We thought we’d saved the whales. Were we wrong?

This story is part of the Good Weekend: Best of Features 2023 editon.See all 22 stories.

What does a whale know?

It is minus 5 degrees – a balmy summer’s afternoon in Antarctica. The sky is white and the sea is glossy black. We have been sitting in this black rubber Zodiac for almost three hours, and I’ve begun to be wimpily conscious of the frostbite on my left foot, red and itching beneath my rubber boot and three layers of sock.

The minke whale surfaces about five metres from the boat. A moment later it’s right beneath us, pewter and bronze in the dark sea, only a handsbreadth below the surface. This is utterly unexpected. I’ve been here almost a week and I’ve seen many whales, often close-up, their dark backs curving out of the water, their humped blowholes opening and closing. But this is 10 metres of creature less than three feet away, as clear and close as my daughter skimming across the surface of a backyard pool. I could touch it with my fingertips without wetting my palm.

I can see everything: the starburst of barnacles over its nose, the long line of its mouth and jaw, the pectoral fin laid flat against its body. It has turned on to its side: I can see its tender white belly, stained brown by diatoms. And I can see its eye.

Whales are shortsighted, and their eyes are on the sides of their heads: to properly see anything directly above them, they must roll 45 degrees and get close. That’s what this whale is doing. Like a person turning their head, it’s twisting to look at us.

It’s a mammal’s eye. And it looks … well. I know how it sounds, but it looks like it belongs to one of us. I will never get that eye out of my head.

There’s a moment of stunned silence on the boat, broken only by Marcel, our Chilean Zodiac driver, talking into a walkie-talkie. “Right next to us,” he is whispering, trying and failing to sound professional. “It could not be any closer.” There’s a sound like someone blowing out a birthday candle: the whale, taking a breath on our left. Then it turns and swims back towards us, rolling the opposite way, bringing the other eye to bear. As it slides below the boat it flicks its fin, breaking the surface of the water with a tiny splash. I expect to feel the scrape of it against the hull, but there’s nothing – five-and-a-half tonnes of millimetre-perfect manoeuvring. “Oh my god, oh my god,” says someone, possibly me. “Oh!-oh!-oh!-oh!” says Marcel.

When I think back on this experience, here is what strikes me: if you tend to anthropomorphise animals, you should never look into the eye of a whale. It has a white edge, it holds steady as it moves past you, and it’s surrounded not by scales, but by skin. It’s a mammal’s eye. And it looks … well. I know how it sounds, but it looks like it belongs to one of us. I will never get that eye out of my head.

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What do we know about whales? Extraordinary things, and nothing at all. We know that the street lights of London once ran on whale oil; as did the transmission of General Motors vehicles until 1973. We know that after centuries of hunting whales with every successive advance in technology at our disposal, we killed an estimated three million in the 20th century alone. We know – now – that whales help to remove so much carbon that those deaths were the equivalent of burning 28 million hectares of temperate forest; we know that today, the dollar value the IMF would place on those enormous lives – in terms of their contribution to marine productivity, climate change mitigation and tourism – would be in the region of $US6 trillion. We know that their activity in the ocean, feeding at depth and defecating at surface, makes them the ocean’s biggest iron pumps. Iron, often in short supply in the ocean, is a crucial factor to the production of marine life – so we suspect that we destroyed untold levels of marine resources along with the whales. We know that after years of effort, one of the century’s great conservation victories was won when the international moratorium on commercial whaling was signed in 1982.

And yet right beside all this knowledge lie great chasms of ignorance. There are many whale species about which we know no more today than we did in the 13th century, when Norse legends described them as feeding on rain and darkness. There are whale species we’ve never seen alive – we only know they exist because we’ve found their bodies washed ashore. Even among so-called well-known species, we still don’t know where some of them give birth, nor how they find their food, nor how they think (sperm whales have brains six times the size of ours, and more spindle neurons associated with speech and empathy than we do), nor what they communicate (many whale languages may be as complex as ours).

Nor do we know if whales are actually rebounding after all our centuries of attentive slaughter. Some species, like southern-hemisphere humpbacks, seem to be doing very well; others, like critically endangered Antarctic blue whales (the largest animals on the planet), fin whales (the second-largest), sei and sperm whales, seem not to be gaining ground – and we don’t know why. But we can hazard a guess.

Humans kill at least 300,000 cetaceans (including dolphins and porpoises) every year. The greatest cause of death, and the biggest threat – even bigger, at this moment, than climate change – is the fishing industry, and the untold deaths caused due to animals being caught as bycatch in fishing harvests, or fatally entangled in lines, ropes and nets. Whales are also struck by ships and washed up on beaches with their bellies full of plastic. Their ears and sensitive biosonar systems are damaged by the cacophony of noise that increasingly fills our oceans, interfering with their ability to feed, navigate and find each other. All this, plus the climate crisis. It seems a fair assumption that it is us – still us – who are killing the whales.

From left, Chris Johnson, Natalia Botero-Acosta and Ari Friedlaender. “There are days where it is hard, and the work is tough,” Johnson says. Credit: Ted Grambeau

Scientists, of course, are not keen on assumptions. They’re all about the hard data, baby, none of this rain and darkness nonsense. Which is why we’re all sitting in this tiny rubber boat on this big black sea on the edge of this great white continent. Chris Johnson, the Melbourne-based global head of whale research at the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF); Professor Ari Friedlaender from the Institute of Marine Sciences at UC Santa Cruz; and Natalia Botero-Acosta, director of Macuáticos Colombia Foundation, have all travelled to the uniquely rich waters of the Antarctic Peninsula to study the area’s nine known species of whale. They’ve hitched a ride on Ocean Endeavour, a small Antarctic expedition ship run by Australian-founded tour company Intrepid Travel. Intrepid gives the scientists berths and space for their equipment and samples, along with use of the Zodiac boats, in exchange for regular research updates to the paying passengers. The scientists, in return, save the enormous costs of fitting out an Antarctic research vessel, as well as the carbon costs of getting here. (I’m also here as a guest of Intrepid.)

Their task this week is threefold: to take skin and blubber biopsies via a crossbow dart (fired in a very Erik the Viking way by Botero-Acosta from the prow of the Zodiac) that reveals gender, ovulation/pregnancy status, maturity and stress levels; to tag whales using a $18,000 suction tag made by an Australian company that can re-create a 3D “day in the life of a whale” record; and to take drone footage that can identify individual whales and calculate their size, health and body condition.

Friedlaender has been collecting whale data in the Antarctic for 25 years. Last year, he, Botero-Acosta and Johnson collaborated with more than 50 research groups around the world, pooling 30 years of information to provide the first comprehensive international report on whale migration. The Protecting Blue Corridors Report, published by WWF, highlights how the cumulative impact of industrial fishing, ship strikes, pollution, habitat loss and climate change threatens whales in all their critical ocean habitats – the places they feed, mate, give birth and nurse their young – as well as along their epic migration superhighways, the “blue corridors”. But it also shows the existential – and unexpected – dangers facing them in what I, at least, presumed to be a place of solace and safety: Antarctica.

“Antarctic krill is the crucial Jenga piece: you pull it out and the entire tower collapses.”

Chris Johnson, global head of whale research at the World Wide Fund for Nature

For southern-hemisphere whales, Antarctica is the end point of their colossal annual migrations – up to a 17,000-kilometre round trip, the second-longest of any mammal. (Only the Arctic grey whale’s is longer.) And for the duration of many of these journeys, baleen whales do not eat. A female humpback is so strong that in a good year, she can swim as far as the equator, calve, mate and fall pregnant again, and make the return journey while nursing a calf, all without eating (other than, perhaps, the odd opportunistic snack). Perilously, the only place she really feeds is in Antarctica.

Of course, when whales like this arrive here they’re starving; they might make 500 feeding lunges a day, and consume millions of kilojoules – more in a single day than a human would in years. And here’s the second perilous detail: the only thing baleen whales in the Southern Ocean eat is Antarctic krill: a tiny, prawn-like creature less than six centimetres long. Historically, krill have been so plentiful that they are the keystone food source for the entire ecosystem: multiple species of seal, penguin and seabird also rely on them. “Antarctic krill is the crucial Jenga piece: you pull it out and the entire tower collapses,” explains Johnson.

Whale superhighways: A global view of blue corridors for whales, combining satellite tracking data from more than 1000 tags from 50 researchers.Credit: Courtesy of WWF

The problem today is that human markets are also consuming Antarctic krill. We use it for three non-essential purposes: as an additive in commercial salmon feed; in pet food; and as an omega-3 supplement for humans. A dozen industrial-sized factory ships are currently hunting krill in the Antarctic: the biggest players in the industry are Norway and China. China is rumoured to have another eight krill super-trawlers planned, and there is pressure to increase the catch.

“Right now, the fishery is only taking a small percentage of the total krill biomass,” explains Friedlaender. “But they’re taking it from right here: a very small, concentrated area, during a very short period of the year. They want to catch the most they can, for the least amount of effort, in the shortest amount of time. And that’s exactly what a whale wants to do. So they are literally competing for the same resource in the same place, at the same time. “The ships could go further south,” he adds, “but it costs more, and it takes longer. They’re in it for maximum efficiency and maximum profit. So they stay here and compete with the whales. But a whale doesn’t have echo-sounders to find the krill, or nets that are miles and miles long.”

In January 2022, footage was taken of about 1000 feeding fin whales off South Orkney, north-east of the Antarctic peninsula. And right in the middle of the whales were four huge industrial krill ships, trawling arms and nets spread wide. There are no restrictions currently in place for how the commercial fisheries interact with, or avoid, whales – but such ships are, by definition, literally taking the food from their mouths. They are also killing whales directly. Three humpbacks were killed as by-catch in 2021 in krill nets, and another in January 2022.

There is only one organisation that has the power to make decisions about the Antarctic krill fishery internationally: the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR). At its meeting each October in Hobart, this 27-member commission sets and allocates the annual krill harvest. But – in what sounds like a difficult balance to achieve – CCAMLR is also responsible for the conservation of Antarctic marine ecosystems. Nevertheless, in 2009, in a recognition of the region’s unique biodiversity and richness, it committed to a network of Marine Protected Areas, or MPAs. In 2018, the Antarctic Peninsula was formally proposed as part of this network by Chile and Argentina.

MPAs are a marine version of national parks: that proposed for the Antarctic Peninsula would set aside 670,000 square kilometres of ocean habitat in which fishing would be largely banned. The benefits for the natural world would be incalculable: the food source for multiple species of whale would be protected, as would the survival of some 10,000 unique species of mammals, fish and birds. It would be like a giant biodome, pumping out oxygen, sequestering carbon, sheltering some of the most extraordinary lifeforms on the planet.

Antarctic minke whales have to compete for krill with commercial fisheries, which are now trawling it for salmon feed, pet food and omega-3 supplements.Credit: Ari Friedlaender

The Antarctic Peninsula MPA is one of three currently under consideration by CCAMLR. Australia, whose Antarctic presence lies on the Eastern side of the continent, has been working on one of the others. The Minister for the Environment and Water, Tanya Plibersek, tells Good Weekend: “I am absolutely committed to establishing an MPA in East Antarctica and will continue to lobby hard to make it a reality. The proposal would protect approximately 1 million square kilometres of the Southern Ocean – an area three times the size of Victoria. I have raised the East Antarctic marine park each and every time I have met with my overseas counterparts.”

But at every meeting in Hobart, two countries have objected to the MPA network: Russia and China. The commission operates by consensus, so these two vetoes are enough to negate the other 25 countries’ approval of the scheme. The system is gridlocked. “Every year it keeps getting put off again,” explains Chris Johnson, who attends the annual meetings. “We just can’t get it over the line. And we’re starting to get worried that it’s revealing these cracks in the system, where we just can’t agree … we just can’t come together and produce results.”

In recognition of this, a special emergency meeting of CCAMLR has been called for June in Santiago, Chile. As Johnson puts it, “We have to try and move this logjam.” Plibersek, too, says Australia remains “resolutely committed” to the MPAs. “[We] strongly supported the call for a special meeting [...] to break the impasse.”

An adult humpback whale breaching in the Gerlache Strait, Antarctica.Credit: National Geographic Creative/Robert Harding Picture Library/WWF

There have been some hopeful signs – last October, the American delegate, Monica Medina, after years of Trump-induced impotence, pushed hard for a resolution. And the more time goes by, the more the evidence mounts about the vital need for widespread protections. “That’s where we hope this work we’re doing right now will make a difference,” says Johnson. “The more evidence we have, the more effective and strong we can make the MPAs. Oftentimes governments will ask us to be aspirational, push the boundaries: ‘You guys go all the way, and we’ll try to meet you as far as we can.’ So we’ve just got to keep pushing.”

As a trio, Johnson, Friedlaender and Botero-Acosta probably know as much as anyone on the planet about Antarctic whales. Which means they know that getting the data gathered during this trip, and others like it, onto the table at CCAMLR might, ultimately, make the difference between these whales’ survival and their destruction.

Nothing like a life-or-death scenario to talk your mind off your frostbite.

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If you want to blow your mind, think of this. Whales are long-living animals – Arctic bowhead whales can live for 200 years; blue whales almost 100. So it’s statistically possible that there are still whales alive today who saw the hull of the Terra Nova, the ship carrying the world’s most famous Antarctic explorer, Robert F. Scott, on his final journey to the South Pole in 1910. The same is true for Australia’s own historic Antarctic expedition, led by Douglas Mawson in 1912, and for Ernest Shackleton’s 1915 Endurance expedition.

The heroic past feels oddly close here. Friedlaender’s mentor was trained by Mawson; Robert Scott’s only son, Peter, about whom Scott wrote in his tent before he died, “Make the boy interested in natural history if you can, it is better than games,” was a co-founder of WWF, which has grown into one of the world’s largest conservation organisations, and has been active in the Antarctic for more than 40 years.

It’s statistically possible that there are still whales alive today who saw the hull of the Terra Nova, the ship carrying the world’s most famous Antarctic explorer, Robert F. Scott, on his final journey to the South Pole in 1910.

But it also feels like the place that time forgot: half ancient Norse-saga realm of Niflheim, half modern Elsa icescapade. It’s so, well, white – white and frozen and full of ice, some lumps small enough to drop into a G&T, some as big as downed skyscrapers, scattered all over the bay as if thrown by some tantrumming ice god.

And finally, it feels like a place where time is moving at warp speed. Climate change has made the Antarctic Peninsula one of the most rapidly warming parts of the planet. And this year marked a new record low level of sea ice on the continent as a whole. As well as protecting glaciers and icecaps that would cause enormous sea-level rises if lost, and the oxygen-generating phytoplankton that thrive beneath it, sea ice is crucial habitat for minke and killer whales and several species of seals and penguins. It also shelters Antarctic krill during their larval and juvenile stages. And we already know how much depends on krill.

Each morning in the Antarctic, I put on four pairs of pants, five top layers, three sets of socks, and enormous rubber boots that I dunk in biosecurity virucidal disinfectant before Michelin-manning it down the gangway and into a Zodiac. As the days pass, I discover that these sartorial decisions are working out okay (apart from the weird patch on my left foot, which freezes on the first morning and stays frozen for the entire trip, slowly but surely developing frostbite) but that – incredibly! – my $3 beanie from Cotton On totally fails to keep my head warm, and every time I leave the ship all my facial muscles slowly become paralysed, even on sunny days. “This muh be wha Botox fees lah,” says the expedition publicist.

As if in compensation, however, we see whales on every journey: whales sleeping and rolling and lolling around as if they’re at home in front of the telly – which, in their own terms, they are. In the course of a week, the scientists methodically biopsy and film 28 humpbacks and minke whales.

On our first morning, we come upon three humpbacks, asleep in a little group on the surface. They’re lying so close together their bodies touch, a behaviour called logging (because they look like floating tree logs) which is absurdly moving – especially because the small one in the middle, lying peacefully protected on both sides, is a calf. The presence of the mother is normal, of course – but, as Botero-Acosta explains, nobody really knows why additional animals are sometimes seen with mother-baby pairs.

Again, our lack of knowledge foils us – but this time it’s an ignorance that allows for possibility, even magic. I think of the philosopher Amia Srinivasan, who has written of whales: “Contained in their mystery is the possibility that they are even more like us than we know: that their inner lives are as sophisticated as our own, perhaps even more so. Indeed, contained in whales is the possibility that the creatures are like humans, only much better: brilliant, gentle, depthful gods of the sea.”

In the days to come, Friedlaender mentions these three whales several times, inadvertently crushing all thoughts of magic. “That mother looked pretty skinny to me,” he says at one point. “You could see her shoulder blade through her blubber layer. At this time of year, these animals should be a bit more robust.”

I try not to imagine what approaching tragedy might be implicit in his words. On shore, however, there’s nothing left to the imagination. At the many gentoo penguin colonies that dot the peninsula, you can see the sharp little breastbones beneath the white feathers. For the past two years, altered weather patterns have caused unseasonably late snows here, which have forced the penguins to wait until very late to lay their eggs and hatch their chicks. This, in turn, has meant the babies are not ready to fend for themselves now that their parents are beginning their seasonal molt. Molting penguins cannot swim or hunt; so this season, for the second year in a row, parents are sitting helpless on shore while their baby chicks starve in front of them.

After two or three trips to the colonies, watching the fluffy little chicks with their dark eyes and their perfect webbed feet staggering over the stones, I can’t stand it any more, and stop going ashore. And I’m just a bystander. I think: how do the scientists, who’ve devoted their lives to the task of trying to save such creatures, bear the heartbreak?

A gentoo penguin. Credit: Courtesy of Intrepid

“There are days where it is hard, and the work is tough,” admits Johnson. “There are days at CCAMLR where you can feel very low, and it seems like things are failing. It takes an emotional toll. But things can work out. And it can change really suddenly.”

Johnson has seen it work out with his own eyes, in fact. In 2016, he was in Hobart when CCAMLR managed to pass an MPA protecting 1.57 million square kilometres of the Ross Sea, a region to the east of the Antarctic Peninsula. It’s the largest such area in the world, covering an area larger than France, Germany, Italy and the UK combined – of which 1.12 million square kilometres is fully protected (the rest allows strictly controlled harvesting of some resources). “People were crying with joy,” he recalls: “It was just the most incredible thing. And that’s what we need to remember. Antarctica is unique in the world – an area set aside for peace and science, governed by all of us, for all of us. We’ve done it before: we can do it again.”

“Antarctica is unique in the world – an area set aside for peace and science, governed by all of us, for all of us. We’ve done it before: we can do it again.”

Chris Johnson, global head of whale research at the World Wide Fund for Nature

Perhaps the arc of history is – at long, long last – swinging the way of the natural world. At the Ninth Summit of the Americas, in June last year, the governments of Chile, Canada, Colombia, Costa Rica, Mexico, Panama, Ecuador, Peru and the US signed a joint declaration: Americas for the Protection of the Ocean. “They basically committed to protect 30 per cent of their oceans in the eastern Pacific by 2030,” explains Johnson. “And that just came out of the blue – they just decided. But this work we’re doing, researching and mapping whale movement and migration corridors, will help them, as will protecting the Antarctic Peninsula.”

Of course, three of these countries – Canada, the USA and Mexico – are simultaneously contributing to the extinction of two cetacean species as we speak: the North Atlantic right whale, which lives along the North Atlantic coast between Canada and the US, and the vaquita, which is found only within the Gulf of Mexico. With as few as 10 individuals left, “vaquitas are doomed,” says Friedlaender bluntly. “They will become extinct in the next five years, maybe less.” As for the North Atlantic right whales, there are some 350 of these large, once heavily hunted whales left, of which only about 70 are breeding females. Their case is not yet hopeless, says Friedlaender; but in all three countries, it’s man-made threats – fishing nets and boat strikes – that have destroyed the species, and humans haven’t been willing to take the steps to save them. “And that’s the thing,” says Friedlaender. “It’s all very well making the commitment. But you’ve got to follow through. You’ve actually got to implement change.”

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One morning in Antarctica, I come on deck at dawn. It is totally still and completely silent. The air is pink, the light soft, the sun hidden by a high mist. The sea is as sharp and shining as the surface of a blade, and there seems not to be a curved line anywhere, only an infinity of edges and angles – like stepping inside a diamond. Then, as I reach the starboard railing, I see a humpback fluke in the distance – the perfect double curve of the tail like the sweep of a maple seed.

Chris Johnson appears, hauling his drone cases. “So if anyone was up at 4am today, and you saw an old bald guy, running through the ship screaming and crying, that was me,” he says, grinning. “The UN signed the global oceans treaty today.”

This is a major, 200-nation-strong commitment to protect, for the first time in history, the high seas: the two-thirds of the world’s oceans (and the millions of animals species, plants and resources they contain), that have no laws regulating them. At 3am Western Antarctic time on March 6, after 36 hours of continuous negotiation at the United Nations HQ in New York, during which delegates ate cold pizza, slept on conference-room floors, argued and closed their laptops in fury to walk away, then opened them up again to keep trying, agreement was finally reached. The president of the conference, Singaporean Rena Lee, mounted the podium. “The ship has reached the shore,” she said. The room erupted in applause, and she bowed her head several times, then put her hands to her mouth, in tears.

This treaty will not stop Antarctic krill fishing, or halt climate change, or actually eradicate any of the threats facing whales at all. Like everything else envisioned by man to help the natural world, it now requires detail and ongoing agreements and implementation: not only commitment, but follow-through, as Friedlaender puts it.

But at least we know it’s possible. Just as we know we now have the technology, and the economic power, to halt climate change. Whether we do so or not is now a question of political will – which actually comes down to individual decisions by people like you and me, and the politicians we elect. It’s easy to forget this sometimes: that we still have the chance to come down on the right side of history.

We don’t know what whales know. But we do know, now, enough to save them.

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