I Went Looking for A Dead Baby Whale
The other morning I went looking for a dead baby whale, I couldn't stop thinking about it. For some reason I felt like I needed to see it again or at least know it was gone and not rotting on the rocks.
Normally every Winter I make a concerted effort to head down the beach for as many sunrises as I can. The winters here aren't that bad but sunrise is at a much more respectable hour, yet for all the reasons I hadn't made a single sunrise this Winter. You know kids, working way too much and just being, well, tired of life a little bit. This morning had actually been rescheduled a couple of times already but I’d finally made it down to the beach to watch the sunrise.
My friend Madi, had reached out a couple weeks ago for one last photoshoot together before they moved to the UK. So just before first light we clambered down the stairs, on to the beach and over the rocks at the south end of the bay. I don’t like to rush, ever really, and one should definitely not rush the sunrise, lest it not come up. So we waited for ten minutes or so in the early blue light of the day, chatting and catching up. Slowly we made our way over to where we hoped to take some photos and there layed a dead, new born humpback whale.
The sun broke the horizon a minute or so later.
Humpback whales are about four metres in length when they’re born and this one was barely that. Or at least it seemed smaller, as I stripped off and jumped into the shallow water around the rocks. I gently rubbed its belly, getting slightly rough each time, trying to see if I could wake it and maybe help it back to the ocean. My uneducated guess is that it was dead before it hit the rocks. Maybe it was still born or maybe it died of exhaustion.
Humpback whales are currently making their way up the East coast of so called Australia to the tropics. In the tropics its been a long held belief that they dodge the Antarctic winter to mate and give birth. While this is the apparent norm due to them having nearly been hunted to extinction there’s a bunch we don’t know about humpback whales.
A recent study led by Jane McPhee-Frew (UNSW) has documented humpback calves 1500km further south than their assumed birth zone. It also appears they aren't going all the way up to the Great Barrier Reef as much anymore.
According to Griffith University marine scientist Olaf Meynecke, this could be a response to changes in food availability but a likely contributor is an earlier sea ice melt in the Antarctic and faster warming in Antarctica.
So maybe this dead baby humpback was our fault. Maybe it was born too early in the colder southern waters and died of exhaustion shortly after. Washing up on the rocks for a Winter sunrise.
Currently there’s a major algal bloom happening off the coast of so called South Australia. The harmful algae dominating the bloom is called, Karenia mikimotoi. A few things contributed to the bloom but a major factor was a marine heatwave in September 2024 which saw ocean temperatures 2.5 degrees above normal. The Karenia mikimotoi, damages the gills of marine life and is currently causing thousands of marine animals to drown. Washing up onto the shores of so called South Australia’s coastline. A photography duo I admire, Narelle Autio and Trent Parke aka Chillioctopus, started sharing beautiful but devastating imagery of the dead sea life the same day I found the dead whale.
A couple days later I had to go back. I had to know if it was still there or not. I couldn’t stop thinking about this dead whale and how maybe my lifestyle had contributed to it being there. A recent study by McGill University researchers indicated that humpbacks rely on a mixture of environmental cues with their memories to tell them when to migrate.
“Every year since 2016 has been the warmest on record, and that pattern is speeding up. At some point, their memory-based strategy may no longer work.” said Professor Virginie Millien, a biologist and lead author of the study published in Scientific Reports.
Are we starting to see the beginning of the humpback whales memories failing them? How long until we start regularly seeing dead baby whales washed up on the rocks?
I don’t know why I wanted to start this 1000th attempt at blogging and writing with this story but I think it's because it's happening, this could be it. The polycrisis of a white westerners making is coming to fruition. Almost like we’re all out of good ideas and maybe we’re realising we’re the bad guys. But instead of changing course we’re making sure that we drag the rest of humanity and world down with us while getting fat on the last of the lobster and drinkable water.
