Whales

Hannah Stitfall is asking all the questions you ever wanted to know about whales. Did you know they have culture? She’s joined by whale legend Hal Whitehead, whose close encounters with sperm whales and understanding of their culture has completely changed how we view these enormous animals.

We’ll also have an update from the team onboard the Arctic Sunrise, our research ship that’s on its way to the Galapagos Islands.

Hal Whitehead (Intro):
I love the ocean and have been attracted to the ocean since I was very young and wanted to understand it and beyond it. I spent a lot of time at sea sailing around with sperm whales. And I’m on my boat and watch them when they come to the surface and they’re clearly very social, they depend on each other, to live their lives to learn how to behave in the whale will. A whale isn’t a whale without the other whales around it, who it lives with, who it depends on, who it learns from. And as I look out at them, I now realise that that group of whales that we are watching has a particular culture, it has a particular way of doing things. So these whales behave very differently from another class, it may be just over the horizon there. And I find this, this contrast totally fascinating. The whales are a vital part of the ocean. And for me are a reason to go into the ocean and they are a route to understanding the ocean because they have to use the ocean to live.

Hannah Stitfall:
This is Oceans: Life Under Water, a podcast series all about the oceans and the mind-blowing life within them. I’m Hannah Stitfall. I’m a zoologist, wildlife filmmaker and broadcaster. And I want to learn everything I can about the world’s oceans. In this episode: Whales.

Hal Whitehead:
It’s very hard to control anything in the ocean. Everything’s fluid, it’s three dimensional. I think this may be partially behind why they appear to have such societies.

Hannah Stitfall:
A lot of people know that the blue whale is the biggest animal that’s ever existed. But did you know that whales have culture?

Hal Whitehead:
They have different ways of doing things which they’ve learned from each other. This is the aspect of their lives that I find most fascinating.

Hannah Stitfall:
This is Oceans: Life Under Water, Episode Three.

I’m really excited to be talking with Hal Whitehead who’s joining me from somewhere in a studio in Nova Scotia, Canada. Now Hal is a biologist whose work studying whales and their inner lives since the 1980s has dramatically changed how we interact with and view these enormous animals today. So it gives me great pleasure to welcome Hal! Hello!

Hal Whitehead:
Hello, Hannah! How are you?

Hannah Stitfall:
I do love your shirt that you’re wearing!

Hal Whitehead:
Oh, good. Good. I like it too.

Hannah Stitfall:
It’s very on brand. It’s a nice navy blue with white whales on it. Very nice Hal.

Hal Whitehead:
Sperm whales too.

Hannah Stitfall:
Good. So let’s get into it. So how many different kinds of whale are there? What’s the biggest and what’s the smallest for our listeners that may not may not know?

Hal Whitehead:
Well, as usual depends on what you call a whale. But as most of us call a whale, there may be 30 or 40 species of whale. The biggest is the blue whale, biggest animal that’s ever lived. And the smallest maybe the pygmy right whale. Well, little by whale standard still a hell of a lot bigger than us. A little animal that we know rather little about.

Hannah Stitfall:
Can you describe to us what a cetacean is so whales versus dolphins.

Hal Whitehead:
So the cetaceans are a group of mammals, whose closest relatives are things like hippos. And they gradually made their way into the ocean 40-50 million years ago, first just shallow waters and then they got into deeper and deeper waters. Then gets about 30 million years ago, they made two major adaptations they developed two wonderful attributes. One lot developed baleen, fingernail type material which grows down from the upper jaw and forms a sieve and that allowed those whales to sieve out small creatures from the water, plankton, small fish things like that. And they can get a huge quantity of food in very short time, a blue whale, the biggest of them, you know, several tonnes of food in one gulp. Pretty amazing. So that’s one kind. At the same time, another group more or less the same time, developed another wonderful adaptation, which was sonar. So the ability to make a sound, a particularly well adapted sound that travels through the water, bounces off something, usually something they might want to eat. And he comes back with enough information so that they can tell Yeah, that is worth eating or chasing or something. So those are the toothed whales, and they include all the dolphins, the porpoises, killer whales, pilot whales, and the biggest of them all the sperm whale.

Hannah Stitfall:
And I’ve watched your TED talk about whale culture, which is absolutely incredible. Can you explain to our listeners a bit about what whale culture is or so far that we understand it to this day?

Hal Whitehead:
Yeah, well, first culture. And culture there’s lots and lots of definitions out there. But the one that makes most sense to most biologists anyway, who think about it and quite a lot of other people, is it’s behaviour or ideas that we learn from others, and then pass on so that a whole bunch of us do the same thing, because we’ve learnt from each other, or from the same place. And if you think of culture like that, there’s quite a lot of whale behaviour, which is cultural. We had been studying sperm whales, off the Galapagos Islands off Ecuador since 1985, we got to know some of the, what we call social units, which is sort of like family groups of sperm whales that live in those waters. And what we were interested in is whether different social units had different dialects. And they communicate using patterns of clicks, which sounds a bit like Morse code, so, click, click, click. click. Or, click. click. click, click, click. And what we found, there were a bunch of the social units who actually sounded pretty much the same. And they went, click, click, click, click. Or, click, click, click, click, click. So a bunch of clicks regularly space, kind of boring. And then we’re another bunch of social units, who went, click, click, click. click. Or, click, click, click, click, click. click. And both these kinds of social units were off the Galápagos. And if social unit was making the regular clicks, it kept making the regular clicks over the years that we studied them, and vice versa with the plus ones. Now when we’re at sea, we tend not just to see one social unit, but we see a group which may be 2, 3, 4, up to maybe seven or eight social units all going round together. And what we found was that even though the regular and plus one social units were using the same waters of the Galápagos, the regular social units only form groups with other regular and the plus ones, only with other plus ones. So the only explanation was that the sperm whales were learning their dialect, and learning who they associate with from their mums and the other members of their social unit. And we found other things like when we were following the regular social units, they wiggled around a lot, they go this way for a few hours and that way and back again, and so on. Whereas when we were falling, the plus ones they take tend to go for quite long periods and straight lines or fairly straight lines. They organised their babysitting differently because the females babysit each other’s calfs when they make long dives to catch food. And so you know that the these clans weren’t just about dialect they were about a whole range of behaviour. And then other people started to find pairs of clans in sperm whales in different places in Japan, in Brazil, in Chile, in Mauritius, in the Indian Ocean, in the Caribbean. In the biggest study, another colleague of mine, Taylor Hirsch, put together recordings from right across the Pacific and found seven clans in the whole Pacific about seven, seven clans in the Pacific with maybe 150,000 females in the Pacific means 20,000 females per clan. So this is a big, large scale social structure. Also large in spatial scale because there’s one clan, the short clan front all across the Pacific, from Japan to Chile, from British Columbia to New Zealand. Whereas there’s another clan much more restrictive. We’ve just found off in waters of Ecuador.

Hannah Stitfall:
Do you think it could be a matter of the different clans having different accents? And still being able to talk to each other like me originally being from Essex being able to speak to somebody from Scotland? We can still understand each other. Or do you think the further that the clans are away it’s a completely different language? I mean, do we know that? I mean, will we ever note that?

Hal Whitehead:
I think, and I’m not sure about this, but I think maybe language is the wrong way to think about this. And they do seem to be what we call symbolic markers. So we humans use symbolic markers to mark our groups. So for instance, two football teams in the same city, say Manchester, for instance, is contrasting colours, right? So it’s very clear if you’re walking down the streets of Manchester, which this group of fans supports in which that group supports and they tend to stay a bit away from one another. So you know, they could understand each other if they want went out and talk to each other. And maybe in another context, they would but, you know, on on Saturday morning as they’re heading for the game…

Hannah Stitfall:
Don’t want to talk to each other!

Hal Whitehead:
Right. And so I see it as more like that. And actually Taylor Hirsch’s work suggested the same sort of thing with the sperm whale clans. So clans which use the same areas which overlap tend to have more distinct coders than clans, maybe one’s off Japan and the others off of Chile, and so very unlikely to meet.

Hannah Stitfall:
And apart from different whale species size, do they have different cultures dependent on the whale species? So for example, as a sperm whales culture different to a humpback, or pygmies?

Hal Whitehead:
Yeah, a lot of it depends on the social system. So some of the whales in particular, the larger whales with teeth like sperm whales, killer whales, pilot whales, live in very tight, family-based societies. So a female probably stays in the same group as her mother, while they’re both alive, so they’re spending their lives together. And in killer whales, young males do as well. So in these species, there are these very tight social circle structures, which are incredibly important to the whales. In contrast, an animal like the humpback whale, which has a much less tight structured family society. So each individual will have a bunch of friends who it spends time with, but it’s his others and so on. And it’s much more loosey goosey. In that situation, the animals are learning from a much wider range of other animals, the cultures can span a whole ocean. So in blue whales, or humpback whales, all the blue whales in a particular ocean, all the humpback whales in a particular part of an ocean, sing the same song, but it’s a different song from the ones in the next ocean.

Hannah Stitfall:
And tell us about the closest interaction you’ve had with a whale.

Hal Whitehead:
Well, I don’t particularly want to get super close them. I want to see the whales interacting with other whales, not with us. But I study a species here off Nova Scotia called the Northern Bottlenose Whale, which is a rather strange and poorly understood animal of the deep waters who dives very deep for squid. They’re also very social. And unlike a lot of these deep water whales, they’re very curious. There was one time we were out there, about 100 miles off the coast here in an underwater canyon where these animals live. And we get a lot of our data by recording the sounds and we do this through what’s known as a hydrophone, which is an underwater microphone passes on the end of a long 100 metre cable. And the worst thing that can happen is that this hydrophone can get wrapped around the propeller on the boat.

Hannah Stitfall:
Oh, no,

Hal Whitehead:
And it did. So I jumped in. And I’m pretty near the world’s worst swimmer. So this was not an efficient procedure. Anyway, I was taking breaths and diving down for about 12 seconds and unwrap a teeny bit and come up to a bit more. And then I just looked behind me and there were two of these wonderful creatures, just about two or three metres away just watching everything. So I think that’s the closest I’ve got.

Hannah Stitfall:
I find it quite interesting that you’re not one of the – you’ve said just then – you’re not the world’s best swimmer. But you spend a lot of time sailing and in and around the water.

Hal Whitehead:
Yeah, I love being on a boat. Being on a boat is the very best thing, I think. But I like to stay on the boat. Yeah, I’ll take a swim from time to time especially the waters warm. But yeah. Best to be on the boat.

Hannah Stitfall:
Best to be on the boat. Okay, don’t take good. So can you for our listeners at home tell us about who Roger Paine was?

Hal Whitehead:
Sure. Yeah. So Roger Paine was a biologist who done some extraordinary work about the interactions between moths and bats. And you know how the bats tried to get the moths and so on. And he became fascinated by whales. But this is in the 1960s. And he went out there to see whales and to listen to whales. Because sound was his thing. He was a musician as well as a biologist. And he heard these extraordinary sounds from the humpback whales of Bermuda.

(whale songs)

Hal Whitehead:
He recorded and he got other recordings, and he analysed this recording.

(whale songs)

And he realised that these humpback songs were songs in the same sense that we humans have songs or birds had songs they had, they had a repetitive structure, they had verses notes and themes. And so they were very complicated song, possibly the most complex songs in the world. They were also extremely beautiful. So Roger put out really, with his colleagues, Scott McVeigh, put out a really important paper in a major scientific journal describing the songs and all the scientists were Wow, this is extraordinary. He also put out, and this is in 1970, a long playing record, which was the media in those days of the songs. And this went to the general public. And they went, Oh, wow!! And I can remember that time because I was in university sort of laying around on in my room on my bank listening to these extraordinary sounds. And this was a large part of became a large part of what changed our attitudes about whales in the 1960s the whales were sources of oil and margarine. That’s what they were, by the end of the 1970s, for a lot of people they had become beings who sing. And a lot of this was due to the songs and at the same time, organisations like Greenpeace, were highlighting the extraordinary status of the whales. Where if you look at the late 1960s, and how many whales there were in the world and how that trajectory was going, it looked like in about 15 years there will be no more whales. We were killing them at that rate. And then in what I see is one of the great conservation stories in the 1970s we humans got together globally and pretty much stopped that. So the whale populations which were heading towards zero, levelled out in the late 1970s, and then whaling was pretty much stopped in the 1980s. And at least some of them, including the humpback whale, have rebuilt in the decades since then. And, you know, as humans, we should be proud of that we can sometimes get it right.

Hannah Stitfall:
And that, that record that Roger Payne put out, wasn’t it the biggest selling nature record today? I mean, to be honest, I can’t think of any others that have been brought out, maybe that’s why. But it was a huge deal, wasn’t it

Hal Whitehead:
It was a huge deal. And actually, that wasn’t all Roger did. In the 1960s scientists like Jane Goodall was starting to treat wild animals as individuals, rather than just numbers or, you know, nice packages of cool physiology. And she started giving them names and looking at their social systems and, and looking at them in detail. And Rogers said, maybe we can do the same with whales. And he started studies on right whales in Argentina, where that was his emphasis getting to know whales as individuals. And that was another major bit of pioneering work that he did. It influenced a lot of us. And you know, our study the studies I’ve been doing on sperm whales, as individuals have that as a sort of driving factor.

Hannah Stitfall:
Whale song. So is it all whales that sing or is it just humpbacks?

Hal Whitehead:
No, they don’t all sing. Only baleen whales sing. These are the ones with the filters from the top of the jaw. But most of them do sing. The humpback whale song is way more complicated than any of the others but some of the others are really interesting. Such as the bowhead whale, a big baleen whale of the Arctic waters…

(bowhead whale song)

…who sings quite complex, but much shorter songs and very variable.

(bowhead whale song)

As bowheads songs, scientists put it: humpbacks may be more like a symphony, but bowhead, it’s more like jazz. And then there’s animals like blue whales, fin whales, which make songs so low, we can’t hear them. But there are songs and they’re quite simple. And they can travel probably 1000s of kilometres underwater. So there’s a great variety and there’s a few baleen whales that do not seem, like right whales. And as far as we know, none of the toothed whales sing in the sense of producing a repetitive series of vocalisations like a human song are or a bird song.

Hannah Stitfall:
And why do they sing?

Hal Whitehead:
Well, that’s it, we don’t know! We do know that the thing is most all, as far as we know, males, they sing mostly in the breeding season, which is the winter. But they also sing a bit in the autumn when they’re on their feeding grounds cold water areas where there’s lots of food. And in the spring after they return to the feeding grounds, as well as on the migrations between the feeding grounds and the breeding grounds. We assume it’s something to do with mating, but I don’t think we know. We don’t know. I don’t know.

Hannah Stitfall:
I don’t know either how, but we love to hear it. And from studying whale culture, is there something that you found in whale culture that you have become particularly attached to or something from whale culture that has taught you more about yourself?

Hal Whitehead:
One thing we’ve actually never know, almost never noticed is any aggression among the sperm whales. Now these are huge animals with massive mouths, big teeth. But there’s almost no sign of aggression, maybe a little bit in the big breeding males. I once saw what was almost like a sumo match where these two huge creatures went for each other for a few seconds and then one gave up and went off. But otherwise, none. And that seems general, you don’t see any of the aggression that you see, with many non-human primates, with baboons, and chimpanzees, and so on, as well as, you know, with other terrestrial animals, like say wolves, and so on. And I think a lot of this may come down to the structure of the ocean, it’s very hard to control anything in the ocean. It’s, you know, everything’s fluid, it’s three dimensional. It’s really hard to say this is mine, and you’re not coming near it. I think this may be partially behind why they appear to have such peaceable societies. And why they also seem to have, certainly the sperm whale I studied, seem to have more democratic societies. So I’ve watched a group of sperm whales, maybe 40 animals as they move around the ocean. And this is really important to them. Because food is not evenly distributed, they’ve got to go to the right places. And they’ve got to make good decisions about where to go. But how do they do this? In elephants, which have, in some ways, quite similar societies to sperm whales, there is a matriarch, usually an older female, who is the big boss and says, off we go, here we go. So that we were kind of looking for that but we find very little sign of that. Instead, it seems much more democratic. They’re going to make a turn in a few of them move that way and a few goes this way. And then oh, well, maybe and so on. And I’ve watched some take over our to make a 90 degree turn. You know, like democracy itself, it’s slow, it’s messy, but it tends to produce the right answer. And I think that’s a nice message for me and for us that you know, despite the problems we need our democracies.

Hannah Stitfall:
Be more whale!

Hal Whitehead:
Be more whale, in that respect. There we go. Yeah, nicely put.

Hannah Stitfall:
We’re gonna get you get your another shirt with that on it – be more whale!

Hannah Stitfall:
So before we get back to Hal there’s something cool I wanted to share with you. Right now there’s a boat bobbing around in the Indian Ocean with a team of researchers on board. Now, one of those is a woman called Asha DeVos. She’s one of the world’s top whale experts. And she’s leading pioneering research into the whales of the Indian Ocean, and she wanted to share it with you.

Asha DeVos:
So we’re out on the scientific expedition. And we’re doing both visual and acoustic surveys of whales and dolphins. It’s really interesting part of the Indian Ocean that I don’t think many people have ever had the chance to explore. I’m born and raised Sri Lankan, beautiful tropical island at middle of the northern Indian Ocean. It would seem like a really natural pathway to become a marine biologist. But when I told people at age 18, that that’s what I wanted to do, most Sri Lankans were really confused. We didn’t realise we had so much abundance of life in our waters. Our assumptions were based on the very little knowledge that we had. And so for me, I started this journey to really become a marine biologist. But take all that knowledge back to Sri Lanka, make sure I was establishing the field making space for others, allowing people to fall in love with the ocean just as I, I always dreamed I would. So Arjuna waters in the Indian Ocean, there’s a range of threats that these whales and dolphins face. One of the big ones certainly of Sri Lanka is ships strike where they get hit by ships and get killed. They can get entangled in fishing nets that might be floating freely. There’s also all kinds of pollution in our oceans. We think always about plastic pollution. But noise pollution is a huge problem for animals that navigate their world using their ears. And also in the Indian Ocean, in the last six decades, there’s research to show that we’ve lost about 20% of the phytoplankton on our surface of our oceans. About 50% of the oxygen that we breathe – that’s one in every second breath we breathe – is produced by plants in the ocean. There’s so much that comes out of the largest ecosystem on our planet. So it is really important for all of us across the world, no matter where we live, no matter whether our lives are deeply intertwined with the ocean or not to recognise that protecting the ocean is protecting ourselves.

Hannah Stitfall:
And now back to Hal.

Talk to me about whaling. I mean, it’s one of the more positive stories we’ve had over the last few decades. But when did it start? And how did we get to the point where it’s amazingly, almost completely been phased out except Japan and Iceland.

Hal Whitehead:
Yeah, it’s an incredible story whaling, it goes back, well, probably into prehistory, learning how to kill whales who came very close to the coast and bringing them in and using the products. A whale is a huge animals, so for a small community coastal community, it’s like a windfall. That was always a very small scale operation. But that all changed. With industrial whaling. Industrial whaling probably started, I don’t know, in the Middle Ages, in Europe, in the Basque Country between France and Spain, they were killing right whales close to the coast, they killed a lot. They use them mainly for oil made a lot of money, and they started moving around and they wiped out those right whales, they would go to other parts of the North Atlantic and and kill them too. It grew and grew and in 1712 people from Nantucket in the United States started industrial whaling for sperm whales. And that became a huge industry, partly because sperm whales have better oil than the other whales. And there were a lot of them there all around the world. And so the whale is, from Nantucket and to another ports in New England, as well as Western Europe, started going further and further around the world. They’d go into the Pacific and Indian Oceans, they would discover islands, which had never been seen by these Europeans before. They would bring diseases, they would wipe out other native animals, like giant tortoises. So whaling had a huge impact not only on the whales, but also on a lot of other things. But by the end of the 1800s, whaling was becoming less lucrative they killed a lot of whales. The discovery of petroleum meant there were other sources of oil. So whaling was wasn’t doing too great until they discovered ways to make it much more effective. And this was largely done by Svend Foyn, and Norwegian who started instead of using sail powered whaling boats and road capture boats. He started using steam powered whaling boats, which could go much faster, in much worse weather. He started using harpoon guns rather than people throwing harpoons. So by the beginning of the 20th century, industrial whaling was far, far more efficient than the whaling of the Nantucketers, and so on. And they were a bit of a pause for the two World Wars when we were too busy killing each other to kill quite so many whales, but otherwise, it just went on and got bigger and bigger. And it was all over the world by a lot of different countries, and it couldn’t be controlled. And in the 1960s, it was very clear that the whale populations were in very bad shape. And, yeah, the end of the 60s, that’s when Roger Payne’s record came, our attitude started changing. Greenpeace were out there, you know, challenging the whalers and things changed.

Hannah Stitfall:
It is crazy, really, I mean, those those ships, I mean, I’ve seen photographs of them, they sit with the big steam powers ships with the, you know, the harpoon guns, I mean, they are just, you know, they are killing machines, aren’t they? And you think if everybody around the world are using them, and nobody really has any interest in protecting whales, I mean, they don’t stand a chance against them. Some of the photographs I’ve seen that just awful to look back on now. It’s the way it was, they just didn’t stand a chance against us.

Hal Whitehead:
They didn’t. And even though by the 1960s, there were population biologists who were looking at the numbers and saying, This is awful. We have a huge, huge problem here. Of course, no one listened – as they don’t today, as people warn about what we’re doing to other kinds of wildlife and the environment generally. But luckily in the 1970s conception of whales changed. That was pretty much it for whaling, which was fantastic.

Hannah Stitfall:
So basically, we need someone to bring out a shark record. Thinking any of our listeners out there that want to want to break into the industry, I think that that’s your that should niche there – make shark record!

Hal Whitehead:
Absolutely, yes, yes!

Hannah Stitfall:
I’ve read recently about what they’ve been doing in Dominica establishing the world’s first ever sperm whale reserve. Now, how significant is this for the protection of these animals?

Hal Whitehead:
Well, I think it’s, it’s very significant. So I’ve tried to look at sperm whales around the world, and how they’re doing now, like the other big whales, they haven’t been whaled much at all. Over the last 40 years or so we would expect their populations to come back. But sperm whales have extraordinarily low rates of producing babies. So each female only produces one every five years, and there’s no twins. So that means that populations cannot increase fast. In the areas where humans have a much bigger footprint. It doesn’t look good for them. Their populations seem to be declining, certainly not increasing. So places like the Mediterranean, like the Gulf of Mexico, and the waters of the Eastern Caribbean, around Dominica. So off Dominica, and I’ve spent quite a bit of time there. It’s a wonderful place, and the sperm whales there are particularly splendid, because my colleague, Shane Giro has got to know them individually, in the same way that Roger Paine was hoping people would do way back when he started his work in the 60s. And Shane does know all those individuals. So when I’m out there, and I see a sperm, well, you know, they all look pretty much the same. They look a bit like logs to me in the water. But Shane notes: that is so and so. And she’s the daughter of so and so, and she likes doing this, and so on, and the whole history of her social world, and her preferences and her personality. And it’s pretty wonderful! But those populations are under threat because it is a part of the world that’s used a lot by us. There are a lot of shipping, including huge cruise ships that go through there. There are fast ferries, there’s swimming with the whales of Dominica, which was fairly far out of control when I was last there. And all this is a threat to the whales. So this proclamation, as I understand it, of the small sanctuary of Dominica looks like it will reduce those threats. It will regulate where the cruise ships go, how fast they go. It will regulate the people swimming with the whales, so that they’re not being swarmed with all day long. So yeah, I think it’s a good thing. I’m really pleased and congratulate the people who worked on this, especially the people of Dominica, who had to do it themselves.

Hannah Stitfall:
And what is your next project? What are you working on now? Can you say or what are you working on in the future, near future?

Hal Whitehead:
Well, as far as you know, going up see goes which is my favourite bit.

Hannah Stitfall:
Apart from the fact that you can’t swim.

Hal Whitehead:
Yeah, but no I’ll stay on the boat! And I can just about swim, I’m just not very good. We’ll be studying these Northern Bottlenose Whales here off Nova Scotia and further north of Newfoundland. We’re interested in them just as wonderful creatures, but also in how they’re dealing with us, like most creatures, so the ones here have no Nova Scotia, there’s only about maybe 160 of them because they were heavily affected by whaling into the 1960s. So when I was growing up in England, the pets in our family, were he probably eating Northern Bottlenose Whale, you know, that’s what they were being used for. And they, you know, they get stuck in fishing gear and so on. But luckily, their main habitat is now a protected area, so there’s no fishing there. So they seem to be doing a bit better. So that’s great. The next population off Newfoundland there is an area of huge oil and gas development, and I’m very worried for them so we’ll get up there and see what’s going on. I don’t know. But it’s concerning.

Hannah Stitfall:
Well, Hal thank you very much for talking to us today. I know our listeners would have gotten a lot out of the conversation we’ve just had. It’s absolutely fascinating talking to you, thank you. Keep up the brilliant work that you do with whales. And I hope you wear that shirt most days because it’s fabulous.

Hal Whitehead:
Okay, thank you. I’m just off to my class and I’ll wear it in there and see if they notice. Thank you. It’s lovely talking to you.

Hannah Stitfall:
Next week, we’re going south to the Southern Ocean and Antarctica. But if you want something else in the meantime, check this out. Remember the story we heard at the end of the first episode, the research ship that set sail on an expedition to the Galapagos Islands? Well, we’ve had an update from one of the people on board that Arctic Sunrise, she’s called Usnea.

This episode was brought to you by Greenpeace and Crowd Network. It’s hosted by me wildlife filmmaking broadcaster Hannah Stitfall. It is produced by Anastasia Auffenberg and our executive producer is Steve Jones. The music we use is from our partners BMG Production Music. Archive courtesy of Greenpeace. The team at Crowd Network is Catalina Nogueira, Archie Built Cliff, George Sampson and Robert Wallace. The team at Greenpeace is James Hansen, Flora Hevesi, Alex Yallop, Janae Mayer and Alice Lloyd Hunter. Thank you so much for listening, and see you next week. Transcribed by https://otter.ai

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