The Whale Who Loved Rock & Roll

Via the Atlantic, a lovely excerpt from what sounds like a much sadder book (David Kirby’s Death at SeaWorld: Shamu and the Dark Side of Whales in Captivity), detailing a musical human-animal interaction from 1968 that sounds perhaps even more delightful than my favorite one of all time:

Paul played everything for the little whale: Mozart, Miles Davis, the Moody Blues. Hyak seemed to like it all. But what he liked more than anything was music that was new. One day Paul put on an album by the famous Indian sitar player Ravi Shankar. “He was so interested in that, he responded to it so enthusiastically,” Paul said. “So the next day, I went down and played it to him again. And we didn’t get more than a few seconds into it when he stopped and went straight back to his corner. He sat there and waited for me to put on something else. He’d remembered enough of what I’d played him the previous day, and he didn’t want to hear what he’d already heard, again.”

…This little whale had an extraordinary acoustic memory, Paul realized. And as with Skana, he believed that Hyak was trying to use operant conditioning to elicit a desired response from the human, not the other way around. Hyak was now consistently demanding new music. Fortunately, in 1968, there was no shortage of it. The Rolling Stone’s album Beggars Banquet had just been released, in addition to a number one single, “Jumping Jack Flash.” Hyak seemed to love rock and roll. The aquarium’s conservative management frowned upon the racket of English long hairs blasting their electric guitars, but Paul figured, what the hell? He’d give the Stones a go. He got the LP out of its sleeve and put it on the record player. “All of a sudden, Hyak swam at me and charged around the pool making great waves that washed over the edges,” Paul recounted. “He went down one side, leapt, and then turned the corner and r-r-raced down the other side. Then he shot his body out of the water once again, did a barrel roll, and dove back in. After that he slapped his pectoral fin on the water. He’d sit there and spray great plumes out of the side of his mouth. It was such an amazing transformation of behavior. And I said to myself, wow, he really digs the Stones!”

One of the first biologists to understand the nuances of whales’ reactions to human-made sound worked with Hyak’s tank-neighbor Skana, and eventually began to advocate for the whale to be released into the wild. He was subsequently released from his contract with the Vancouver Aquarium, and started a nonprofit dedicated to studying wild whales and preventing their capture. Here are some photos of Skana from her decade of performance at the aquarium.

Photo via Chelsea Gomez/flickr