“Sound in the water is really important for the toothed whales like sperm whales, which use sound to identify prey and to navigate. “Shipping has increased by 300% in the past two decades and noise is a massive issue,” says Helen McLachlan, fisheries programme manager for the Worldwide Fund for Nature. Most pernicious of all, however, is the noise. Collisions with ships, bycatch from fishing, habitat loss due to the climate emergency and a global plastic pollution crisis are hitting whales from all directions on a scale unknown in the 1970s. Commercial whaling has started to return, with Norway and Japan among the countries that have abandoned the IWC ban. A new series of threats to whales have appeared. As of May 2020, humpback whale populations had returned to 93% of their pre-whaling size.īut in 2020, 50 years on from the release of the album, whales are once again in the global headlines for all the wrong reasons. Whale populations began to rise, and have done so – with some exceptions – ever since. (In 2015, it sank off the coast of Russia, killing most of the crew.)Ī Greenpeace Zodiac inflatable boat approaching Russian whaling vessels the Dalniy Vostok and its supporting harpoon boats in the north Pacific in 1975. The Dalniy Vostok would eventually cease whaling and became a fishing trawler. The anti-whaling movement would go on to transform world opinion, paving the way for the International Whaling Commission’s (IWC) 1982 decision to ban commercial whaling starting in 1986 – of which Russia, along with Japan, was one of the biggest proponents. Although the harpooners did not stop whaling that day, Greenpeace had scored a success. There were people working in the kitchens, boathands, people who were cutting up and processing the whales dragged on board.” Very few of the crew on the boat were actually whalers and harpooners. “And they were fascinated by the whale sound. They seemed, to tell you the truth, quite friendly and interested in us. The crew lined the rails of three decks, towering above us,” recalls Weyler of the moment when they played the music. The whale was the perfect species in danger that could stand for all of wild nature.”Īs the activists turned on the loudspeakers to blast it at the Dalniy Vostok, they also hoped whale song could be a language that could cross boundaries. And they even, we learned at that time, make music and vocalise. By the early 1970s, public understanding had advanced to the point that whales became animals that “people internationally could all relate to”, says Weyler. The success of the album had been one of the reasons Greenpeace chose whaling as an early focus in the first place. It also announced a scientific breakthrough: Payne and his team had found that whales don’t just call but actually sing to each other, in slowly repeating patterns. Produced by marine biologist Dr Roger Payne from audio of male humpbacks singing off the coast of Bermuda, Songs of the Humpback Whale had been a surprise hit with the public, and remains the only multiplatinum-selling album of animal sounds. The Greenpeace crew playing music to the crew of the Soviet ships.
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