Back From the Brink: Star Trek and the Humpback Whale

In Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, the humpback whale is nearly extinct. By the twenty-third century of that particular universe, it’s gone. That’s the plot, and that’s the problem Kirk and his ever-loyal crew have to solve.

By 1986 when the film was released, Star Trek, a quirky Sixties television show canceled after three seasons (and it had to fight for the last one), was well on its way to becoming a cultural icon. It had found new life and new viewers in a series of feature films, and in 1987, the first spinoff series, Star Trek: Next Generation, would begin its seven-season run. More films and more series would follow.

The influence of Star Trek is broad and deep, and “the one with the whales” is no exception. Its message is clear: Human interference has brought innumerable species to or past the brink of extinction. The humpback whale, one of the largest animals that ever lived, had been hunted so relentlessly that there were only a few hundred left. Even after whaling was banned, the hunt continued, and we see it on the screen, with George and Gracie standing in for all the whales who had been killed or were about to be killed.

In the Trek universe, the hunt goes on and the species is exterminated, with dire consequences for the future of Earth. It’s even been speculated that Kirk’s way-out-of-the-box attempt to save the species and the planet may have contributed to the whales’ extinction. I don’t know that I agree, but it is an interesting take on the film.

In our universe, the film did a thing that Star Trek has done remarkably often. It educated while it entertained. It got people thinking about the plight of the whales. And it contributed to something remarkable.

The humpback started to come back. The ban on hunting had a good deal to do with it, but raising awareness and making people care goes a long way toward influencing how they act and how they think. By the first quarter of the twenty-first century, instead of being exterminated, the whales’ numbers had risen significantly. They might even have been comparable to what they were before modern commercial whaling began.

Experts were astounded. These huge and gentle creatures with their eerily beautiful songs were back. If an alien probe happened to show up in our solar system, there would be thousands of responses, instead of none at all.

That’s a miracle, and it’s wrapped in a mystery. Only the male whales sing, but no one knows exactly why. Mating calls? Communications? Art and entertainment? Whatever the reason, the ocean is echoing and re-echoing with the song of the whales.

At one point during his almost-year with My Octopus Teacher, Craig Foster tried an experiment. Octopuses, he read, are actually nocturnal. He had been doing his dives during the day, but he ventured into the kelp forest at night. It was a different world, and one of the things that made it truly magical were the resounding echoes of whale song through the darkened forest.

Humpback whales are world travelers. They feed for half of the year in the cold, nutrient-rich waters around the poles, scooping up tons upon tons of krill and tiny fish. Then for half the year they migrate to warmer waters to breed and give birth to their calves.

Foster’s kelp forest is located on the western cape of South Africa, the Cape of Storms. It’s a major feeding ground for humpback whales. At just about the time Foster was studying his octopus, something was happening that modern science had not seen before.

Whales were gathering en masse in those waters. Humpbacks are not gregarious by nature. Mostly they travel alone, or with just one or two companions. A “supergroup” may consist of around a dozen whales. These were super-mega-maxi-groups, as many as 200 strong. And they were gathering in summer, when they would normally have migrated to the antarctic to feed.

These supergroups were spotted off the coast of South Africa at intervals through the 2010s. They were hunting and feeding, which was not normal for that location or that time of year. Researchers were baffled as to why.

There were several possibilities. Unusually high numbers of prey species in those waters. Unusually high number of whales putting pressure on their usual feeding grounds and pushing them out to these areas. Or maybe this is how and where they used to hunt before they were driven almost to extinction. It’s not anomalous behavior. It’s behavior that had been disrupted by human interference.

That was good news, and a bright spot in the annals of the earth’s species. But there’s a darker side to it. In recent years, humpback numbers have dropped in certain areas, notably the northern Pacific. They’re what’s known as a bellwether species, an indicator of the effects of ecological shifts. And it seems they’re losing ground again, not to hunters but to something more insidious and inherently more dangerous: human-caused climate change.

What will happen to them, whether or how they’ll survive the warming oceans, we don’t know. Will they make it to the twenty-third century after all? Only time will tell.