The Last Of Us: The Rice’s Whale

Imagine you are a whale of the Rice’s whale species. Your year-round home is one very special pocket of ocean, known to humans as the Gulf of Mexico. You are different from other whale species in this way, because you chose to stay put rather than migrate across the globe. As part of the greater whale species, you are intelligent, and you communicate in ways humans don’t yet fully understand. You sing and you ‘talk’, and you use your critical senses of sound and hearing to pass down ancestral knowledge. On a daily basis, you use these survival skills to help your pod find food and avoid danger. 

For millions of years, your home was a peaceful place to exist, a perfectly balanced ecosystem, abundant with marine life and wide open space, as nature intended. This specific ocean territory is the one for which you are uniquely adapted. You specifically evolved to exist here, and it is not in your DNA to just up and move, just as it’s not in a human’s DNA to suddenly go from living for generations near the equator to migrating to the Arctic. Adaptation and evolution is a process over long periods of time. 

Over the last hundred years, a blip in your species’ timeline, foreign sounds and dangerous objects began to infiltrate your ocean home. It became loud and dangerous. The serene underwater soundscape was abruptly disrupted by engines, drills, seismic guns, and horns. Thousands of massive metal structures punctured the sea floor and obstructed the surface. Enormous, fast moving ships and tankers plowed continuously and recklessly above. You spend much of your time at the surface, both to breathe and to rest. Now, spending time there is a looping brush with death. 

Human-built and operated ships are a major cause of death and serious injury to the entire whale species. So is entanglement in commercial fishing nets. And the ingestion of marine debris, like plastic waste. And noise pollution. Oh the incessant, torturous noise that fills your once-quiet home. Not dissimilar to the human practice of psychological warfare through ‘torture music’ used on other humans in captivity. All sea life must suffer from these mechanical ocean horrors. But the noise pollution goes beyond physical harm. It reduces your capacity to communicate. Your voices are drowned out by the loud, ongoing, reverberating shouts and screams from the infiltrators. You can no longer rely on your voice to warn your clan of dangers ahead. You can no longer find food as easily, for we believe those species, too, have been disrupted by the foreigners, and increasingly, by climate-fueled warming waters. 

One by one, your species began to disappear. Struck by ships and killed instantly. Injured unnaturally by ship or rope and sentenced to live in intense pain for as long as it took to take you. Disoriented by human-made noise to the point of starvation and infertility. Your casualties of their war lay dead now on the ocean floor. 

It got worse. The foreigners continued their conquest beyond shallower waters into the deep sea. Then in 2010, a catastrophic event. The Gulf of Mexico Massacre, at the human-hand of the deep sea rig, dubbed Deepwater Horizon. Black oil arose from a grave it was never meant to escape. It swallowed much of the life that once swam freely above it. In an instant, a further 22% of your species alone was exterminated. Now there are 51. 

Fifty-one individuals of your kind remain alive on this Earth. It is sad and lonely now, knowing what the future holds: emptiness. For you and your kin, there is no future, there is only the time that remains in this moment of life on this version of Earth. It’s no longer a good life. Bringing newborn calves into this new world is a death sentence preceded by a life of danger and disruption. Life among the now ubiquitous, loud, uncomfortable, and unnatural sounds from the invasive species above is not a life any living creature should endure. Nor is a life where the risk of death is present every time you simply come up for air. The miracle that you and your species are, a present day miracle reflecting back millions of years on the very formation of complex life on Earth, is close to extinction. 

And as we speak, plans are being made on dry, abused land specifically aiming to seal the fate of your critically endangered species, the majestic Rice’s whale. The “God Squad” of Americans, a corral of just 6 individuals from the Homo sapiens species, will decide whether to keep one of their destructive self-interested activities alive at the expense of you and other marine species. Will they choose to extinct a dying species as a statement-making declaration to extract what is equivalent to a drop in the bucket more from an over-exploited area of Earth’s ocean just to prop up an industry that itself must die if we are all to live? You, Rice’s whale do not need to die or suffer any more. Humans don’t need anything more from your home. They never did to begin with. If the rest of us could only make the few evil ones see through the thick smog of pollution choking their minds and souls, then maybe there is a chance for you. But if we fail you, please know the good of us will never stop fighting for all that remains.

As the darkness approaches and you swim, glide, twirl, dive, breach, and suspend in these waters which held all of your ancestors before you, you must wonder if all of it, someday, will get the chance to begin once again. See you in another world, dear friend.

Photo Credit: NOAA Fisheries/Laura Dias (Permit #21938)