Whale of a Rescue
25:16 Share

Radiolab for Kids is supported by IXL. IXL is an online learning program that helps to enrich homeschool curriculums, offering practice in math, science, social studies, and more. Their programs are designed to meet kids where they're at, helping them develop curiosity and determination all the way through 12th grade, no matter your child's learning style or knowledge level.

Ixl has built-in tools like video tutorials, detailed explanations, and learning games to guide your child in the way they learn best while meeting them at their level. Make an impact on your child's learning. Get Ixl now. Radiolab for Kids listeners can get an exclusive 20% off Ixl membership when they sign up today at ixl.com slash rlkids. Visit ixl.com slash rlkids to get the most effective learning program out there at the best price.

Radio Lab for Kids is supported by the New York Hall of Science, a hands-on science center and STEM learning lab in New York City. Looking for summer day trips that make you feel like you are traveling through time and space?

Visit the Hall of Science for a stellar day with the whole family. The Great Hall, an iconic building created during the space age, gives the feeling of floating in deep space. Outside, see real NASA rockets, a Friendship 7 replica, outer space-themed mini-golf, and more. Plus, there's lots of hands-on exhibits inside, including a Mars rover. Visit nysci.org for more. Listener supported. WNYC Studios. Wait, you're listening? Okay.

All right. Okay. All right. You're listening to Radiolab. Radiolab. Radiolab. From WNYC. WNYC. Yeah. Hello, friends. Lulu here. So our terrestrial season is over. There will be brand new episodes in the spring. But in the meantime, we're going to keep this feed popping with all kinds of neat animal stories that come from Radiolab.

Radio Lab is a show that's been on for over 20 years. It's where I learned how to make radio, and it is full of some of the best stories about the natural world, about plants and animals that I've ever heard. And so I'm going to be hand-selecting them, giving you a little intro, and that'll be dropping every other week here. So we hope you keep listening in. And I will say...

There may be some terrestrial surprises as well. What? Little treats of us dropping in with new songs, new stories. Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. So keep your ear here. It'll always be family friendly and hopefully always be a good time. So...

Bringing us to today. The story I want to play for you today is one of my all-time favorite radio labs. And I'm actually in it in a small way. I was a young producer just starting out. And hosts Jad Abumrad and Robert Krolwich gave me the assignment to go up to this big cathedral in Manhattan because they said it would be full of animals. Meow!

And it was wild. It was truly wild, literally wild. And that's all I'll say. You will hear what it sounds like and you will learn why they were there as you listen to the story. So without further ado, kicking it off to Jad and Robert. I hope you enjoy. So where are we?

We're in a church. In a church? Well, that's different for us. It's not usually where we start. We're in a church. Cathedral, really. A huge cathedral in upper Manhattan. St. John the Divine. Got an organ. The preacher. Congregation, of course. Couple thousand people in the pews, at least. Your basic Sunday service. Except today.

You've also got... Here it comes. Dogs. The reason we begin here is because today the church is filled with dogs. Can I talk to you about your dog? Yeah. What's his or her name? His name is Blizzard. And what is he? He's a Labrador and poodle mix. Well, I have Legend, who I just adopted in January. I have Denzel. Oh, by the way...

More than dogs, you've got birds. His name is Jesse. It's a barn owl. And now, has this guy ever been blessed before? I don't think so, no. He was just born this year. And hamsters? His name is Tubby. Teddy Toes. And all kinds of creatures. We've got a little girl with a falcon in behind her. Oh, it's a giant tortoise. This is the St. Francis Day of the Animals. It's a yearly event. Coming tortoise. Where people bring their animals to be blessed. There's a donkey.

The folks that are gathered here... There's a little girl with a hermit crab. They don't think there's anything weird or inappropriate about this. In fact, if you ask them... And here comes a bull. Here's what they say. I don't know if it means anything to her, but it means it to me. Because, you know, you want to...

baptize your babies and this is more or less the same kind of thing. And what does it mean to you? It just means when she finally does go away, she's going to go to heaven. And what kind of parent is she? Oh, yeah, don't put your hand near his face. And what's his name? Chuckles. Do you feel like he has a soul or an inner life of some sort? It's a thinking being. They're as smart as we are, really. Jack? Yeah? Since you invited me here, I don't want to be impolite or anything like that.

Say what you gotta say. Well, okay. These people, of course they love their animals. Sure, yeah, you can hear that. But aren't they presuming a little bit that the animals they love are going to feel the grace of the prayer or feel the blessing, which is a... Well, which raises a question. What do we really know about what goes on inside the animal's mind? Yeah. All those things you might feel in a church. Grace, gratitude, guilt.

Can the animals feel those things too? How much can we share? And can you measure it? Yeah. I'm Jad Abumrad. I'm Robert Goldwich. This is Radiolab. Okay, just to get things rolling, this is a story that we heard about first from the following dude. Hey, is it Mick or is it Mike? I go by Mick. There's way too many Mikes around. Mick Menego is his name. And we met Mick recently at the Emeryville Marina, which is not far from San Francisco.

where he's got a boat called the Superfish that Mick says he rents out for all kinds of things. Nature trips to ash scattering, bachelor parties, fireworks watching, I don't know. I got a little cardboard sign. I stand by the freeway. It says, have boat, need work. So yeah, that's Mick. And our story begins one morning in December. Probably 8 o'clock in the morning or something, as I recall. It was a few years back. Mick was just kind of sitting at home. I was at home, yeah. It was the middle of December. We didn't have any work. But then he gets this call.

It was a call relaying a message from a fisherman way out at sea. So after he hangs up, Mick immediately calls a few dive buddies. And then, let's see...

James Mosquito. James Mosquito. Professional diver. I called him and said, hey, you know, here's the deal. Are you interested? He was a no-brainer. I said, yeah, I'm in. Absolutely. Figured, all right, we're going. So I packed up my stuff, grabbed my gear, and I went directly to the boat. And we left underneath the Golden Gate Bridge. Nothing but the horizon in front of us. My name is Holly Dreard. I am James's significant other. We motored out for about two hours.

I had to do west towards the Farallon Islands. What were you feeling when you were on the boat heading out? I didn't think we'd find her. I really didn't. But about 18 miles off the coast, completely open water, one of the divers spots some crab buoys in the distance and some seagulls flying overhead. And as they got closer... I saw the whale. It was just... Just the very top of the whale. Sticking up about maybe six inches out of the water. At the surface. A tiny sliver of black. And that was it.

I said, okay, we need to see what's going on. So Tim and James jump into an inflatable boat, and they paddle about a couple hundred feet from the whale. And it just wasn't happening. Every time that this whale came on up, it would just displace the boat back again.

So it would push us back again. Not to mention... The visibility in the water was just terrible. They couldn't even see down there to see, you know, what they were dealing with. And, you know what, sometimes plans have to change. So Tim and James look at each other, and without saying a word... Boom. We got out of the boat and slashed into the water. And I see a shadow. This massive animal. A hazy silhouette. And we just started swimming. ♪

to the whale about 100 feet away. You know, parts of blubber and skin floating around. 35 feet, 20 feet. And then they see it. My goodness, this thing's the size of a school bus. A female humpback whale is one of the largest creatures on the planet. 50 feet long, 50 tons. And this particular whale was in a kind of C-shape.

where its head was at the top of the water, but its tail was almost pointed directly down. It was almost like somebody was pulling her down by the tail to the bottom of the ocean. Yeah. There was probably 20 crab traps, 2,000 pounds at least, just tied up to the tail. She had just become an anchor. An anchor. And to see her not be able to move that tail and to struggle. Just like... The whale was actually really laboring to breathe. Yeah.

It's a little puff, and there's just rope everywhere. It went around the whale's mouth, around the whale's head. Across her eye, over her back. Wrapped around the pectoral fins, all the way down to his tail. I thought there was no hope. There's no chance. We're looking at a dead whale. The whale just doesn't know it yet. But I knew that I had to try. Went to swim to the whale. And as soon as I decided, okay, I'm going to swim to the whale, well, the whale decided she wasn't going to have that.

What'd she do? She put up her pectoral fin, which is like her arm, and this pectoral fin's about 15 feet long. It's about four feet wide, and she just splashed down the water in front of me. You know, it's the size of an airplane wing coming down on top of you, just inches from my head. So at that point, I backed off and waited.

waited for the whale to settle down. She was physically exhausted. Which she did. And then they both swim back. James goes to the tail and Tim up to the whale's head. You know, I was there with a six-inch dive knife. Cutting out line right near her eye. Which was the size of a grapefruit. And her eye was moving, keeping an eye on me. Really? Absolutely. He would go left or I would go left. He'd go right or I would go right. She was tracking me.

And all the while, they're just cutting as much rope as they can. You really had to saw at it. It was very strong, very tight. Sometimes I'd cut a rope and it would be a loose rope and all of a sudden something else would tighten up, which was the one rope that would let it all free. This whole process took hours. But finally, James gets to the end of it. He's at the tail sawing his way through that big clump of line and he realizes at a certain point...

But to cut through all that line... I'm going to have to stab the whale to get my knife underneath the rope. It was that tight, though. I jabbed my knife into the whale's tail and pulled the rope and then cut it. And at once the rope went... It was a very surreal moment looking down and seeing the 20 crab traps and buoys just disappear into the abyss. And just like that...

the whale was gone. I'm spinning around going where'd she go where'd she go? But as the water settled they realized they'd done it. They'd freed her. As soon as I came up I was like whooping it up and yelling unbelievable. I was screaming. Can you imagine? Now here's where the story takes a pretty startling turn. In fact the whole reason we wanted to tell this story to begin with is for what happens next. So Tim and James and the other divers are in the water they're celebrating high-fiving and then all of a sudden

James looks down. Next thing I know, I have this 50-ton whale coming right at me. I'm thinking, oh my God, stop, I just saved you. Wait, so this whale is coming at you from below, like jaws? Yeah, she's rising up towards me. Oh God. And I'm just thinking, this is going to hurt. And when she was only inches away from my chest, she stopped and pushed me on the chest backwards.

And then released me and then kind of pushed again and then released and pushed again and again. And then she swam up right next to me, picks her head up above the water so that her eye was above the water and then came up and looked directly at me. And for what felt like 30 seconds, he says, she just stared at him. The pupil didn't move around. She wasn't looking for anything else. She was just looking at me.

You're in the presence of something that great. Makes you feel small. It really was a very emotional feeling. I wasn't quite sure what to make of it. But then he says she went off to the next diver. Did the same thing. I remember distinctly I was 18 inches away from her eye and she just looked at me and let me touch her and then swam off. Then she went off to the next diver and did the same thing and the next person and did the same thing. One by one. Coming up right next to him.

looking at him really good, inches away, eyeballing him. She swam around every diver. All the guys got it. So it was about dusk. The water was glass flat. I was sitting at the helm of the boat, just in awe. And they had to leave the whale. She didn't want to leave them. And there's a real question here. What exactly was that whale doing or saying? Was she saying anything? If you ask James or Tim or Mick or any of the other divers that were in the water that day,

They'll tell you. I felt this whale was really thanking us. I know it sounds crazy, but I could see the look in her eye. This mammal, this 50-ton mammal was literally saying thanks. Thanks for helping me out. And, you know, I'll bring that to my grave, knowing the gratification that I felt. We'll be back in a moment. We'll be back in a moment.

All right, we're back. On with the story.

So what do you think? I mean, here's the question, really. Was that whale saying thank you? Was the whale saying, well, I think the whale was saying something. I mean, a whale, if she was just free of her ropes, I would think she would just go off and say, woof, I'm free. So the fact that she would. That she hung around. And make these specific visits. Like, I don't know. I feel that there's something intentional about that.

She didn't leave anyone out, right? No. In fact, according to one of the guys on the boat, she actually went to the boats and did the same thing to the boats. She said thank you to the boats? Yeah. Well, then. So she was looking at the people, but she also thought that the craft was something she had to say thank you or deal with. Yeah. So maybe she was just sighted. Maybe she was just... I really don't know what... I mean, I don't feel completely comfortable just saying... Of course, I know what I want to feel. Yeah, me too. But let's just try to...

Straighten up for a second. We have a guy named Clive Wynn, who teaches at the University. Hello. Hey. Oh, hi. Is this Mr. Clive Wynn? Yeah, this is Clive Wynn. Hi. Clive is with the Psychology Department at the University of Florida. Who am I talking to? Who's this? This is Jad from Radio 11. Right. Hi, Jad. Clive also happens to be an expert on animal psychology. Hi. This is Robert also. Hi, Robert. Can you hear us pretty well? I can hear you pretty well. I'm wondering how well I'm going to distinguish your voices.

Oh. No need to do that. Treat us as a unitary figure. Yeah. Okay. Listen, let me begin. This is Robert talking. We'll tell you a story, and we want to know what you think of the story. So once upon a time, and not too long ago... All right, we're going to fast forward a bit. Because we ran Clive through the entire whale story, front to back. So my question to you is, if a diver said to you, this whale said thank you to me, what would you say? Well...

I would be put in a difficult situation because I don't doubt that what these people experienced was a very moving moment with that whale. But the problem is I just don't speak whale. So I don't know what thank you looks like in whale. If I'm going to be a cynic about it, I would say, well, the whale has been trapped for, I believe, over a day.

and may just be disoriented. Well, but this was parking herself with one individual and then moving to the next. That's not a distracted. That looks like it's got some intention. It shows some interest in the individuals. I'll give you that. But how do we get from that to deducing that the whale is trying to express thanks? What do you mean? Let's play a different example. Let's suppose that you found a bear in the woods that was caught up in some netting that ended up in the woods, and you worked for hours to free the bear.

and then the bear eats you, does that mean that the bears are an ungrateful species of animal? Yes. No, I don't truly believe that. Right, well, so, I mean, it would make as much sense to ascribe ingratitude to the bear as it does to ascribe gratitude to the whale. Are you saying that you don't know if there's a possibility of sharing or that you don't think that there's a possibility of sharing at an emotional level between two species?

Um...

I don't doubt that there is the possibility of sharing between two species. I mean, I see it with dogs all the time. But I think it would be a mistake if we thought that the love we feel for our dogs is the same feeling that the dog has back to us. It has different qualities. But when you pet your dog and it wags its tail and it seems happy to see you, do you just not trust that? Well, okay, so let me make clear that I wear two hats. When I'm talking about a dog, when the dog pants back at me, I just hug the dog and let him kiss me, and that's...

That's life with a dog. But if I'm now wearing my scientific hat, then I ask myself, what do these behaviors mean among dogs? There's a beautiful study

that came out recently from Alexandra Horowitz. I'm Alexandra Horowitz, and I study dog cognition. Where do we find her? She's around the corner from you. She's at Barnard College. So we sent our producer, Soren Wheeler, to meet her, and he ended up hanging out with her and her dog, Finnegan, in the park.

She did this beautiful experiment that shows that when people think their dog is looking guilty, actually the dog is just being submissive.

So here's what she did. She tracked down a bunch of dog owners. Posted them Craigslist and put out posters. And she found a bunch of owners who believe that, like most dog owners do, that their dogs feel guilt. Yes, my dog feels guilty when he's done something wrong. And then she set up a situation where all of the dog owners had to scold their dogs because, you know, they had been told that their dogs did something bad.

But the trick of the experiment is that only half the dogs had done something wrong. Half the dogs had actually been naughty, and half the dogs had not been naughty. But then she... Misinformed the owners. Lied to half of the owners. So we lied to the owners. So even the owners whose dogs hadn't been bad thought their dogs had been bad. So everybody scolded their dog. And almost everyone did this the same way, which was to say no loudly to their dog and maybe put their hands on their hip and express disapproval. No. Yes. Finnegan. I can't believe you, Aiden.

Finnegan. Oh, good old. It's okay. See, Finnegan just made the look, even though he hadn't done anything wrong. And that's essentially what she found. Even the non-guilty dogs made the guilty look. It didn't matter whether the dog had transgressed or not. All that mattered was whether it was being chastised by its owner. So bad dog, bad dog. Right. That creates the look, not the deed. That's exactly right.

But for me, the pivotal question here is not whether or not they all had the look, but what's attached to that look? What feeling in the dog is attached to that guilty look? Maybe the dogs who were falsely accused still felt bad. Well, maybe they did. Maybe they did. And maybe there are angels on top of this control console here. The angel of love.

I thought it was a perfectly valid question. Anyhow. We should thank Alexandra Horowitz. Her latest book is called Inside of a Dog. That'll do it for today. Thank you so much for listening.

Stay alert out there in the water and above it for the creatures who might need you and the ones who might be blinking gratitude your way if you just look close.

More stories about this lumpy old planet of ours coming up in two weeks. Hi, this is Tim Young out in California on my first take of reading the Radiolab credits. So here goes. Radiolab is funded in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the National Science Foundation. Hi, this is Clive Wynn and Radiolab is produced by WMYC. Hi, I'm Emma and I live in Portland, Maine.

Here are the staff credits. Radio Lab was created by Jad Abumrad and is edited by Soren Wheeler. Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser are our co-hosts. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Our staff includes Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Bressler, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gable, Maria Paz Gutierrez, Sindhu Jnanasambandam, Matt Kielty, Annie McEwen, Alex Neeson, Valentina Powers, Sara Khari,

♪♪