Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb.
And I'm Joe McCormick, and we're back with part two in our series on that most charismatic anatomical feature of whales, the blowhole, also known as the spiracle or the spout. If you are just joining us and you haven't heard part one, you might want to hop back in the timeline and listen to that one first. That's where we go over a lot of the basic science of the blowhole.
But as I mentioned last time, this is a subject that I was tempted to look into because there is a whole chapter about the spout in the classic nineteenth century American novel Moby Dick by Herman Melville. Now, if you've ever read Moby Dick, you'll probably recall that it is not all high speed whale chases and heroics by Queek Wegg and mad sermons of vengeance by Captain Ahab An. Awful lot of the book is made up of chapters that could be considered strange, thoughtful little essays on objects
both technological and biological. Technological subjects like various pieces of whaling equipment and things on ships, and biological subjects like the various parts of a sperm whale's body. And one
of the latter chapters is called the Fountain. It concerns the blowhole, and I thought this this would make an interesting subject for us, in particular because the chapter raises a number of practical controversies about the biology of whale spouts, as well as some tantalizing but questionable claims about sprays of blubbery venom from the whole. Now, among the primary controversies that concern the narrator Ishmael in this chapter is the question what is it exactly that shoots out of
the whale's spout? What are the plumes that whaling ships used to locate these animals out on the high seat? And of course these are still you know, people looking for the whale blow is still what like whale watchers
today would use to look for these animals? Is it a towering jet of water blasting as if from a fire hose, as it is often depicted, I'd say most often depicted, or is it nothing more than gas, vapor or misst And to get as started here, I want to read from this chapter in Moby Dick articulating this first question, Are you all right if I read this? Rob, go for it? Okay, okay, this is what Ishmael says. You have seen him spout, then declare what the spout is?
Can you not tell water from air? My dear sir, In this world it is not so easy to settle these plain things. I have ever found your plane things the nattiest of all. And as for this whale spout, you might almost stand in it and yet be on decided as to what it is. Precisely the central body of it is hidden in the snowy, sparkling mist enveloping it. And how can you certainly tell whether any water falls
from it? When always, when you are close enough to a whale to get a close view of his spout, he is in a prodigious commotion, the water cascading all around him. And if at such times you should think that you really perceived drops of moisture in the spout, how do you know that they are not merely condensed from its vapor? Or how do you know that they are not those identical drops superficially lodged in the spout whole fissure which is countersunk into the summit of the
whale's head. For even when tranquility swimming through the midday sea in a calm with his elevated hump sun dried as a dromedaries in the desert, even then, the whale always carries a small basin of water on his head. As under a blazing sun, you will sometimes see a cavity in a rock filled up with rain.
Whoa who this kind of went off the rails. Yeah, and here what.
You do not agree that whales always have a pool of water on top of them, like a rock filled up with rain.
Right, or that they keep their elevated humps sun dried as a camel's in the desert.
Yeah, that is a good quase. I don't know if there's anything to that claim or not, Like, would a whale ever keep a part of its body consistently exposed over the surface or do they? I mean, what I feel like I've seen most of the time is repeatedly going under and then coming back up to breathe, and then returning correct.
Yeah, I think I think there'll be a hint of this in one of the sources I refer to in a bit concerning depictions and iconography of whales, which very often still do picture the whale as having a large portion of its head above the water, as if that's just how it rides around.
Yeah, now, we already discussed discussed this question to some extent in the last episode, and the consensus of spurts, marine biologists, and just whale watchers that we were reading last time seem to be that what comes out of
the whale's blowhole is not primarily water. It is not a jet like from a fire hose, but it is the explosive exhalation of gas from the whale's lungs, and to be clear, that can be quite explosive, because when a whale breathes out, especially after it has been under for a long time, it nearly totally collapses its lungs. It is like a blast of breath, and that exhalation can create a very watery looking blow for several reasons.
First of all, the exhaled breath contains vapor, which condenses into mist and droplets when it leaves the warmer environment of the whale's lungs and airways and enters the colder environment of the atmosphere above, similar to how you can see your own breath on a cold day. Then, of course there's also some droplet content in the whale breath that is just mucus being exhaled, kind of like when
we sneeze. And then there's probably also some splashing of sea water, which may happen if the exhalation begins before the blowhole breaks the surface of the water, so some water is just getting sort of splashed up by the blast, or if there was some amount of seawater trapped in the airways robbed, Is that about the gist of it, you think?
Yeah? Yeah, And, like I say, from my family's tripped down to Mexico to observe the gray whales and their lagoons, very much the case with those exhalations that occur below the surface of the water. Those can be quite explosive and create what feels like a fountain next to you in the water.
But that does not mean the whale spout is shooting a jet. It is breathing out and that breath is gas, though it contains probably some mucus droplets and bits of water.
Now, of note, I've run across various descriptions both in literature and in just you know, the discussions of whale behavior. Of the of the spout with a rainbow within it. You know, the spout mist goes up into the air and you can see the reflection, the refraction and the and the dispersion of light in the water droplets. I don't have much to say about that other than it
is neat to see, and you've certainly seen it. See that it has captured people's imaginations over the years, and you can find various photos of this today from whale watchers.
Rob When you mentioned this, did you know that this actually connects to the final paragraph of this chapter in Moby Dick.
Moby Dick was coming up in my searches, and I've never actually read Moby Dick. I've I've only seen the film adaptations, but I did suspect that Melville also touched on this.
I actually he writes about it quite beautifully, so if you don't mind it. In the last paragraph, he says, and how nobly it raises our conceit of the mighty misty monster to behold solemnly sailing through a calm, tropical sea, his vast mild head overhung by a canopy of vapor engendered by his incommunicable contemplations, and that vapor, as you will sometimes see it, glorified by a rainbow, as if
Heaven itself put its seal upon his thoughts. For do you see rainbows do not visit the clear air, They only irradiate vapor. Thrue science fact. And so through all the thick mists of the dim doubts in my mind, divine intuitions now and then shoot in kindling my fog with a heavenly ray.
That's beautiful. Yeah, and really, I mean, this is what it's like to be in the company of whales, Like the idea that Heaven is glorifying them with a rainbow. It does not feel hyperbolic to me having been in their presence, like being in the presence of a whale invites hyperbole because it's just such an overwhelming experience.
Haven't had the experience myself, but I can't disagree it is quite true to most observers who write of it. But I want to come back to this misconception, the idea that the whale spout shoots a jet of water like from a fire hose. Do we have any idea like where does this misconception come from? How far back does it go? And like why were people saying this?
Yeah, it's interesting to try and tease this apart getting into these older descriptions of whales and older understandings of whale behavior and biology. You know, there's a lot we're
still unraveling about wales today. But historically there was a great deal that wasn't known about these creatures, and they were frequently the subject of myth, legend and folklore, and even people who are trying to, you know, skeptically understand them were often having to depend on the word of sailors and second and third hand accounts of what they do. And then you throw whalers into the mix, and of course you know that also skews things in different directions.
But they were, you know, generally they were often interpreted as fish, as monsters, as gods, as shape shifters, and more. Now, concerning whale blow or whale spout in particular, there are a few main myths and misconceptions. Yeah, to discuss, uh, you know, first hitting on this one about the about the spout being a jet of water. Again, this is something that not only do you find in old besty
areas and woodcuts some of those old maps. You see these fabulous like beat twails with two you know, almost like Martian old school Martian style blowholes on the top of their head that are depicted just spouting big jets of water like their fire engines.
They have almost horns made of water or like antinnae.
Yes and then just poking around. If you if you have your your smartphone with you and you pull up, pull up somebody in there, do a you know, a text, and if you go into throwing some whale emojis, chances are, I don't know, if your phone's like mine, you'll have two to choose from. One is a more thankfully scientifically accurate whale, but the other is what we've seen a
million times and emojis and clip art. It is a cartoon whale spouting a fountain out of its single blowhole on the top of its head.
The same way it is most often drawn, with the fountains splitting in a kind of fork two ways.
Yeah, which, as we discussed in the previous episode, you know, the spout has different shapes and different intensities depending on the species of the whale. Some do kind of squirt off in two directions. But it's the way you see it in clip art and these simple plaistic cartoon illustrations. Yeah, it tends to look just like a fountain. Now. In trying to in getting into this ended up, I kept
pulling up older sources. But one of the more interesting older sources on this is an eighteen eighty four book by naturalist Henry Lee titled See Fables Explained, and it took on this misconception about whale spout more than a century eco.
Now a brief note on Henry Lee. He was a nineteenth century English naturalist who specialized in marine organisms, and for a time he was the director of the Brighton Aquarium in England.
But he is.
Notable for writing measured skeptical investigations of cryptozoological legends, and in this latter capacity he has actually come up on the show before, I think, on some episodes that we just recently did for Vaults on Saturdays. So Lee was the author of the eighteen eighty seven monograph called the Vegetable Lamb of Tartary, a curious fable of the cotton plant.
We discussed this at length in those episodes on the vegetable lamb, which of course was a legendary organism with accounts going back to ancient times, usually described as a basically a mammal that grew from a plant, a furry, flesh and blood mammal that had meat and bones and blood that came out of a stalk that was attached to the ground roots and grew somewhere in Central Asia.
While there have been multiple skeptical attempts to make sense of these legends going back hundreds of years, Lee offered an, I think, in both of our views, an extremely persuasive argument that these accounts actually go back to observations and
misunderstandings of the cotton plant. So by the standards I would normally apply to a I don't know, a multidisciplinary skeptical treatise involving literary, historical, and biological knowledge from the eighteen eighties, I recall being extremely impressed with the last work of Lee's that we looked at.
Oh. Absolutely yeah, And I feel like this book. What I read from it, which is basically the chapter on whale spout, I thought thought it was a very level and in any ways ahead of its time. So in this chapter he cites an example of this whale spout misunderstanding in the work of the second century Greco Roman poet Opian And this is the quote uncouth the site when they, in dreadful play discharge their nostrils and refund to see while noisy finfish let their fountains fly and
spout the curling torrent to the sky. So beautiful, you know, in translation obviously, but yeah, this idea of refunding the sea, letting the fountain fly a curling torrent up to the sky, it's at least a landsman's idea of what whale spout consisted of.
Based on what I've read, it seems like the most common understanding was that whales were shooting jets of water out of their blowholes because they like swallowed a lot of water through their mouths while eating, and then they would have to squirt it back out, but couldn't do that through their mouths for some reason.
Yeah, yeah, which I think it's one of those things that certainly by this point naturalists knew that this is not how an organism worked, and certainly not how to how whale works. And so Lee, Yeah, he basically lays out that this had been already been refuted time and time again by naturalist but that the image was just too entrenched in the popular imagination and popular imagery of
whales to be fully dismissed. And also more people are casually taking these images in than they are actually listening to the naturalists. And we have to, I guess we also have to bear in mind like today so many of us have access, whether we're actively watching them or not, to fabulous documentaries about the biology and behavior of whales, so many opportunities to see for yourself what the whale spout looks like. And this of course was not always the.
Case, right, So back then there might have been more correct knowledge about whales and their mammalian biology in books. But that it really hits home more when you just like see some video of them moving and swimming and spouting.
Right, right, So he rails against quote sensational pictures in which whales are presented with their heads above the surface and throwing up from their nostrils column of water like the fountains in Trafalgar Square. Now he cites another erroneous description from a sixteenth century map by map master Olaus Magnus. This is somebody we've talked about on the show before and concerning old maps and sea monsters. Right.
I think he came up extensively in my interview with chet van Duzer on the history of monsters on maps, but I think he's come up in other capacities as well. This is a recurring guest here.
Yes, Lee writes the following, quoting Magnus quote four to the danger of seamen, he will sometimes raise himself above the saal yards and cause such floods of water above his head which he had sucked in that with a cloud of them, he will often sink the strongest ships or expose the mariners to extreme danger. This beast hath also a large round mouth like a lamprey, whereby he sucks in his meat or water and buy his weight
casts upon the flour or or hinder deck. He sinks and drowns a ship hinder deck, hinder deck, hinder deck. I think I don't know anyway, you get the idea like,
here's this big monster and there and he fears. Some woodcut illustrations to this article, and you can you can easily find these as well, depicting the same sort of like you know, beaked monstrosity we just described with these creatures like coming up to a ship and spitting out that, you know, using their their strange blowholes to just flood a ship and make it sink.
Brutal, not real though.
Yeah no, and Lee continues to rail against this. He shares that after previously trying to set the record straight on this in a publication, he received letters stating that, Okay, sure, while lesser whales might not spout water like this, the great whales are doing it. They're totally doing it. You're wrong. So he goes on to discuss the basics of blowhole anatomy and function, driving home that there's no way this system could be the system that you find in a
whale's head, great or small. There's no way that this system could be used to squirt jets of pure water. It's just not how their bodies work. Right.
So, as we said before, in certain cases, there might be a lot of splashing from a whale's explosive exhalation, but it's exhaling gas and that maybe some splash is getting caught up in that exhalation, but it is not squirting water. What's coming out is from its lungs.
Right, and he lays all this out and discusses everything we've just mentioned before that yeah, it's not water coming out, but if the exhalation comes below the surface of the water, it's liable to carry up a lot of water and have this explosive watery appearance.
Now, given all this, I did want to be fair. I want to come back and add that to the partial credit of Ishmael, the narrator of Moby Dick. He does come down on what we now know to be the correct side of the water jet versus mist or vapor debate. So he says it is missed, but he gives a fairly hilarious reason for thinking it is missed. His explanation is as follows.
Quote.
I account him meaning the sperm whale, no common shallow being, inasmuch as it is an undisputed fact that he has never found on soundings or near shores all other whales sometimes are. He is both ponderous and profound. And I am convinced that from the heads of all ponderous profound beings such as Plato, Piro, the Devil, Jupiter, Dante, and so on, there always goes up a certain semi visible steam. While in the act of thinking deep thoughts while composing
a little treatise on eternity. I had the curiosity to place a mirror before me, and ere long saw reflected there a curious involved worming and undulation in the atmosphere over my head, the invariable moisture of my hair while plunged in deep thought after six cups of hot tea in my thin shingled attic of an August noon. This seems an additional argument for the above supposition is so good, I get sweaty one time too.
Yeah, these are some some wonderful mental gymnastics which again land him in the right spot, but some unnecessary twists and turns. Now. It's worth noting, for the most part, this misunderstanding of whale anatomy is victimless, right. I mean, it's like, okay, if worst case scenario you think that a whale shoots water out of its blowhole, I mean, what's it? Or if you encounter a whale you'll be
set right on this. But it's worth noting that the myth of whale spouts and water can even prove actually dangerous to whales. This, according to Dan Jarvis of the British Diver's Marine Life Rescue organization is quoted in a twenty twenty one Melissa Hobson article on Nationalgeographic dot Cota UK. Apparently there have been cases where people who are not familiar with the anatomy of whales, who still have this
idea of the whale fountain in their mind. They have happened upon a stranded whale on the beach and thinking that this great fish needs water to start pouring water into its blowhole, which can drown the whale. Oh no, yeah, So you know there are cases where not knowing what's going on, even is a non biologist, it can lead to something like this. So don't go pouring water into blowholes.
Certainly not but okay, I think we can mostly close the book on the idea of the water jet. It's not a water jet. But returning to c fables explained by Henry Lee, Lee also briefly addresses a strange claim in the same chapter of Moby Dick that caught our attention and we wanted to investigate further and to refresh you. We mentioned that in the last episode. But this is the allegation made by Ishmael that the whale spout is poisonous, a claim that seemed prima fasse unlikely to both of us.
But to read again from Mobi Dick so you'll know what he's saying. He says that for even when coming into slight contact with the outer vapory shreds of the jet, which will often happen, your skin will feverishly smart from the acridness of the thing, so touching it. And I know one who coming into still closer contact with the spout, whether with some scientific object in view or otherwise, I cannot say, the skin peeled off from his cheek and arm. Wherefore,
among whalemen the spout is deemed poisonous. They try to evade it. Another thing I have heard it said, and I do not much doubt it, that if the jet is fairly spouted into your eyes it will blind you. The wisest thing the investigator can do, then, it seems to me, is to let this deadly spout alone. So that's a number of strange claims, he says. Okay, I've got a friend who got some whale blow on him
and that made his skin peel off. Whaleman generally say that the blow that comes out of the spout is poisonous and if you get it in your eyes it will make you blind.
So Lee doesn't spend a lot of time with this. He mentions it he doesn't really have much to add, but he kind of dismisses it out of hand, and also throws in there that Herman Melville is quote not a naturalist, and he doesn't seem to have much to add beyond that, aside from mentioning an account from a steamship whaler. He writes, quote, he believes that the blast was strong enough to blow a man off the spiracle
if he were seated on it. Now, I don't know. Okay, that also feels kind of like a tall tail, but maybe a more believable. It's not saying that it will blow your skin off and blind you, but he's just saying, well, it's pretty explosive. If you were re seated right on it, I bet it would blast you into the air. I think it definitely would make you move, So just on, just strong enough to blow a man off the spiracle.
I believe you would not remain on the spiracle if you were somehow balanced there for the spout.
Right, So it might knock you off, but it would not as often depicted in cartoons and illustrations. Create a jet that then leaves you floating in the air above it.
Yeah, yeah. And the idea of it being used as an offensive blast against ships, yeah, that's pure fantasy. Now. One thing I did find interestingly doesn't go into this, but he mentions that this being an account from a steamship whaler, and I can't help but wonder about, during the age of steam power, if there's like not some level of technological comparison going on in one's mind where
steam comes out of the top of a ship. Steam, of course, is very hot and can damage you and burn the skin off your body, things like that, And so if there's some sort of like comparison that gets made between the ship and the whale, which of course is large, travels in the water and also emits these blasts that don't look unlike steam like, maybe it's the kind of thing where there's just kind of like a sub conscious comparison being made.
That's interesting. I never thought about that, but that does seem plausible. So I did my own digging around for answers on the question of the supposedly poisonous whale spout and like you, Rob, I found no support whatsoever for the claim that the blow from the blowhole is poisonous, meaning that it contains a chemical toxin or venom with directly injurious effects on nearby mammals through either topical contact
or ingestion. I found nothing on that. In fact, I didn't even find that many references to this passage in moby Dick, which I was surprised by. I thought I would come across more. I don't know scientific sources referencing it, even if only to contradict it or maybe try to get at the source of this belief. But it just doesn't seem like this this idea gets a lot of stick.
One example of the kind of reference I found was in not even really a scientific book, just a sort of book on grey whales called Grey Whales Wandering Giants by Robert Bush from nineteen ninety eight, which mentions the claim in Moby Dick that the spout is poisonous, only to say that it's not poisonous at all, but that sometimes it does have a very powerful smell, and the author quotes John Steinbeck from a work called The Log from the Sea of Cortes. In Steinbeck wrote, a whale's
breath is frightfully sickening. It smells of complete decay. The author here Bush says, I don't know, it's never really smelled that way to me.
Yeah, I was in a position to smell a lot of grey whale breath and I don't know. I mean, there is a breathiness to it, I guess at times, but yeah, I wouldn't say it stinks. Now. One thing to keep in mind, though, is like these are organisms. The blowhole is, you know, a breathing orifice. So I have read that you do have situations where you can have a sick whale, so that could impact what you're smelling. I suppose that.
Yeah, and Bush says the same thing. Maybe it's breath smells worse when it is diseased or wounded or something. So beyond this, I was just I was like, Okay, I'm going to expand my circle of interest here. I was looking to find any evidence of any mammal or any animal for that matter, that is believed to have poisonous or venomous breath, and I really could not find anything that fits the description. Despite the popularity of creatures with toxic breath in Dungeons and Dragons in video games.
It's a good area of effect type attack. But I couldn't find really any evidence of this in reality. Maybe there is such a thing and I just wasn't searching the right way. But the closest stuff I could find is what we're all more familiar with animals that might spit venom or something, but not having toxic breath.
Yeah, but the only thing that really comes to my mind is vultures, say vomiting, which there are a few different interpretations of that behavior, but it's not quite a Dungeons of Dragon's area of a fact attack.
And still that would be vomit from the digestive system, not toxic breath.
Right right, not toxic gas emitted from the mouth.
So is this claim in mobe to just completely made up? Maybe Melville just made it up to make, you know, just for interesting fictional effect. Or maybe it was something he heard he heard from people that was an actual belief among whalers, but they just made it up. Well maybe,
but then again maybe not. While I think it's clear that the exhalation of whales is not poisonous or venomous, I think this could be a misunderstanding of something that does seem true, which is that I found evidence that sometimes, after certain times types of contact with marine mammals, including whales, people do report reactions. In fact, this is a great bit of listener mail we heard from a listener after part one of this series who has a bit of
relevant personal experience. So Rob, I'm gonna read Tabitha's email here, all right. Tabitha says, Dear Robert and Joe, regarding the consequences of getting a face full of blowhole ejecta. I have a family experience. As a child, I went on a dolphin watching boat trip. When dolphins started swimming alongside the boat and playing in the bow waves, my sister and I were allowed to lie on the deck and stick our heads out under the railing to watch them.
It was the nineties. One dolphin surfaced and exhaled directly into my sister's face from close range. Initially she was fine, if a bit slimy and embarrassed. Later that day, however, her eyes turned red, weepy and swelled almost shut. I don't really remember the aftermath except for thinking it was hilarious, But as far as I recall, it got better in a day or so, suggesting an allergic reaction rather than bacterial infection. So maybe a certain number of people are
just really allergic to cetaceans. Maybe a lot of people, but we don't have the opportunity to find out very often. I can imagine a whaling crew having one case of whalesnot face rash, and the story spreading until it reaches the flesh dissolving, eye melting, tall tail stage. Love the show as always, Tabitha, well fascinating and thank you so
much for sharing this, Tabitha. So I totally agree that it is not hard to imagine some nineteenth century whalers could observe experiences like this and conclude incorrectly from it that the whale spout is toxic, is venomous or poisonous, like the venom of a spitting cobra or something. But I was wondering more about the mechanism, what is actually going on here now? I honestly could not find much of anything documenting what we're directly classified as allergic reactions
to cetace blow. But I did find a very interesting source documenting similar reactions in the context of human zoonotic diseases from marine mammal vectors. Now, this is something I really had never thought about before we did this series. Of course, when you think about zoonotic diseases, you think about bats, You think about livestock animals, you know, maybe pigs, birds, and so forth. I had never thought of the idea that humans could catch diseases from whales, seals, dolphins, and so forth.
Yeah, yeah, I mean neither.
But now allow me to introduce you to the paper Health Risks for Marine Mammal Workers published in the journal Diseases of Aquatic Organisms the year two thousand and eight by Tanya Hunt at All. This is a paper where the authors say there have been isolated, documented cases of humans acquiring zoonotic diseases from marine mammals. There are certain diseases that are well known and even have interesting little names, such as seal finger. If you want to be grossed out,
you can look up images of seal finger. But they wanted to design a survey to get a broader range of responses. So they wanted to survey professionals and volunteers who regularly work directly with marine mammals to see how common various types of injuries and work related illnesses were in people who have contact with these animals. So what did they find to read from their abstract? First of all, they characterized the people who responded to the survey. Most
respondents eighty eight percent were researchers and rehabilitators. And then they say, quote of all respondents, fifty percent reported suffering an injury caused by a marine mammal and twenty three percent reported having a skin rash or reaction. Marine mammal. Work related illnesses commonly included seal finger, which is now known to be traceable to a bacterium called mycoplasma, conjunctivitis. That's very interesting because that conjunctivitis is irritation and swelling
of the eyes. That of course connects to Tabitha's story, but also connects to the idea that getting whale blow in your face could make you blind. But to go on, viral dermatitis, bacterial dermatitis, and non specific contact dermatitis. This is rash or irritation of the skin, although specific diagnoses could not be confirmed by a physician. Through the study, severe illnesses were reported and included tuberculosis, leptospirosis, brucillosis, and
serious sequli to seal finger. Risk factors associated within increased odds of injury and illness included prolonged and frequent exposure to marine mammals, direct contact with live marine mammals, and contact with tissue, blood and excretions. And I was looking
at another paper tracking marine mammals Zunocees in humans. This was by waltzik at All in Zunoceason Public Health from twenty twelve, and it also tried to collect all of the literature on zoonotic infections from marine mammals and humans, and it concluded that the most common type of zoonotic reaction to marine mammals was localized skin infections in humans, which again makes you think about the discussion about like
peeling skin and skin reactions that Melville mentions. So those are human diseases that have been tentatively linked at least circumstantially to contact with marine mammals. But we need to introduce some caveats Number one. This includes a wide range of different marine mammals, so not just whales, but all kinds of marine mammals, and a wide range of different types of contact including touching of skin, bites, contact with blood and inner organs, et cetera, not just exposure to say,
mucus and droplets from the blowhole of whales. So what if we were to come at this question from the other direction and ask what is in whalesnot specifically when a whale breathes out, there's got to be plenty of bacteria and stuff in there. Has anybody ever documented what microbes are present in the blow of a whale and whether that list contains anything that could cause skin or eye infections or otherwise create the impression, even the false
impression that the spout is poisonous or venomous. Yes, there have in fact been investigations microbiological investigations of whale blow. The first one I wanted to mention was a paper from twenty seventeen. This was published in m sistems Too, which is an American Society for Microbiology journal. It's by Amy April at All and it's called Extensive Core Microbiome in Drone Captured Whale Blow supports a framework for health monitoring.
This study was interesting because it used a drone to fly above the water surface and collect blow from two populations of healthy humpback whales, one Pacific group off of Vancouver Island and an Atlantic group off of Cape Cod
and I was thinking, wow, that's a good use for drones. Yeah, So they took these samples, but then they compared the microbes present in them to what was present in just samples of straight seawater from around because obviously some seawater gets in with the blow, so you're looking to see what's in the blow that's not just in the seawater. And the author's right quote. The blow microbiomes were distinct from the seawater microbiomes and included twenty five phylogenetically diverse
bacteria common to all sampled whales. This core assemblage comprised on average thirty six percent of the microbiome, making it one of the more consistent animal microbiomes studied to date. The closest phylogenetic relatives of twenty of these core microbes were previously detected in marine mammals, suggesting that this core microbiome assemblage is specialized for marine mammals and may indicate
a healthy, non infected pulmonary system. So that's interesting. These two geographically distinct populations of healthy humpback whales from different oceans share a common baseline of non pathogenic bacterial species. Of course, the fact that a bacterium is not pathogenic in its normal whale host doesn't necessarily tell you how it will behave when sprayed onto the skin or into
the eyes of a human being. But then, the other study I wanted to mention is one that was published in Nature Scientific Reports by Raverty at All in twenty seventeen called Respiratory Microbiome of Endangered Southern resident killer Whales and Microbiome of surrounding Sea surface micro layer in the Eastern North Pacific. So, to summarize from a news report on this article, I was reading from the University of
British Columbia. Stephen Raverty, he was the lead author on the study, is a professor or an adjunct professor at University of British Columbia's Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries. And this study was looking at the microbiome of endangered Southern resident killer whales in what's known as the Salish Sea. It's the sea around I think, the sort of the inside of Vancouver Island. It's the sea around that stretch
throughout British Columbia and Washington State. And this study was focused on the health of orcas, not on humans, so this was not studying human diseases. But it did find that the breath of these killer whales, when sampled droplets from that blow, contained all kinds of bacteria and fungi that are known to cause disease in humans, so bacteria like salmonella, like Staphylococcus aureus, and then fungi like penicillium
and foma. And it's not clear that these common bacteria that could also cause disease in humans would be present in the breath of all whales. It's also not clear that they have always been present, even in these killer whales, because there's a possibility that these are sort of recently introduced microbia loads that are a result of human activity.
We don't know, but it's a possibility. Giving a quote to this news article, the lead author, Raverty says, quote, We're not sure if these microbes naturally occur in the marine environment or if they may be terrestrially sourced. These animals are long ranging as they migrate along the coast, and they are exposed to agricultural runoff and urban discharge, which may introduce a variety of microbes into the water.
So ultimately, in this case, we don't know for sure, Like we can't take a sample of what whalers might have been getting blown in their faces from sperm whale or whales in general in the nineteenth century. But here at least there are cases today of whales that are ejecting breath from their lungs that contains droplets of mucus with bacteria that we know do cause disease in humans. Whether that is sort of a recent loading onto these whales or whether that would have been present a long
time ago, we can't say for sure. But if you combine this with the other observations that people, you know, people who work directly with marine mammals, report a lot of sort of skin infections conjunctividis and things like that, it does not seem implausible to me that this story about the whale blow being poisonous could emerge from different types of infections people get after getting whale mucus or other types of whale body fluids on their skin or in their eyes.
Yeah, there are a number of additional considerations to make based on this information, because, on one hand, just by the nature of tall and sailor lore. How many times would it need to happen really for the stories to generate, You know, just one incident of somebody really swelling up
after being exposed to whale blow might be enough. At On top of that, if there are myths and legends pre existing that to tie into some of this, those could add to the energy of these tales and could even in their origin be partially inspired by such experiences.
And then I think the other thing to keep in mind is that the whalers we were just talking about all the different things that one might have reactions to have exposed to, including like blood and organs, Like the whaler was not just out there to see the whale, not just out there to experience the whale. They were
out there to kill and butcher the whales. So it seems entirely likely that, yeah, if you're going to have an allergic reaction to one aspect of the whales anatomy, there are going to be multiple additional opportunities to be infected by blood, viscera, et cetera.
I absolutely agree with all that. So yeah, I can't say for sure, but my best guess is if this is not just a made up story. If there are if there were actually folk tales among whalers that the spout was poisonous, it probably came from people getting some kind of infection after being around whales.
Now I have a few other little things first to take into this first one kind of ties into several different things we've discussed, because it definitely concerns whaling. It concerns the idea of a liquid spout, and it also concerns exposure of the whaler to various parts of the
whales anatomy. So this concerns the red spout. In the book Red Leviat and the Secret History of Soviet Whaling, author and previous guest on the show, Ryan Tucker Jones discusses the destruction wrought by the Soviet industrial whaling industry, and in this one particular case, the Soviet industrial whaling harpoons. So these were not like the harpoons of the classical
age of whaling as depicted in Moby Dick. We're talking about things that are fired, and in this case a grenade tipped so that they explode upon hitting the whale and impacting the whale. He points out that the ideal first hit ideal for the whalers, of course, not the whale. Would be for one of these to go off near the whale's vital organs. Wherever it hit, blood would pour into the cavity and the brain would eventually succumb. But if the lungs were punctured quote, blood would soon fountain
out the blowhole. This was termed by the Soviet whalers a red spout, and the whale would drown in its own fluids. And he goes into a great deal more detail about all of this, but suffice to say like two to six harpoons were often required to kill the whale. So worth keeping this in mind, I think and thinking about all of this, and also it brings to mind an account that I was reading regarding a mythic monstrous whale. So we have the word cetacean, you know, referring to
our whales. This I've read is connected to the name of the of the sea monster in Greek mythology Ketos or CTOs, and it is believed by some, at least in some tellings, to be based on or interpreted as a whale. In Manilius is Monster by K. M. Coleman from nineteen eighty three, the author points to whale like qualities of spouting in the writings of first century Roman poet Manilius. Ovid, however, doesn't write of spouting with these
with this creature, but of vomiting bloody water. So the there of this paper, Coleman contends that Manilius was possibly incorporating observational or even for the time natural insight into his treatment of the myth. But I also think this depiction of that Ovid gives the spouting of bloody water.
This also brings to mind, I mean this, I can't help but compare to this idea of the red spout and wonder if it might be connected to some you know, ancient world older accounts of harpooning a whale piercing the lung and observing this reaction.
Wow, but now I'm picturing this. So the key toss or the sea monster that is here being interpreted as a whale I think was the monster in the Perseus and Andromeda story. So like when Cassiopeia offers up Andromeda as a sacrifice to the sea monster, we should maybe picture at not like a big scaly man thing coming out of the water track see and clash of the Titans, but instead a whale vomiting bloody water.
Yeah yeah, and you know this idea of the vomiting whale, he goes. There's some other accounts of this as well, because I was poking around looking for just any other interesting like whale spout myths that connected into what we're talking about here. And there are various myths about whales being you know, monsters or gods and so forth, but not all of them are necessarily insightful concerning the spout
or the blowhole. But I happened to cross something in Irish traditions that I can't help but wonder if this is something that ended up helping inform sailor's lore, especially as discussed in Moby Dick. I found this initially in an eighteen ninety nine publication Notes and Folklore from the Renez Copy of the Dencentchez by TJ. Westrop, published in the Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland. The Dencentchez. This is the tales of the Tales of
the Duns, the Lore of Places. It's a class of texts from early Irish literature, and these were apparently added to by various writers up until the eleventh or twelfth centuries. So here's a quote from this particular author quote. A very dangerous monster, the ros Sualt is also described, which spouts at Muhrisk in Mayo, and a pestilence en sieus. This is stated of the whale in other ancient works.
When the whale spouts upwards, flying creatures die, when downwards it kills the fish, and when at the land, a plague ensieus. Whoa. So this is the idea of a whale shooting birds out of the air with its poisonous spout, and occasionally, you know, coming close to the shore and being a bringer of plagues, vomiting up plague upon the shore and letting that plague or roll across the countryside as a vapor, a bringer of miasma.
Okay, I was confused about the timeline for a second. But okay, so this is an eighteen ninety nine publication, but it is discussing these earlier like medieval Irish texts.
Correct. Yes, and for there's a little background. Mrisk is in fact a village in County Mayo in Ireland, and also according to a different text in eighteen ninety two text I was looking at this ross salt, and I apologize that I'm butchering. This was sometimes understood as a sea animal, and I think sometimes translated as a walrus. Not that we should necessarily think of it as a walrus, but you know, sometimes there's a shift in what these
terms are referring to over time. So since we had a sea monster here, especially one of European origin, I turned, as I always do, to the books of Carol Rose. He has these wonderful pair of encyclopedias, one dealing with monsters and giants and other other one dealing with fairies and leprechauns. And there's some crossover between the books, but
they're both great. So I looked it up. And Rose has a little more insight on the resalt, which she says is an alternate name for the moorisk, a monster fish of Irish tradition. She writes that it was said to inhabit the region of crow og Patrick, and it was super poisonous. If it vomited in the water, all the sea life around it would die. The fumes from its mouth would cause dead birds to fall out of the sky, and it could breathe on a coastal region and bring disease.
Okay, that sort of matches what we were reading a minute ago, right, right, yeah, yeah, And at the coast it brings the pestilens. It kills the birds if it shoots up, and it kills the fish if it shoots down.
Right. And I also found another source referring to this. This is from P. W. Joyce in nineteen oh six is a smaller social History of Ancient Ireland, and this author added basically says the same thing, but added that it was quote able to vomit in three different ways
three years in succession. He adds that the vomiting into the water also wrecked ships, and when it vomited towards the land in the third year, the whale caused quote a pestilential vapor to creep over the country that killed men and four footed animals.
No, not the four footed animals.
The four footed animals are just at the forefront of strange death. I mean, this is how many times are we gonna in this year and last have we talked about strange reasons that four legged animals are dying? And in the British Isles.
We never considered this as an explanation for the cattle mutilation panic. What if it was actually a risk?
Yeah, yeah, what if a whale vomited? So this is this is all interesting Again, I don't think that. I think potentially one has to, you know, take into account these these myths and legends about poisonous vomit coming out of these whales or whale like creatures, these also first hand accounts of potentially getting some sort of an infection after contact with a whale spout or whale blood, et cetera.
But I also can't help but wonder if there's some connection, particularly between this story and perhaps encounters with beached and dead whales, where there's of course decomposition going on, and therefore there's going to be a very strong, awful odor, the kind of odor that we would, you know, we would associate with with illness. Perhaps, so I wonder, I wonder if there's any connective tissue there as well.
Well. Rob, I think this has been a mighty fun and interesting exploration. Even though we didn't get a definitive answer on the poisonous whales thing, I think what we did find out has been enlightening, and as Melville would say, through all the thick mists and the dim doubts, you know, the divine intuitions now and then shoot, so our fog has been enkindled with a heavenly ray.
Very nice. All right, We're gonna gohead and close it out then, but yeah, we'd love to hear from everyone out there. If you have additional insight, experience, et cetera, just general thoughts and what we've talked about in this pair of episodes or our previous episodes on Gray Whales in particular, write in we'd love to hear from you. Just a reminder that Stuff to Blow Your Mind is primarily a science podcast, with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays,
but on Mondays we do listener mail. On Wednesdays we do a short form artifact or monster fact episode, and then on Fridays we set aside most serious concerns to just talk about a weird film on Weird House Cinema.
Huge thanks to our audio producer JJ Posway. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, or just to say hello, you can email us at contact Stuff to Blow Your Mind dot com.
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