A Nod to the Odd - Narwhal

There are any number of peculiar looking animals in the world, but perhaps none more so than the narwhal. These so-called “unicorns of the sea” have been intriguing people probably since the first human crossed the Bering Land Bridge and got a good look at the creatures.

The taxonomic name for narwhal – Monodon monoceros – is one of those Latin descriptors that suggests the animal got a Linnaean classification before scientists knew a whole hell of a lot about the creature they were naming. Meaning “one tooth, one horn,” the tooth part is right, but the horn part isn’t. A narwhal does not have a horn. The thing sticking out of its head that looks like a horn is actually a tooth, or more properly a tusk. More about that in a bit.

In Arctic Dreams, author Barry Lopez remarks, “We know more about the rings of Saturn than we know about narwhal.” This is frustratingly true. Biologists still know relatively little about narwhal, due to the fact that they are incredibly difficult to study. They live in the Arctic, one of the most hostile environments on Earth, and spend a great deal of their time under the heavy pack ice of Baffin Bay, swimming from air hole to air hole as they check stuff off their narwhal to-do lists. And even after the pack ice breaks up scientists still only have a whopping two months to observe the animals. These limited observations are made even trickier by the fact that narwhal are very skittish creatures, especially around motorized boats, but even if the motor is off and the boat is  stationary, sounds as relatively quiet as human voices can frighten away the whales.

(Narwhal at the Surface)

For most of the year narwhal are the only large mammals living in their harsh world, and they would not be able to live there were they not exquisitely adapted it. The whales have evolved a layer of blubber up to five inches thick that enables them to stay warm in their frozen homes. And when brunch rolls around they are capable of diving a mile or more down into the abyss, where they prey on fish – almost exclusively Greenland halibut, but with the occasional Arctic cod or squid thrown in – that, literally, no other large predatory species can reach.

It is generally understood that narwhal reach sexual maturity at around seven years of age. Most whales have a lengthy gestation period, and narwhal are the same, gestating their calves for 14 months. Females deliver a single calf about every three years. (Calves are born without tasks, because of course they are, that would really hurt.) Pregnancies come so infrequently because of the time narwhal calves spend suckling and otherwise being cared for by their mothers.

It is unknown at what age female narwhal stop having young, but the whales are very long-lived. The oldest narwhal ever recorded (their ages can be calculated by counting the rings in their tusks, just like with trees) was a female that lived an astonishing 115 years. Even if we assume that figure to be something of an aberration, it is still quite possible that there are narwhal alive today that were born during World War II.

(Diving)

Compared to other whales, narwhal aren’t especially large. Not counting their tusks males average about 13 feet, and females around 11 feet. Narwhal of both sexes weigh in at around 3000 pounds. The extreme cold of their environment imposes upon the whales a fairly low swimming speed. When they are just ambling along running errands and so forth they do so at a paltry four or five miles an hour, only slightly faster than an average human walks, but even when they kick it up a notch their maximum speed seems to be around nine miles per hour.

Narwhal are frequently observed swimming upside down, a behavior that puzzles scientists. Orca and other whale species swim upside down, but more often than not only when at play.. The behavior would make some sense among males trying to keep their tusks out of the way when feeding near the bottom, but narwhal of both sexes swim upside down at the surface. They might do it for no other reason other than just cuz it’s fun.

The thing, of course, that really separates narwhal, not just from all other whales, but from all other mammals, are those tusks. The jury is still way, way out about why they have them and what they do with them.

(Large Pod Surfacing)

As mentioned previously, narwhal tusks are teeth – canines – that extruded through the upper lip. All male narwhal have one, but only about 10 percent of females do. On rare occasions males might have two, except when that happens one dramatically outgrows the other. Color-wise, narwhal tusks are dark brown at the base, lightening as they grow into a sort of creamy tan. Maximum tusk length among males is eight feet, and three or four feet among females. The tusks are flexible (they can move around a foot in any direction) with a leathery coating that scientists believe enables the tusks to flex without breaking. They always grow from the left side of the head. Why that is the case is a murky aspect of narwhal evolution. Equally murky is the fact that tusks always spiral to the left as they lengthen. Even equally murkier is that apart from the tusk narwhal have no other teeth. Weird.

No one is sure as to what use narwhal put their tusks, but hypotheses abound. Scientists agree about one thing though: the tusks are not are weapons. Male narwhal are not leaping about the ocean, going at it like Westley and Iñigo Montoya. Which is not to say that narwhal never touch one another’s tusks. The animals have been observed diving straight down 20 or 25 feet, then coming right back up again, their tusks rising vertically from the water. And sometimes two whales perform the same maneuver almost in tandem, except that once their tusks are out of the water they cross them. If it’s some kind of semaphore, the narwhal definitely should have supplied a codebook.

(Tusk. Sans Whale)

An interesting fact about the tusks is that they have a long central nerve running from base to tip. Having a nerve in such a relatively unprotected place would, a few cetacean biologists believe, allow narwhal to sense a variety of factors about the water they swim through, not the least of which would be the water’s temperature, oxygen gradients, and perhaps even depth and salinity. These notions are, for now, pure speculation, but if it ends up that there is some truth to them, that would mean that narwhal have a unique sensory organ that could potentially augment their already sophisticated echolocation.

In all likelihood narwhal tusks are an evolved secondary sexual characteristics, used by males during courtship to impress potential mates, not unlike a male peacock’s plume, the great big schnoz of a male elephant seal, or the Armani-and-Rolex combo seen on male jagoffs.

Their tusks, no matter what positives the whales gain from them, have in other ways not done them any favors. Narwhal only have three primary predators, humans, Greenland sharks, and orca, and if they are trying to escape while being hunted their tusks are an impediment. Swimming rapidly with a six foot flexible flagpole attached to your face cannot be easy.

Humans, sharks, and orca hunt narwhal for sustenance, but humans also hunt the whales strictly to take their tusks, which have been valuable among humans for quite some time. They are believed to have been brought to European markets by Vikings over a millennia ago, and archaeologists have found narwhal tusks in digs around Greenland dating back nearly 10,000 years. Today, narwhal tusks find their way into the hands of non-First Nations people via black market trade. They command in excess of $1,000 each.

Like all toothed whales narwhals use echolocation to navigate their world, and they make a variety of sounds, both orally and through their blowholes. The sounds have been described as creaky floorboards, pops, clicks, staccato bursts of sound, barking sounds, and a sound that sounds extraordinarily like a cow mooing. One of their vocalizations, called an “click train,” is an extremely loud (200 decibels) series of clicking sounds. The volume might be enough to disorient prey fish, like a cetacean sound death-ray. This isn’t a completely silly idea, seeing as sperm whales are also thought to use sound to stun their prey.

(En Garde!)

There is plenty more to be said about these lovely whales, particularly about the threats posed their world by vanishing sea ice, but let’s end the things on a more positive note, this delightful description of the narwhal from Canadian biologist Marie Auger-Méthé:

They’re just so weird. They swim upside down; that’s so ridiculous! They have a tooth growing out of their face and no other teeth in their mouth; that’s ridiculous to me. The sound they make when they vibrate their blowhole and they take a breath sounds like farts. They’re a huge herd of farting animals. I had this romantic idea of narwhals slowly swimming wonderfully by, and when we saw our first narwhal and noticed their farting noise, I realized that they aren’t nearly as romantic as I thought they’d be. They crack me up! They are so not boring. They are the reverse of everything.

Cheers.