidelburgh Tun,” Ishmael describes the men extracting oil from the head by precariously hauling it up vertically out of the water alongside of the hull, which was the common method.16

If before the 1840s any naturalist completed a careful dissection of a sperm whale that had beached, the reports had not made it to European or American professional circles. The time it took to travel and pass information, the challenges of preservation and transport, and the lack of proper tools, often made it impossible to take advantage of a beached whale of any species for scientific purposes. So naturalists such as Beale and Bennett pieced together information of the sperm whale’s internal anatomy from a variety of sources—especially dissections of smaller whale species, such as dolphins. While at sea in 1835, Dr. Bennett dissected a fetal sperm whale, found in the body of its mother after it was killed. Bennett believed that the fourteen-foot-long male was only hours from being born. He was able to describe this fetus’s digestive and respiratory system, including stretching out 208 feet of intestine. Even professional whalemen, such as James Colnett, occasionally captured young sperm whales to learn anatomy and to teach each other how to properly cut the blubber strips and extract the spermaceti (see earlier fig. 28). Thus, in “A Bower in the Arsacides,” Ishmael explains that on another ship on which he sailed the crew once picked up a “cub Sperm Whale” to make sheaths for the harpoon barbs out of the whale’s “poke or bag [stomach?],” after which Ishmael used a hatchet and his knife, “breaking the seal and reading all the contents.”17

It was not until 1845, the year Melville returned to Boston, that an American doctor named J. B. S. Jackson published a paper in the Boston Journal of Natural History that claimed to record the first full scientific dissection of a sperm whale. A young 3,000-pound, sixteen-foot-long female had been brought up to Boston on a railroad car after being killed about fifteen miles out from New Bedford. Jackson’s paper includes a lovely, detailed illustration of the multichambered stomach, but that was it.18

WHALE VOICE, HEARING, AND ECHOLOCATION

As Justin Richard and I are speaking about the sensory life of cetaceans, we watch through the glass the two beluga whales swimming below the waterline. Like narwhals and bowheads, beluga whales do not have dorsal fins. This likely evolved to ease their movement under ice and to avoid a convenient handle for polar bears. The sperm whale, like the fin whale, has a relatively small, almost vestigial dorsal fin far toward its tail at the end of its dorsal ridge. What Melville describes as Moby Dick’s “high pyramidal white hump” is the sperm whale’s dorsal ridge and its dorsal fin. Presumably this helps them track underwater like a boat’s keel.

Surfacing, one of the belugas gives a wet trumpet sound, like one of those vuvuzela horns famous from World Cup soccer matches. The belugas also regularly emit all sorts of clicks and squeaks, as well as deep bellows. Through the glass we hear a variety of clicks and rattles, too, especially when one comes close to investigate us.

Beluga whales are especially loud and varied in their noise-making. Mariners nicknamed them “sea canaries.” Beluga whales make sounds above the water out of their blowholes. Audible below the surface, they produce clicks and rattles through internal organs in their head. Like nearly all the toothed whales, belugas have a sound-making valve within their nasal passage, often called the monkey’s muzzle, museau de singe, or phonic lips, which make noises in combination with internal air sacs and the surrounding musculature. Belugas have an extraordinary range of sound out of their blowholes—think whoopee cushions and bagpipes—along with still more of a language under the sea, which is primarily, it seems, sonar beams focused and augmented via their oil-saturated forehead, also known as the melon.19

Sperm whales have phonic lips, too, but they do not seem capable of making any noises with these through their blowhole at the surface, other than the gasp itself—which certainly can be loud when under stress. Melville’s derision of J. Ross Browne’s roaring whale and Ishmael’s satisfaction with the metaphor of sperm whales as stoically silent are nearly true on the surface of the ocean—but it is not so below. Unique from any other whales, the sperm whales and their close relatives, the dwarf and pygmy sperm whales, have two exceptionally asymmetrical nasal passages. While both passages travel through the oily head-matter, the wider diameter air passage leads to the phonic lips, which is situated below the blowhole. The more narrow air passage leads directly to the blowhole and is responsible for all of the air exchanged in breathing. (See fig. 34.) Although beluga whales, dolphins, orcas, and all other toothed whales, also have only one blowhole, unlike sperm whales, their two nostrils, or nares, are short and internally symmetrical.20

Although the surgeon-naturalists Beale and Bennett did not have a clear understanding of the internal anatomy of the nostrils within the sperm whale’s head, they, like Melville and other experienced whalemen, knew well the different oil sacks within the sperm whale’s enormous noggin, even if they did not know their utility for the animal’s survival. Whalemen knew that the majority of the sperm whale’s head is filled with two oil-rich sections. The upper part is what they called “the case,” a term still used by biologists today. The case is a roughly cylindrical mass of soft white tissue soaked with a fluid known as spermaceti oil, which does indeed crystallize and turn whitish and waxy when exposed to cold air. Dr. Bennett wrote that it has a creamy, bland flavor, like “very fresh butter.” Beneath the case and on top of the rostrum is “the junk,” which also has compartments of oily tissue similar to the spermaceti organ. The junk is more solid and is divided by denser tissue into segments or lenses. Ishmael accurately explains that the junk is a “honeycomb of oil.”21

For the whalemen’s market back home, oil was generally divided into right whale/bowhead oil; sperm whale oil from its body; and the most valuable stuff, the spermaceti. The oil from right whales and bowheads was known in the nineteenth century more generally as “whale” or “train” oil, for use in lamps and lubricating some of the machinery of the Industrial Revolution. The blubber from the body of sperm whales burned cleaner so it commanded a better price. Sperm oil was also an excellent lubricant for small machinery, such as ship’s chronometers and sewing machines. From 1833 to 1840, for example, Charles W. Morgan’s company provided the sperm oil to lubricate all of the government’s coastal lighthouses. The highest grade spermaceti, from both oily sections within the sperm whale’s head, were processed together ashore into high quality sperm oil and into a specialized wax that was manufactured into high quality candles.22

As for the oil’s natural utility for the whale, Ishmael argues in “The Battering Ram” that the fluid-saturated case and junk in the sperm whale’s head might serve animals to assist with buoyancy and, as Ishmael says, act like a shock absorber, a ship’s fender, to cushion during “inconsiderable braining feats.” We’ll take up this topic head-on later.23

Melville, along with all the naturalists and whalemen of his day, would have been dumbfounded to learn of the spermaceti’s more significant role in underwater communication, navigation, and finding food. Surgeon Beale knew that sperm whales communicated underwater for several miles, by some sort of “signals,” but how exactly they did so “remains a curious secret.”24

The majority of the sperm whale’s life is spent in complete darkness. Even in the clearest ocean, sunlight does not extend beyond some 650 feet down. Research into animal sonar had begun in the 1790s, notably by an Italian bishop named Lazzaro Spallanzani who experimented with gruesome ways of systematically removing each sense from bats in order to confirm that they somehow navigated in complete darkness only by sound. Yet Spallanzani still could not figure out their secret. Echolocation wasn’t identified for another one hundred fifty years. Naturalists in Melville’s day knew that sperm whales had to somehow capture food in darkness and that even whales that were blind or with deformed jaws survived somehow in the wild. Surgeon Beale liked the theory that the sperm whale floated quietly in the deep sea with its mouth open, alligator style, which attracted squid into his jaws with his mouth, tongue, and glistening white teeth. At least a few American whalemen bought into this theory, too.25

Scientists did not begin to recognize the vast array of sperm whale clicks, creaks, clangs, and grunts below the water—and its potential role in finding food and navigating in darkness—until over a century after Moby-Dick. This largely began with scientists Bill Schevill and Barbara Lawrence, a husband and wife team from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution who submerged microphones to listen to the sounds of belugas for the first time in 1949. This led to their theories that toothed whales could echolocate in the same way as bats. In the 1970s scientists began to take a close look at the chemistry of the two spermaceti organs, which each have a different makeup than, say, the oil within a beluga’s melon or nearly any other toothed whale. The consistent lipid composition in the sperm whale’s head, along with, perhaps, its internal temperature gradients and the skull shaped like a satellite dish, seem to provide an exceptionally useful method to focus outbound sound waves. In recent decades biologists have identified complex intraspecies social communication and foraging behavior in the sounds of sperm whales. A 2003 study that used an array of hydrophones concluded that the sperm whale’s “monopulsed clicks,” also known as codas, are “by far the loudest of sounds recorded from any biological source.”26

Justin Richard explains to me that sperm whales produce underwater sounds through methods similar to belugas. The sperm whale’s phonic lips and air sacs, however, are far in the front of their heads. The spermaceti organs seem to amplify and focus back out these echolocation sound waves that likely bounce off the bowl-shaped skull. (See fig. 34.)

There is a slim possibility that baleen whales might be capable of some echolocation, too, but their moaning sounds underwater seem to be more for intraspecies communication, rather than for deep-sea navigation and finding prey. Studies that first began in the 1950s and ’60s with Cold War technology searching for Russian submarines, led by Bill Schevill and another colleague, Bill Watkins—the same pair that recorded baleen rattle—led scientists to understand that a blue whale’s low, subsonic vibrations can communicate to other blue whales swimming over a thousand miles away, perhaps across entire ocean basins.27

The depth-sounding technologies on modern oceanographic and commercial fishing ships use the same premise as that of toothed whales, sending down a series of sonar clicks to the bottom. One type of this equipment is called the CHIRP, an acronym for Compressed High Intensity Radiated Pulse. You can hear the clicks in the lower holds of a steel ship when the CHIRP is operating. During my own years at sea I’ve also heard through the hull the actual clicks and whistles of dolphins, through both wood and steel. I’m sure that early whalers in the forecastles of the Acushnet and the Charles W. Morgan must have heard this, too, at least from the smaller whales. It’s a believable yarn that the whalemen called these sounds “carpenter fish.” The clicks and knocks from echolocating and communicating toothed whales might have sounded to mariners like hammers tapping underwater.28

How exactly sperm whales and other whales sense each other, are aware of other individuals, remains unclear. At the aquarium, Richard explains that beluga whales seem to have good perception across a wide range of frequencies, but this is largely known from experiments on smaller whales in captivity. Although whales have tiny ear slits behind the eye that lead to internal structures through an auditory canal, the toothed whales—from dolphins to sperm whales—actually first receive sound through the acoustic fat in their lower jaws. Beale, Bennett, and their colleagues in the 1840s had identified the hearing apparatus within the sperm whale’s head, so they assumed sperm whales had at least some sense of hearing through the earholes. Ishmael explains that into the tiny ear opening of the sperm whale “you can hardly insert a quill,” and that the right whale also has a small canal with a membrane over the ear canal. This is mostly true; there is a plug that’s only visible in dissection. Where did Melville get this detail?29

American whalemen believed sperm whales could hear—and see—well enough that they had to row up quietly to not startle the animal. At an earlier point in the voyage, Ishmael says, “The sudden exclamations of the crew must have alarmed the whale.” At one point during the final chase, Ahab approaches Moby Dick head-on so as to be less visible to the animal, which was a popular conception of nineteenth-century mariners—that whales are less aware of what’s in front of them. Observers today recognize that sperm whales can get nervous if a boat is in front, especially if they’re not used to them. But the whales rarely if ever turn their heads sideways to look with their eyes at the approaching vessel, as would a seabird. More often they move their forehead toward a vessel to use the echolocation clicks more directly. It could be, too, that the whalemen didn’t need to be quiet at all. Sounds made on the surface might not register significantly with sperm whales. The subsistence hunters in Lamalera, Indonesia, for example, chant and bang the side of their boats while hunting sperm whales.30

Well aware of the serious ethical conflicts of keeping highly intelligent animals in captivity, Justin Richard explains that the belugas and other marine mammals at Mystic Aquarium have provided research opportunities that would be impossible for him and his colleagues otherwise. Even just small anecdotal moments teach volumes. For example, when he worked as a trainer and scuba diver here, he learned to correlate the underwater beluga sounds to general behaviors, such as play or hunger. Once when he and his fellow trainers slid open a plastic Ziploc bag underwater, Juno and Kela rushed over to a corner together, trying to hide. “It was bonkers. We wondered if we’d replicated something in the wild, like the sound of a killer whale.” When Richard travels up to the Arctic he’s struck by how hard it is to learn about the whales in their own environment, even about belugas, which are especially coastal compared to most other cetaceans. Still further, he’s amazed by how, even with so many technological advancements, so much remains unknown about marine mammals.

Juno comes up to the surface, breathes, and rolls over to look at us with his left eye. Richard explains that the scientific community still remains ignorant of some fairly basic anatomical and sensory information, especially about the largest of whales. Because how could you, for example, design an experiment in the wild that tests the ability of a sperm whale to smell or hear? More specifically, if sperm whales make their echolocation clicks within their heads using air in their nasal passages, how do they do so at great depth with all that pressure—when supposedly they have pushed all the air out?31

“Dissect him how I may, then,” Ishmael says in his reverie on the tail, “I but go skin deep; I know him not, and never will.”32