LIANE HANSEN, host:
Studying animals in nature isn't always about close encounters. Wild animals can be hard to find. Some hide by scurrying into burrows. Others scamper up trees or dive underwater. For the field biologist, there is passion in the search for the quarry. Our next story is a tribute to that search. It's from scientist turned independent radio producer Ari Daniel Shapiro.
Dr. ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO (Independent Radio Producer): I've spent part of my life as a killer whale biologist. I'm fascinated by both the whales and the lengths we go to to study them.
Dr. VOLKER DEECKE (Research Fellow, Sea Mammal Research Unit, University of St. Andrews, Scotland): Killer whales are great animals. They fascinate me a lot.
Dr. SHAPIRO: That's a friend of mine, Volker Deecke. He makes his living researching killer whales.
Dr. DEECKE: I love the challenge of having to think like a killer whale. You know, having to strip your biases as a terrestrial, visually based mammal, and now have to try and understand what life might be like for an animal that lives in a three-dimensional world where vision is not very useful, where sound travels for large distances.
Dr. SHAPIRO: I studied killer whales for my graduate work. So I get what it's like to imagine myself thinking and moving like a killer whale. In the field, I've had unbelievably vivid dreams of encountering the very whales I was hoping to find by day. Back home, I've heard emergency sirens outside, and mistaken them for a band of roving killer whales that have somehow come ashore to put out a fire.
(Soundbite of killer whales)
Dr. SHAPIRO: Whales are mythic and real at once.
Dr. DEECKE: The one thing that I always notice about whales is people use them as a canvas, you know? The white whale, people just color them in and project whatever they want onto them. And the less you know about an animal, the more you can do that. You know, once you actually have the full knowledge of what the animal is about, it takes away that freedom to project your ideas into it, what it should be, and what it should be doing.
Dr. SHAPIRO: So before we go any further, let's color in the killer whale a bit. They live in every ocean and hug the coastlines of every continent. Each population feeds on something different. In Norway, they eat fish, mostly herring. In Alaska, one of the populations eats marine mammals, including seals and porpoises. Killer whale feeding involves two basic phases. They locate and pursue their prey, and then they attack and eat it. In one very obvious way, killer whales that eat fish behave differently from those that eat marine mammals.
(Soundbite of Norwegian killer whales)
Dr. SHAPIRO: These are the Norwegian fish eaters. They're loud. They call to one another a lot. They echolocate using sound like an acoustic strobe light to scan their surroundings and find fish. Now, here's a recording of the Alaskan mammal eaters in pursuit.
(Soundbite of Alaskan killer whales)
Dr. SHAPIRO: They're absolutely silent. The seals and porpoises they eat have excellent hearing, and a vocal killer whale would tip them off and help them escape. So the killer whales keep quiet. But hearing in fish tends to be poor. So it's OK for killer whales to be chatty. It may be that they're informing one another of where they are, or maybe they're just excited. Both types of killer whales, those that eat fish and those that eat marine mammals, spend a lot of time in pursuit, waiting for and following their prey. And it's not unlike how killer whale researchers spend their time waiting for the whales to show up - chatting with one another, scanning the water from a windy bluff.
Dr. DEECKE: I mean, you're just looking for little irregularities in the water. Anything vertical really sticks out on this horizontal landscape.
Dr. SHAPIRO: Volker is speaking from Fitful Head, a lookout in the south of the Shetland Islands, which are about 80 miles to the north of Scotland. I visited him and a field team of three this summer in Shetland, where they were studying the killer whales. One of the big questions was whether the Shetland whales eat fish or mammals. The team wanted to watch the animals in action, look for evidence of fish scales or marine mammal guts in the water, and listen for the presence or absence of killer whale vocal activity. But to get close enough, they first had to find them by spotting the animals from a distance. And that takes a lot of waiting. Here's Andy Foote, a killer whale biologist and one of the field team members scanning the water for whales.
Mr. ANDY FOOTE (Killer Whale Biologist): I think when you first get into working with whales, you almost jump at every wave or marker buoy. And as you get a little bit more experienced, you sort of actually don't exclaim at and have an outburst at the first sight. You wait for it to come up a second time and make sure, and you're like, ha, OK. Just that sense of excitement, where all of a sudden your - the hairs on the back of your neck stand up a little bit, and then you've got your whale.
Dr. SHAPIRO: Day after day, while we stood there looking for whales and not seeing any, there were often tourists and locals observing us, trying to make out why we watched the waters around us so intently, so hopefully. Some folks understood what brought us there, like this fellow, Gordon(ph).
GORDON: When I was a kid, a teenager, we used to go bus spotting. Ever heard of that? We used to go around and take numbers of the buses.
Dr. SHAPIRO: Oh, yeah.
GORDON: And we had special books with all the buses in them and all the different types of buses - double-decker, single-deckers. And we used to go in different carriages and sit behind the wheel and vroom, vroom, vroom, you know?
Dr. SHAPIRO: That was your thing.
GORDON: That was my thing.
Dr. SHAPIRO: So you can understand how you could get really interested in something?
GORDON: I can understand how a person could be interested in a worm or a killer whale or a bird or whatever.
Dr. SHAPIRO: But some bystanders weren't quite so convinced, like Tom(ph).
TOM: Could I do it? Not really.
Dr. SHAPIRO: How long would you wait up here?
TOM: Well, if I thought I was going to see one, I'd probably stay a half-hour or an hour.
Dr. SHAPIRO: Would you stay here for three months?
TOM: Oh, no, no, no. No, no. No, thank you.
Dr. SHAPIRO: In three months, Volker Deecke's team followed killer whales in Shetland only 12 times. On average, that's a little less than once each week. But it's a start. They eventually observed whales targeting marine mammals, namely harbor seals, as prey. There was no evidence for feeding on fish, but the possibility can't be ruled out just yet. So, they'll probably go back next summer to try to learn more. Volker's looking forward to it.
Dr. DEECKE: Having the time to immerse yourself into the place and just go beyond the first impression, I think is a real privilege in itself, whales or no whales. So that's certainly what keeps me going.
Dr. SHAPIRO: As killer whale biologists, we wait weeks for a glimpse of a black fin on light water, for the moment when we can observe and describe what the animals let us see. It takes a kind of love to maintain that kind of relationship, because we're pretty sure the killer whales don't feel the same way about us. It's not like they're waiting for us to show up. But it doesn't matter. We're drawn to them.
Ms. ALICE ROCCO (Killer Whale Researcher): With killer whales, it's incredible.
Dr. SHAPIRO: That's field assistant Alice Rocco.
Ms. ROCCO: Like the first time we saw them, to me the male was extremely sensual - you know, like he had these sexy movements going on. Looked like he was a dancer or something - a really good dancer.
Dr. SHAPIRO: And it's not just we biologists that get infatuated. Killer whales are awesome creatures. Local Shetlander Derrick Herning(ph) watches them from shore.
Mr. DERRICK HERNING: You get a thrill from seeing a killer whale. I mean, I know they're cruel, that they play around with seals. They toss them up in the air and all the rest of it. But it's still a marvel of nature, this - it's a beautiful whale, the killer whale. So I take my hat off to it. I don't wear a hat, but never mind.
(Soundbite of music)
Dr. SHAPIRO: Killer whales capture the imagination. And maybe that's because of their very elusiveness, the way they disappear beneath the water's surface into their own world, leaving us behind on the shore, wishing to see them just once more. A love like that can sustain you for a lifetime.
(Soundbite of music)
HANSEN: Our story was produced by former killer whale biologist turned public radio producer Ari Daniel Shapiro, with help from Jay Allison and the public radio Web site Transom.org. To watch a video by Ari Daniel Shapiro of researchers conducting field work on killer whales, visit our Web site, npr.org.