A week or two ago two members of the International Paleopsychology Project--Ted Coons and David Berreby--came over to the Bloom brownstone for a session of nattering, chattering, and taking the temperature of the universe. In the process I brought up the concept of informational communities--communities held to together by data-sharing--and whales. Elephants, hippopotamuses, and whales are all capable of making sounds far below the range of human hearing. On land these sounds travel over a mile, roping elephants that are far apart into a common data tribe. If elephants relay information they get from a comrade in the north to a comrade in the south, the chains of information could stretch for many miles. Male elephants are tossed out of the group of mothers who raised them when they hit puberty. I always thought their roaming, solo existence was a sorry comment on nature's willingness to inflict pain--in this case the pain of lifelong loneliness. However the elephants exiled in the jungle a mile from the females may, in fact, be linked by constant conversation with the femme's fatales they've been forced to leave behind. The girls may pass them gossip from the inner circle and they may respond with news of what's going on far beyond the outskirts of touchy-feely female territory. In other words, the males may only get to make body contact on rare occasions, but like the few of us who live our lives in virtual reality, they may well be tied into the social grapevine by information exchange. They may, in fact, be the antennae of the central female society. Hippopotamuses are another matter. They make their subsonic rumblings under water. I don't have the exact figures at hand, but their basso profundo-izings can be heard roughly 30 miles upriver and 30 miles down as well. What we see as a small collection of hippopotamuses bathing and lazing in the current may, in fact, be an illusion. Those hippos are tuned in to a conversation that, with a bit of relay, can extend a hundred miles or more. The idea of informational communities, data tribes, is one that hasn't to the best of my knowledge been explored, so details are sketchy. Now let's get to whales, the grandmasters of info-flash and of the info-telegraph. Elephant communities and those of whales parallel each other eerily. The book Cetacean Societies (Janet Mann, et. al., University of Chicago Press, 2000) notes this several times. Whale pods seem as harsh in their treatment of males as elephant clans. Which shouldn't be surprising. Whales and elephants share a common evolutionary ancestry-they are part of the same family tree. When young males of several whale species reach the age of sexual blubberings, they are tossed out of the maternal pod and left to go awandering. Awandering, indeed, they go, traveling seasonally as far as the earth's poles. But are they lonely in their travels? I always thought so, and wondered why they go so far from the females and young. According to Cetacean Societies, whale calls, their complex and possibly linguistic songs, can travel several thousand kilometers, from Iceland to Bermuda. That's just according to research collected as of 1999, and it may well reflect the limitations of current research techniques. Whale tunes, symphonies, and soliloquies may, in fact, travel even farther. What, then, would be the adaptive value to a whale gene team, to a whale genome, of sending some of its vehicles literally to the ends of the earth while keeping its female vehicles and their young in balmier waters closer to the equator? The highly speculative hypothesis I proposed when Ted and David were here providing inspiration went something like this. After the experience of the last 1990s with la Nina and el nino's effects on weather thousands of miles away--in Japan, California, new England, old England, France, and Spain--we know something that our fathers and forefathers knew when they spoke of the gulf stream-a current that began in the Gulf of Mexico and flowed all the way to the Arctic Circle. The insight that the phrase "Gulf Stream" implies is this: the weather six months from now is being hatched this instant in currents far, far away. Those long distance travelers, the male whales at the poles, may well be broadcasting weather forecasts to the ladies way back home. And in turn they may be given the current news on whose baby is doing what with whom. Why are weather forecasts important to whales, who have an entire sea to roam? Like human nomads, the cattle-herders of Kenya, for example, whales may need to know where the sea will be most abundant in the food they eat. And they may need to know it far in advance. Whales are mighty venturers--they can travel enormous distances, and they do. But it takes them time. They move at the rate of roughly 25 miles a day--the same speed Napoleon's troops reached when marching on foot. A journey of three thousand miles may begin with just one flip of the tail fin, but if it's not a flip in the right direction a whale pod may arrive at its destination only to discover that the cupboard is bare. Knowing which way to go when you're traveling nearly three months to get to a destination two thousand miles away is a necessity, especially for creatures that may need to consume several hundred fish, seals, or several trillion bits of plankton each and every day. Below is an article on the high degree of correlation between weather events on distant parts of the planet. Whales may have had an intuitive sense of this article's core data long before scientists got around to discovering it. One more note--the large-scale weather patterns described in this article are correlated with the earth's tilt and the extent to which the wobbles and eccentricities of that leaning, listing careen expose the Alto Plano to sunlight. These are the very same wobblings in our orbit around the sun that account for the 22,000, 41,000 and 100,000 year climatic alterations of the Malankovitch Effect. It is very likely that whales, like elephants, have memories that go way, way back. We know whales can teach each other tunes and dialects. But who knows how far back in time communal memory augmented by oral tradition can go among these creatures of the sea. Who knows how many ancestral voices whale data tribes include. I seriously doubt that cetacean traditions go back 22,000 years in time and anticipate the next tilt and wobble--or the ocean currents' tilts and wobbles cause. On the other hand, research on cetacean communities is still in its infancy. Who knows what forms of data pooling we may find when we become more skillful at deciphering the voices of the ocean's deeps.

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