Cetacean religion

I’ve been thinking about cetacean religion. That’s because I wrote the phrase “human religious thought” a couple of days ago, which prompted me to think about other kinds of religious thought. I believe that whales and their relatives are the best candidates for such thought. They’re social. They’ve got big brains: the average adult sperm whale brain weighs 20 pounds. Their smaller dolphin cousins’ weigh about 3.75 pounds. For comparison, human brains weigh about three pounds. Not that brain size necessarily means anything. But I’ve noticed that the extra weight in dolphin brains is all in the in good, smart-making, folded-up cerebrum. More folds means more neurons packed into the skull, and the hemispheres of a dolphin's brain are much more densely folded than ours.

We know that many cetaceans communicate with each other. Blue whale song travels halfway around the world, flowing underwater with sonorous tonality. Or rather, it used to. These days the oceans are a cacophony: ship engines, submarine sonar, and so forth. All kinds of mechanized noises fill the deep. The US Navy has developed a new low-frequency sonar that’s so powerful it makes whales’ ears bleed...then kills them. If a blue whale can hear a pod a few hundred miles away he’s lucky.

But imagine, just for a moment, that in the absence of an environment that lends itself to the manipulation of objects, all of that extra brain mass supports communication and memory. Imagine hundreds of thousands of years' worth of song, passed across vast oceanic distances. Stories incomprehensible to us: chronicles of the heavy flow of currents miles beneath the surface, or anecdotes about the strange rage of a spectacular storm on the surface and the intricate feel of gale-force winds on a breaching dorsal ridge. Poetry that could take months or even years to unfold, recited by 120-ton marine bards using haunting frequencies below and above the range of human hearing.

The newest stories, of course, would be the ones about the tiny creatures that skim along the surface of the water, first on small bits of floating material, and then, much later, on thunderous behemoths larger than the whales themselves. Perhaps there are new songs about the lost pods, millions of individual bards pulled bleeding from the sea onto the tiny creatures’ vessels and flensed, leaving only their bitter organs floating in churning wakes. Perhaps, now, there are songs known to only a few, songs about the isolation, the diminishing tribes, the horrendous clanking turbulence of the tiny creatures as they flit this way and that above and within the ocean. Tales that are unique to the North Atlantic, or to the Southern seas off of Cape Horn, never to be told anywhere else.

Do they still remember the old songs? The cetacean versions of Genesis, legends from the time before there was water? Do they sing about the ages when the seas were filled with stories? Such tales would be their religious thought: explanations of how things were, before the Great Noise.