Shots in the Dark

In The Atlantic, Alexis Madrigal writes about a fascinating project by underwater photographer Bryant Austin, who is obsessed with photographing whales, and particularly their eyes.

…as Austin puts it, the whale challenges him “to reevaluate our perceptions of intelligent, conscious life on this planet.” This mammal’s eye — lens, cornea, pupil, retina, photoreceptors and ganglion nerve cells — is a direct passageway into its brain. And when we look at it, Austin can’t help but see an intelligence there, a connection to a brain that, perhaps, works enough like ours for us to understand each other.

I’ll buy this. I once went snorkeling with whale sharks, and at one point dove down about 15 or 20 feet to swim alongside one of the beautiful animals. I was at one point within a yard or so of one of its eyes, and we watched each other, and there’s no question in my mind that that shark was interpreting me—and making contact. Its eye was looking at my eyes. What does that mean? I have no idea. But I can see why Austin would find that contact fascinating.

As Madrigal points out, while we have a pretty good, if amazed, sense of what we are seeing, we really have very little idea of what a whale is seeing. So she asked Sonke Johnsen, a Duke scientist who wrote a book called The Optics of Life, about how whales interpret what their eyes see—particularly given the fact that they have eyes on separate sides of their head. How exactly does that work?

“They have two completely independent fields of view,” ]Johnsen said.] “God knows what they do with that. The internal perception, how do they represent that? Is it like two screens in their head? Do they stick it together? We don’t deal with that because we don’t have a region of our field of view that’s like that,” he said. “For all we know, they represent sonar information as vision. We think they hear a bunch of clicks, but for all we know, it is represented in a visual spatial form in their heads.”

These questions become more urgent as a) we continue poisoning the oceans and b) we are only starting to realize the immense intelligence of these animals. Trust me: It will not be long before we start applying the term “genocide” not only to the victims of Pol Pot, Stalin, Hitler, and so on, but also to the extinctions of animals.

On a lighter note, here’s one of Bryant Austin’s photographs of sperm whales. Being underwater and getting to see something like this—that is most certainly on my bucket list.