Deep Wonders : Spending Three Days on Discovery’s Whale Odyssey Opens a Newcomer’s Eyes

The humpback whales--a mother, her calf and a male escort--suddenly emerged, their black dorsal fins slicing the surface of the Caribbean waters as they lumbered toward us. I sat on the bow of Osvaldo Vasquez’s small fishing boat awaiting the cue.

“Now!” Roger Payne signaled from the cabin. I jumped into the swells of Samana Bay, adjusting my snorkel gear to better glimpse these huge creatures, which ply the bay by the thousands from December to March. The silt-stirred water afforded little visibility at first, but suddenly I was aware of a giant shadow looming on my right. I turned to face what appeared to be a mottled wall of blubber as a 40-foot whale majestically glided past me, silent as a spaceship.

For a moment, it looked as though it might brush me with its large wing. But just then, the humpback arched and dove, its mottled fluked tail fading into the azure deep. I vainly tried to follow but my mask quickly filled with water, drowning the magnificent apparition as suddenly as it materialized.

Back on board, I recalled what Payne, one of the world’s foremost authorities on whales, had said earlier: “You never forget the first time you see a whale. It changes your life.” True enough. But the simplicity of that statement does not nearly express the utter wonder that these leviathans evoke up close.

To capture that on film is the challenge of “In the Company of Whales,” the ambitious two-hour special that begins airing Sunday on the Discovery Channel, with Payne as presenter and scientific adviser. Jessica Tandy is the narrator.

Directed and produced by Robin Brown, the documentary shot footage of dozens of whale species over a period of 18 months off the coastlines of five different continents, including the Dominican Republic’s.

That’s where I spent three days with Payne and his crew last month, aboard the Odyssey, a 100-foot sailing yacht that has been converted into a research vessel and that was moored just off the Dominican shore.

The shooting for the special by that time had been finished. But the research had not. During the hectic whale breeding and calving season in the Caribbean, Payne was working with his Dominican colleague, Professor Osvaldo Vasquez, in the international effort to gather more knowledge about these mysterious creatures--not only in order to save them, but to save the planet, an interdependent relationship that is a central theme of the documentary.

“Whales are the great unknown,” Payne said, sitting in the spacious aft of the Odyssey, which had been donated, in part, by a Chicago tycoon to The Whale and Dolphin Conservation Institute, a research and education center that Payne founded 10 years ago.

“They are an endangered species, because of humanity’s greatest problem: complete arrogance. But I think that if humankind looks enough at a species and falls in love with it, then it might look at other species and eventually recognize the fact that we are not the stars of the show. My money is on whales.”

There is no doubt that a whale makes an appealing poster child and “In the Company of Whales” loses no opportunity to show the lovable nature of its leading character.

Lumping dolphins in with the cetacean subgroup of mammals with which this documentary keeps company, Payne explodes a lot of the myths about a creature whose once-fearsome reputation, fed by books (“Moby Dick”) and films (“Orca”), has now all but been upended by the popular picture of the gentle giant.

Indeed, the behavioral patterns of whales has been Payne’s area of expertise for nearly 30 years, after an early career studying bats, owls and moths. After coming upon a beached dolphin that had been mutilated by humans, a cigar placed in its blow-hole, Payne decided to devote his life to a mammal that was then diminishing in numbers because of the reckless destruction of the whaling industry. He joined the campaign to halt the slaughter and, with public opinion running with the tide, a moratorium on whaling was pushed through by international consensus, cutting the numbers of whales killed from 330,000 a year to just over 300, and these for “scientific purposes.”

In the late ‘60s, Payne and his colleague Scott McVay were the first to document that humpback whales “sing” rhythmic phrases, sometimes over and over for more than 24 hours at a time, opening the door to speculation that whales were far more intelligent than had previously been surmised.

The subject of whale intelligence figures prominently in the documentary and Payne speculates that humans may someday establish direct communication with cetaceans.

“Absolutely,” he said, cautioning that he is not taking a stand on the debate between scientists as to whether or not dolphins have a language capability similar to humans.

“But, I think it may be possible to go beyond just the simple commands, already understood, like ‘Put the ring on the baton.’ A more useful discourse is possible to the extent that we can ask--and expect answers--for such questions as ‘Are you bothered by boats?’ ‘Are you afraid of sharks?’ and even, ‘Was your father faithful to your mother?’ ”

“In the Company of Whales” broaches no such questions for now, but it is replete with what has become the dramatic standard for wildlife documentaries--spectacular footage of the mammals at play and at work: breaching (launching themselves almost entirely out of the water), attempting to mate, feeding, calving and migrating over hundreds of thousands of miles from the warm breeding shallows of the Caribbean to the feeding banks of Newfoundland and Iceland, from the wind-swept coasts of Patagonia to the icy depths of Alaska and the North Pacific.

There are scenes of fierceness as well as gentility. In New Zealand, for example, a giant sperm whale bull charged cameraman Tony Miller while he was in the water moving in for a close-up. Another time, off the South American coast, a friendly right whale swam over to the boat, and allowed himself to be patted and cosseted by the crew. At total ease, he even drifted off to sleep. “You could actually hear him snoring,” said Payne. “It was the most charming thing I’ve ever seen.”

But the documentary is framed most compellingly by presenting the whale not as pet-like, but as a canary. Payne made the point that miners once brought canaries into the mines to gauge the invisible but poisonous gases leaking into the atmosphere. Payne suggested that the toxic poisons found in marine mammals today may well serve the same warning--that pollutants may have reached dangerous levels high up on the food chain, posing serious health risks not only for marine life but especially for humans.

Observed Payne, “The most serious threat to whales today is not necessarily the harpoon or even the drift nets in which hundreds of thousands of whales are snagged annually, but (it is) the toxicity in the seas.” Payne said that the new frontier in whale research is graphing the level of insoluble chemical contaminants and biological toxins in mammals and that the preliminary findings are alarming.

“Just take, for example, one contaminant, PCB, or chlorinated hydrocarbons,” he said. “In the United States, by law, you are not allowed to sell substances that have more than five parts per million of PCBs. Anything containing more than 50 parts per million must be disposed of in special containers. Yet, in mid-ocean, whales were found with 400 parts per million of PCBs. In the Gulf of St. Lawrence, beluga whales were found with 600 parts per million, bottle-nosed dolphin with 6,900 parts per million. These animals are swimming toxic dump sites.”

Payne speculated that there might well be a direct connection between the level of pollution found in marine habitats and the increasing number of mammal die-offs, such as the decimation of nearly half the population of East Coast bottle-nosed dolphin, which succumbed some years ago to a relative of “the red tide,” red and brown algae which produce toxins harmful to fish and marine mammals.

“This is just a theory,” Payne cautioned, “but some preliminary research indicates that one effect of pollutants in marine mammals is to compromise the immune system, not unlike AIDS. There is every reason to believe that the immune systems of whales are being wrecked by what we’re dumping into the oceans. Autopsies on whales found in heavily polluted waters have revealed numerous cancerous tumors. And we’re now losing whales to red tide. But they’ve previously coexisted with red tide relatives for years, so why are they succumbing now? A possible answer: because pollution has damaged their ability to fight back.”

While Payne’s primary research continues to be the social behavior of whales, particularly the right whales of Argentina, he is eager to help fund his colleague’s monitoring system for toxins in the oceans.

Indeed, while in the Dominican Republic, one of the Odyssey’s excursions into the bay was for the purpose of obtaining blubber samples for analysis. When a humpback lunged alongside the boat, Vasquez, director of Marine Mammal Research at the University of Santo Domingo, leveled a crossbow at it and with a dart managed to scrape off a piece of blubber for analysis. His efforts were greeted with loud hisses and boos from passengers on whale-watching craft bobbing in the water nearby.

“They don’t realize these research techniques are rather benign,” explained Payne, “but I appreciate their passion. If we were talking about gray squirrels, I doubt that people would have the same reaction. But whales inspire awe and we can use that to sound the alarm.”

Watching a male breach in the distance--perhaps to impress a nearby female, or even a boat of whale watchers--Payne added, “Why do people love whales so much? Well, seeing my first whale was like seeing my first redwood tree in California. It was so big and I was so small. It put things in perspective.”

“In the Company of Whales” airs Sunday at 6 p.m. on the Discovery Channel.