Andrew Miller: Visit from the giants of the deep a reminder the planet’s future is in our hands

Right whales have roughly the same life span as humans. Four of them came by our local beach last week, to recuperate and breastfeed in the end-of-winter shallows. They lobtailed and blew misty greetings from double blowholes, enjoying some well-earned rest, just beyond the shore-break. Thousands of humans filed down to catch a glimpse of two calves staying close alongside their 70,000kg mothers. The smaller father whales are of little utility to nursing mums, so they had dragged their massive testicles — 500kg per gland — off somewhere else to eat, free of responsibility. It would be unfair to apply anthropomorphic comparisons, by muttering “typical men,” or “how big?” for example. Newborn right whales weigh about 1200kg and stack on 100kg every day, because breast is best. As their mothers cannot sieve krill with their baleen mouth screens until they head for Antarctica again, this is a direct transfer of body weight from mother to offspring. They will lose around a quarter of their mass, more than 15 tonnes, during three months of literal maternal sacrifice. They breed approximately every three years. Us tiny humans stood on wet white sand in spontaneous congregation, watching quietly, feeling a fundamental natural connection that is difficult to find in our ironically inhuman city. We took our kids, to show them that people are not always the main characters, and we felt better for it. Why does it nourish the soul to know these innocent giant mammals are — at least for today — okay? We hunted them almost into extinction, and their oceans are now polluted with warming, acidification and industrial fishing. The world feels much smaller than it did last century; little mystery remains. We find plastic at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean’s Mariana Trench, long queues on Mount Everest, and junk in orbit. Yet there is plenty to wonder at still, if we know how to look forward. Closely related to the irritable hippopotamus, whales and dolphins were not the only animals to return to the deep. Sea snakes, turtles and sealions, walruses and seals, marine iguanas, manatees, otters and salty crocodiles all evolved incrementally from terrestrial tetrapods. Now 98, my mother is still thrilled by the mere suggestion of chocolate, and so I bribed her into a wheelchair pilgrimage along the bumpy beach path. “There goes my boyfriend — who’s his fancy woman?” she exclaimed indignantly as each couple jogged past us, in sweaty pursuit of something. We saw sand coated kelpies circling, rounding up kids at the glowing water’s edge. Two skinny boys gripped each other’s shoulders, sumo wrestling as their parents scanned the waves. “Whale!” the father cried out, as a tail rose high and slapped down. In the cool sunny cusp of spring, the temperature plunged as we passed in the shade of bright yellow acacias. Sour grass with its own yellow trumpets was scattered in between, and all combined with salty seaweed aromas into a heady recall of childhood adventures among magical sand dunes. Mum’s eyes were closed, the sun warming her face as she savoured a gentle liquid breeze. It carried the sound of waves, happy dogs, kids, and freedom. I thanked the whales for making us look up from our phones, to see beyond them to some future horizon. “That’s nice,” they said, with wise motherly smiles, “though it’s not all about you.” Ending whaling was the least we could do — we must follow our better impulses and reduce pollution. I hope the humans will choose good things for this small blue planet, so that our kids and those whale calves can meet again to show off their next generation to one another, down at the beach.