The Ocean's Unexpected Heroes

Humpback whales are known to put themselves in danger to save the life of another species. Is it animal altruism, or is something else at work?

- Elin Kelsey

IN 1982, WHILE I WAS ATTENDING the University of Guelph, the owner of Peter Clark Hall, a college pub, offered me a job as a bouncer. He reasoned that folks would be less likely to get into a brawl with a friendly female than they would a large, hairy dude.

Always a sucker for a social science experiment, I gamely took the gig. One black eye and a wrenched shoulder later, I quit. What my boss and I hadn’t fully appreciated is that by the time a person needs to be removed from a bar, his or her capacity to discern who is doing the removing has vanished. When the urge to fight erupts, any target will do.

I shared this story with Fred Sharpe, a humpback whale researcher with the Alaska Whale Foundation, and he described the remarkable capacity humpback whales have to do just what those drunks could not—hone their aggression.

“The bulls love to fight. It’s like Saturday night in the Octagon,” he says, referring to the Ultimate Fighting Championship venue. “You’ll be in a whale-watching boat at an appropriate distance and all these males will be thrashing on each other. They’re bloodied and charged up, and the fact that they don’t redirect all that agitation toward the occupants of the boat is remarkable. With a great deal of predators, if you got in the middle of that, it would be aimed at you in an instant. Humpbacks are these amazing Buddhist warriors.”