Sunshine Recorder

A deep dive into how the most intelligent creatures in the ocean perceive their world.

There is almost nothing about a whale’s body that we can relate to. They breathe air like we do. They give birth to live young like we do. But the similarities seem to stop there. Their scale, body structure, and environment are all different.

But we do have a point of connection: the eyes. Both humans and whales are mammals, so our eyes are derived from a common ancestor. Not only can we look at whales and they can look back at us, but we know enough about optics to infer their eyes’ capabilities from their anatomy. Animal eyes can be imagined as technological systems evolved with biological materials.

“We will make the fairly bold claim that it is sensible to approach eyes in essentially the same way that an optical engineer might evaluate a new video camera,” write Michael Land and Dan-Eric Nilsson, the authors of the Oxford University Press treatment of our topic, Animal Eyes.

Their eyes capture light in ways we can understand. Their eyes have a focal length. Their eyes have a maximum resolution.

So, what does the world look like to a whale?

Here’s what got me pursuing this line of inquiry. The photographer Bryant Austin makes life-size composites of whales: humpbacks, sperm whales, minkes. The results are sublime. Each fin, each ridge in the skin, seems worth pondering. Austin is especially obsessed with photographing their eyes, and with good reason.

To create these images, Austin thought a lot about what kind of visual system could represent the experience of floating next to one of these creatures. Most whale photographers use wide-angle lenses to capture as much of the whale as possible at longer distances, but he realized that wide-angle lenses do not capture enough data to create high-resolution, life-size photographs of whales.

So, on a very fancy Hasselblad H3DII-50, Austin mounted an 80mm portrait lens with a narrow field of view. The consequences of that decision are startling: Austin has to get within ten feet of the whales, and he has to take many photographs from that distance in order to get enough photographs to stitch together the life-size portrait. In practice, that brought him eye-to-eye with these multi-ton animals time and again.

In his new book about his process, out next week, Beautiful Whale, he describes a moment where he came eye-to-eye with a sperm whale named Scar. “I lowered the camera so that our eyes could meet once again, I noticed his eye moving along the length of my body before returning to meet my gaze,” Austin wrote. “As I reflect upon that moment and reconsider the question, ‘What does it feel like [to be so close to whales]?’ the only word that comes to mind is ‘disturbing.’”

Why is it disturbing? Because, as Austin puts it, the whale challenges him “to reevaluate our perceptions of intelligent, conscious life on this planet.” This mammal’s eye—lens, cornea, pupil, retina, photoreceptors and ganglion nerve cells—is a direct passageway into its brain. And when we look at it, Austin can’t help but see an intelligence there, a connection to a brain that, perhaps, works enough like ours for us to understand each other.

… Whales, unlike nocturnal rodents or ourselves, see the world in monochrome. Leo Peichl at the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research co-authored a paper with the nearly tragic title, “For whales and seals the ocean is not blue.” Indeed, the first thing that we can know for sure about how whales see the world is that it exists only in shades of gray. The water we see as blue they would see as black. “They do want to see the background. They want to see animals on the background. And the animals on the background are reflecting light that’s not blue,” Johnsen explained. If we try to imagine what that might look like, Johnsen said perhaps we could picture a grayscale photograph of people wearing fluorescent clothes under a black light.

The first dive to a depth of a thousand feet was made in 1962 by Hannes Keller, an ebullient twenty-eight-year-old Swiss mathematician who wore half-rimmed glasses and drank a bottle of Coca-Cola each morning for breakfast. With that dive Keller broke a record he had set himself one year earlier, when he briefly descended to 728 feet. How he performed these dives without killing himself was a closely guarded secret. At the time, it was widely believed that no human being could safely dive to depths beyond three hundred feet. That was because, beginning at a depth of one hundred feet, a diver breathing fresh air starts to lose his mind.

This condition, nitrogen narcosis, is also known as the Martini Effect, because the diver feels as if he has drunk a martini on an empty stomach—the calculation is one martini for every additional fifty feet of depth. But an even greater danger to the diver is the bends, a manifestation of decompression sickness that occurs when nitrogen gas saturates the blood and tissues. The problem is not in the descent, but the ascent. As the diver returns to the surface, the nitrogen bubbles increase in size, lodging in the joints, arteries, organs, and sometimes the brain or spine, where they can cause pain and potentially death. The deeper a diver descends, the more slowly he must ascend in order to avoid the bends.

In 1956 a Royal Navy boatswain had successfully dived to six hundred feet, breathing a mixture of helium and oxygen to avoid nitrogen narcosis, but he took twelve hours to resurface. Keller, by comparison, returned to the surface after his first record dive in less than an hour. He boasted of using “secret” mixtures of gases for his underwater breathing apparatus, with different mixtures designed for different depths, but wouldn’t disclose exact figures. After an editor from Life, who had accompanied Keller on his 728-foot dive, wrote an article about their accomplishment, the US Navy took interest. So did the Shell Oil Company.

The industry is currently in the midst of an expansion that originated in 2005, after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita together destroyed more than one hundred drilling platforms in the Gulf of Mexico and compromised another fifty; the storms also damaged nearly two hundred pipelines, contributing to four hundred incidents of pollution. Remotely operated vehicles could only assess and repair some of the damage, so much of the work had to be done by divers. Wages increased accordingly, and since then, as the oil industry has drilled in increasingly deep waters, demand for divers has continued to grow.

Not everybody is cut out for the job. A diver cannot be claustrophobic or antisocial, because he must spend much of his time in a tiny sealed capsule with several other divers. He must be well-disciplined and perceptive, for he is likely to encounter a variety of unexpected hazards on the job. Many divers are military veterans, or have worked as roofers or mechanics. “The best are those who have a great deal of confidence in themselves and their abilities,” one former diver, Phil Newsum, told me. “You have to be willing to adapt to any situation. Philosophically, when you go out on a dive job, you’re expecting something is going to go wrong.”

Often, because of the depth, the job is performed in the dark, with only a headlamp to light the way. Divers have told me stories of sudden encounters with manta rays, bull sharks, and wolf eels, which can grow eight feet long and have baleful, recessed eyes, a shovel-shaped snout, and a wide, snaggletoothed mouth. One diver sent me a video, filmed from a camera in the diver’s helmet, of an enormous turtle that was playing a game of trying to bite off the diver’s feet and hands every few minutes. The diver finally sent the animal swimming away by pressing a power drill to its head. Someone else sent me a photograph of a diver riding a speckled whale shark, as if on a rodeo bronco.

Newsum, who is now the director of an industry group called the Association of Diving Contractors International (ADCI), estimates that only three of every fifteen people who graduate from commercial diving school are able to withstand the rigor of the profession for a full career. Many are enticed by the high salaries, but few can endure the job’s physical and psychological toll. Those who stick it out tend to do so out of a passion for the job’s eccentricities.

Sylvia A. Earle is the former Chief Scientist of US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, a National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence, as well as the founder of Sylvia Earle Alliance, Mission Blue, and Deep Ocean Exploration and Research. Dr. Earle has been called “Her Deepness” by the New Yorker and the New York Times and named a “Living Legend” by the Library of Congress and the first “Hero for the Planet” by Time magazine. She has lectured in more than eighty countries, led more than a hundred expeditions—including the first team of women aquanauts—and logged nearly 7,000 hours underwater with a record solo dive to 1,000 meters and nine saturation dives.

Sometimes I tell young women that I come from another planet because the world I experienced during the first half of my life is so different from the relatively open attitudes about the role of women now prevalent in this country and around the world. My mother could not vote during the first two national elections when men of the same age could. As a graduate student, I was cheerfully told that all the coveted paid teaching assistantships would be given to men “because they would be wasted on women who would just get married and have kids.” Social changes have paralleled unprecedented advances in technology that have driven growth and the dissemination of knowledge. More has been learned about the nature of the ocean in the past fifty years, perhaps even the last thirty, than in all of preceding history.

In 1961, President John F. Kennedy noted, “We are just at the threshold of our knowledge of the oceans … [This knowledge] is more than a matter of curiosity. Our very survival may hinge upon it.” The investment made in the decades that followed have forever altered the understanding of the ocean as the driving force underlying climate, weather, planetary chemistry—and indeed, our “very survival.”

Unknown until the late 1970s was the existence of deep water hydrothermal vents gushing a hot soup of water, minerals, and microbes, and fostering complex communities of creatures, including a previously unknown kingdom of microbes that synthesize food in the absence of sunlight and photosynthesis. No one attained access to the deepest sea until 1960 when two men descended to 35,797 feet (greater than the height of Mount Everest) in the submersible bathyscaphe Trieste for a brief glimpse of the deepest point on Earth—the Challenger Deep—in the Mariana Trench near Guam. And no one returned to those depths until March 2012, when Canadian explorer and film director James Cameron ventured there in his personal one-man submersible.

Technologies that enabled humans to go to the moon and send robots to Mars have given us a vitally important view of Earth from afar—a living blue jewel in a vast universe of unreachable, uninhabitable planets and stars, suspended in a seeming emptiness. On a cellphone or iPad or computer, ten-year-old children can now view Google Earth, zoom from space to their backyard, fly the Grand Canyon, and, starting in 2009, dive into “Google Ocean” to vicariously explore the depths of the sea. New methods of gathering, connecting, evaluating, and communicating data—of measuring change over time, and projecting future outcomes based on knowledge no other species has the capacity to acquire—are all causes for hope, but the gains need to be approached with a healthy dose of caution. Even now, with all our advances, less than 5 percent of the ocean has been seen, let alone explored or mapped with the same precision and detail presently available for the moon, Mars, or Jupiter.

The great conservationist Rachel Carson, who summed up what was known about the blue part of the planet in her 1951 book, The Sea Around Us, was unaware that continents move around at a stately, geological pace, or that the greatest mountain chains, deepest valleys, broadest plains, and most of life on Earth are in the ocean. Nor did she appreciate that technological advances developed for wartime applications were being mobilized to find, catch, and market ocean wildlife on an unprecedented scale, reaching distant, deep parts of the ocean no hook or net or trawl had ever touched before.

“Eventually man … found his way back to the sea,” she wrote. “And yet he has returned to his mother sea only on her terms. He cannot control or change the ocean as, in his brief tenancy of earth, he has subdued and plundered the continents.”

In her lifetime—1907 to 1964—she did not, could not, know about the most significant discovery concerning the ocean: It is not too big to fail. Fifty years ago, we could not see limits to what we could put into the ocean, or what we could take out. Fifty years into the future, it will be too late to do what is possible right now. We are in a “sweet spot” in time. Never again will there be a better time to take actions that can insure an enduring place for ourselves within the living systems that sustain us. We are at an unprecedented, pivotal point in history when the decisions we make in the next ten years will determine the direction of the next 10,000.

The Antarctic krill population has declined by 80% since the 1970s, and without them the entire ecosystem of the Southern Ocean will collapse.

Worldwide there are about 85 species of krill, the largest of which is the Antarctic krill (Euphausia superba) which averages about five centimeters in length. Antarctic krill live in dense concentrations in the cold Southern Ocean. At any given time there are four or five billion individuals, and when they congregate for spawning they create a pink swarm so large that it can be seen from space.

Krill are crustaceans like crabs, shrimp and lobsters. But unlike their cousins that are bottom-feeders, krill are pelagic—they make their living in the open ocean. And unlike the plankton they feed on, krill are nektonic—they are able to swim independent of the ocean currents. 

Antarctic krill feed on algae and phytoplankton that are suspended in the water column. They are preyed upon by nearly every Antarctic predator that exists. And if a predator doesn’t eat krill, it feeds on the ones that do. A penguin’s diet consists of nearly 100 percent krill. Blue whales rely on krill for almost all of their dietary requirement. During the summer months, an adult blue whale eats up to 40 million krill in a single day to fulfill its 1.5 million kilocalorie nutritional needs. Antarctic krill is the keystone species in the Southern Ocean, and without it, the ecosystem would collapse. 

Antarctic krill use intensive searching and rapid feeding techniques to take advantage of high plankton concentrations. Krill form dense schools that move horizontally in the water column when feeding. Krill spend their days avoiding predators in the cold depths of the Southern Ocean. At night, they drift up toward the surface to search for phytoplankton.

Recent studies show Antarctic krill stocks have dropped by as much as 80 percent since the 1970s. Scientists attribute this decline in part to ice cover loss caused by global warming. This ice loss removes ice algae from the Southern Ocean which is a primary source of food for krill. NASA satellite data reveals that there has been continuous ice loss from Antarctica since 2002—more than 100 cubic kilometers of ice per year.