Books SFF Bestiary

Hunting the Great White Whale-Thing on Jupiter

A reimagining of Moby-Dick that takes the classic whale hunt into space…

By Judith Tarr

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Published on January 5, 2026

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Thanks to editor Mal Frazier at Tor, who read the SFF Bestiary article on Moby-Dick and offered an early look at an upcoming novel, I have had a very pleasant end-of-year vacation reading Alexis Hall’s Hell’s Heart. The jacket copy calls it “Gideon the Ninth meets Moby-Dick,” and that’s accurate. It’s a bravura piece, following the plot and characters of Melville’s novel closely, but taking them in directions that are all its own.

There is so much to this retelling and recasting. Literary allusions in two languages and cultural traditions. Historical references. Worldbuilding that riffs, sometimes ferociously, off current events.

In the far future, the spaceship Pequod, which the narrator calls a hunter-barque, and its crew and its legendary captain, hunt Leviathans on and in Jupiter. Earth, or Terra, has been stripped of its resources and essentially abandoned. Most of humanity lives in space.

It’s a grand adventure. It’s also blessed (some readers might say cursed, but that would not be me) by Melville’s original structure, which puts the worldbuilding right out front, in dedicated chapters. We learn in detail what a hunter-barque looks like, what its parts are and why; we know what it’s doing out there, and above all, for the purposes of the Bestiary, what it’s hunting.

There’s a whole chapter called “Cetology.” Here we learn that

These are the creatures we will meet, and the characters will hunt and fight and kill and be killed by. The category adds up to, at its simplest, “some great beast with chitinous mandibles and feeder tendrils.”

Behemoths are the biggest:

The description makes me think of amphipods, though these small and abundant terrestrial creatures are not armored. The shape and overall structure are similar.

That reads to me like jellyfish. Jellies are as alien as it gets on this planet, and I can see them making sense on Jupiter.

Wyrms are a different kind of animal, and ubiquitous in the story:

The narrator points out the analogy to eels, and to the remoras that surround various species of whales, as well as the parasites that infect the eyes of Greenland sharks. Wyrms are a fair bit like sharks themselves, in the way they’re always there, ready to swarm in toward any possible prey. A considerable part of the job of processing a kill involves fighting off Wyrms.

And finally, there are the true Leviathans, of which there are multiple species.

Although we know these are the Jovian analogues of whales—both baleen and toothed whales—their anatomy, with the rippling fins and the sharply pointed tail, points toward another terrestrial species, the giant oarfish.

Of those species, the ones most relevant to the story are the Barnard’s or Slack-Jawed, which is the largest and least known, and which feeds on energy by swimming or flying along with its mouth wide open; the Death’s Head,

And finally, the real point of it all, the reason for the hunt and the whole epic adventure, the Ridgeback or Sperm Leviathan.

There are others, but these are the ones that figure in the story. The Ridgeback matters most of all to the universe it lives and is hunted in, because spermaceti powers everything in the human system. Without it, there’s no life support, no transport, no habitats, nothing. Everything relies on it.

That makes the Pequod’s mission vital. The crew sign on for a three-year voyage, paid by shares in the eventual profits, like terrestrial whalers. The ship becomes their world. They meet other ships occasionally, but for the most part they sail, or fly, through the Jovian atmosphere in search of the electrical spouts that mark the presence of their prey.

The hunt, the capture, the kill, proceed much as they do in Melville, with similar levels of both danger and tedium. Because this is Moby-Dick in space, the ship’s captain is spectacularly and epically fixated on the legendary (if not outright mythical) Möbius Beast. This Leviathan of extraordinary size, intelligence, and apparent malice robbed her of her leg, and she is dead set on revenge.

Leviathan anatomy, biology, and behavior are crucial parts of the story. Despite centuries of the hunt, no one knows a great deal about Jovian animals. It’s not even known to science how or when or where they breed, though hunters (if they should ever be asked) can answer some of those questions. The Pequod, like its terrestrial forebear, finds a breeding ground, and sees how Leviathans gather in family groupings, with females and young and the enormous males.

Scientists might study, but hunters hunt. The breeding ground is a bonanza. Hunters can pick and choose their quarry, hunt down and kill and process as many Leviathans as their equipment and their crew can manage. Conservation is not an issue, and preservation has no meaning. The human universe can’t survive without the hunt and the kill. There’s no alternative, as far as we know or the narrator will tell us.

Just as in Melville, the hunters don’t see the quarry as fellow sentients. They’re hunting monsters, creatures whose intelligence isn’t relevant, unless it happens to be hostile. Even there, that hostility or apparent malice may be no more real or intentional than the storms that buffet them or the gravity that pulls them down into the depths of the gas giant.

Hell’s Heart does a splendid job of capturing the spirit of Moby-Dick. A good part of that, and a great deal of the fun, is the range and variety of its fauna. Even though we know how it has to end, when we finally meet the Möbius beast, we’re there for it. We’re ready for that last, terrifying, fatally fascinating ride into the heart of Jupiter’s blood-red hell.[end-mark]

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Hell’s Heart

Alexis Hall

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Hell's Heart

Alexis Hall

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Books SFF Bestiary

Jellyfish in Space! — Aliette de Bodard’s Navigational Entanglements

Jellyfish are profoundly alien to our human biology and psychology — so they make sense as space aliens

By Judith Tarr

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Published on December 15, 2025

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Aliette de Bodard is on my shortlist of “auto-preorder” authors: writers whose works I order as soon as they become available (remember: preorders are love). I first encountered her through fantasy, the marvelous The House of Shattered Wings and its sequels and tie-ins. (Purely coincidentally, the core trilogy has just been released in a shiny new edition.)

Thanks to commenter Khryss for reminding me that I had an unread De Bodard in my TBR pile, and for pointing out that it features jellyfish aliens. Naturally I leaped to move it to the top of the pile.

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Navigational Entanglements

Aliette de Bodard

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Navigational Entanglements

Aliette de Bodard

Buy this book from:

• Amazon
• Barnes and Noble
• iBooks
• IndieBound
• Target

Navigational Entanglements’ title works on multiple levels. It’s about four junior navigators in a Vietnamese-inspired science-fictional universe, confronted with a near-impossible task. This universe has an unusual take on star travel: navigators use their own energy, called Shadow, to open gates and navigate ships through the weird continuum called the Hollows.

The Hollows are inhabited, and the inhabitants are deadly dangerous. They’re called Tanglers. What they are, almost point for point, are spacefaring jellyfish. Bell, tentacles, stingers, the whole package.

Tanglers’ effect on humans is less about physical stingers and more about psychic damage. When their tendrils escape the Hollows into human space, navigators can track them with Shadow—and by following trails of humans whose minds have been bent or broken. A Tangler in human space is a serious threat to the humans in its path.

Much of the story revolves around the social, emotional, and political lives of the four young navigators, but the nature and biology of Tanglers is crucial to both the conflict and the resolution. The navigators are sent by their elders to find and capture a Tangler that has escaped (or so they’re told) from the Hollows. It has to be captured and presumably killed before it drifts into inhabited space. If they can’t stop it in time, the death toll will be enormous.

We’ve been learning about the life cycle of the jellyfish, and we’ve seen what happens when a bloom of giant jellyfish shows up along the coast of Japan. Both of these things are relevant to the story.

The average Tangler is about human-sized, but its tendrils trail far from the main body. The tendrils are the deadly part. What we learn along with the characters is that a Tangler can grow very, very, very big. The more it eats, the bigger it gets.

We don’t learn how long it lives, but that’s not really relevant. What is relevant is that a Tangler can breed in human space, and it reproduces in jellyfish fashion, seeding an area with polyps that develop into miniature Tanglers. The process seems to be fairly rapid, at least in space outside of the Hollows. The result, if it’s not checked or destroyed, is a bloom of Tanglers, and that is very bad.

Unlike terrestrial jellyfish (at least as far as we know), Tanglers appear to be sentient. They feel emotions (fear, loneliness, longing to go home). They seem to have a language.

They’re not mindless monsters. There’s no malice in them. They are what they are; they’re psychic predators, and they prey on humans who invade the Hollows. Outside of the Hollows, they hunt whatever they can eat, which would be the inhabitants of any habitat (from ship to planet) they encounter.

Whether it’s possible to communicate with them, or to persuade them to go back to the Hollows, is one of the problems the navigators have to solve. Can they settle this without violence, or without being killed themselves? In light of the political situation, should they even try? And what will the consequences be? Is it worth the cost?

I love that Tanglers are pretty much straightforward jellyfish with a couple of extra space powers. Jellies are profoundly alien to our human biology and psychology. They make sense as space aliens.

Now, a question for you all. What are your favorite book or film aliens based on terrestrial animals? That’s where I’m headed in the next chapter.

I have my eye on Pride of Chanur to start (lions! in space!), and several others are on my radar. What would you like me to look at? It doesn’t have to be fully sentient aliens; it can be unique life forms that are critical to the development of the story, as Tanglers are here. What’s out there, especially in the last decade or so? What shouldn’t I miss?[end-mark]

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Column SFF Bestiary

Marine Life Weirder Than Space Aliens

Colonial animals like the Portuguese Man o’ War push the boundaries on life as we know it…

By Judith Tarr

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Published on December 8, 2025

Photo by Sebastian Schuster [via Unsplash]

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Photo by Sebastian Schuster [via Unsplash]

I have learned so much while researching and writing this chapter of the SFF Bestiary. I’m endlessly intrigued by the sheer range and variety of creatures that live in the ocean. Some, like cetaceans, are alien but still relatable to our mammalian brains. Others are as weird and truly other as anything we can imagine on another planet.

When I started researching this topic, I was surprised to discover that the Portuguese man o’ war is not a jellyfish. It looks like one, with its shimmering, clear-plastic-like inflatable bladder and its trailing tentacles, not to mention its notorious stingers, but it’s something else. It’s a siphonophore.

Jellyfish and siphonophores are related. They’re both classified as Cnidarians. They share a gelatinous body, stinging tentacles, and no blood or brain. But structurally they’re very different.

A jellyfish has a bell or hood, tentacles, arms, and a mouth. Sometimes it has eyes or eye-like structures. It’s an animal in the way we are, a collection of specialized organs that add up to a single creature.

A siphonophore is what’s known as a colonial animal, a community of tiny creatures called zooids.

Every member of the colony has a specific and separate function. Some feed, some swim, some reproduce. They’re joined together along a central stem, through which they share energy and nutrition. Individual zooids can’t survive apart from the colony, but if some are separated, the rest of the colony can survive and generate new zooids.

All the zooids in a siphonophore are clones of a single fertilized egg. The egg develops into a polyp, which buds off copies of itself, specialized according to its location in the colony. The ones that eat can’t swim, the ones that swim can’t eat, and so on.

Siphonophores of the same species grow their zooids in the same order, but different species have different arrangements. Many have swimming zooids called nectophores that propel them through the water. Some species, including the man o’ war, have a gas-filled bladder or pneumatophore at or near the front. Some have pneumatophores but not nectophores. They all have feeding polyps with long tentacles that capture and usually sting prey and then consume it, and reproductive zooids that can be either all male or all female or both.

A man o’ war’s balloon or float is fairly small, around six inches (15cm) high, but the stinging tentacles can extend as far as 100 feet (30 meters). Hundreds of man o’ wars can congregate in a single area, just like a jellyfish bloom, with similar effects on swimmers and beachgoers. What you see on the beach or above the water is a tiny fraction of the whole animal.

The man o’ war is far from the largest or longest of its kind, and it’s one of the few that lives on or near the surface of the ocean. Most siphonophores live in the twilight zone, down 2000 feet (700 meters) and more. That’s where the giants are.

The giant siphonophore, the praya dubia (doesn’t that sound like an alien species?), is one of the longest creatures in the ocean, longer than the blue whale. Supposedly it can reach 50 meters (160 feet). It’s an apparently endless ribbon, glowing with bioluminescence, transcribing enormous spirals in the darkness of the deep sea.

Seeing it and its fellow siphonophores on video, it’s hard to comprehend the scale. What looks like a hollow sea cucumber or a textured wind sock moves into the frame with human divers, and dwarfs them. We’ve seen something like it on Star Trek, in “The Doomsday Machine”.

The way it’s constructed, as a colony of individual organisms rather than a single entity, is about as far from our experience as it can be. Its body is toxic to us, and it lives in an environment that cannot support human life. It’s beautiful and weird, and proves yet again that nature is stranger than we humans can imagine.

If we find living creatures on other planets, we might encounter a being, or colony of beings, remarkably like this. Or it might even appear in space. The question then might be, is it sentient? Will we communicate with it? Can we? Or will it be as mysterious as our own terrestrial alien?[end-mark]

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Column SFF Bestiary

 A Real-Life Monster Movie

Giant mindless monsters swarm the coasts, overwhelm fisheries, and defying all attempts to stop them…

By Judith Tarr

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Published on December 1, 2025

Photo by Maryna Seradzenka [via Unsplash]

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Photo by Maryna Seradzenka [via Unsplash]

The 2010 documentary titled Monster Jellyfish—also called Realm of Giants and Nomura’s Giant Swarm—tells a story as viscerally alarming as any monster movie. It hits all the notes: giant mindless monsters swarming the coasts of Japan, overwhelming the fisheries, defying scientists’ attempts to stop them. What’s worse, it’s not a one-off. It’s turned into an annual event.

The Nomura jellyfish was first known to science around 1921. It’s one of the largest jellyfish species, with a bell growing as large as three meters (over ten feet) across. It breeds on the coast of China, at the mouth of the Yangtze River, and drifts on ocean currents until it reaches the coast of Japan.

Every forty years or so, there would be a bloom of Nomura jellyfish: a massive increase in population. Then in 2002, something changed. The blooms began to occur almost annually. By 2009, Japan’s fishing industry was suffering serious losses. Fishermen were hauling in nets overloaded with 200-kilogram (440-pound) monsters, so heavy they were swamping boats.

Nomura jellyfish don’t eat fish; they live on a diet of zooplankton. But blooms of jellyfish consume the zooplankton on which many fish also subsist, and cause an environmental collapse.

It’s not just Nomura jellyfish. The documentary describes a series of blooms all over the world. In 2006, thirty thousand people were stung by jellyfish in the Mediterranean. In 2007, a swarm of jellyfish covering ten square miles destroyed a salmon farm, wiping out 100,000 salmon. In 2008, dozens of athletes competing in a triathlon were stung by jellyfish in the Hudson River in New York.

Opinions are divided as to why jellyfish populations suddenly exploded. Climate change and warming of the oceans is a definite factor. Pollution may also contribute, along with overfishing. Somewhat paradoxically, jellyfish blooms may kill off or drive out fish by consuming all of the available zooplankton, but overfishing increases the supply of plankton on which jellyfish feed and grow.

The uniquely complex life cycle of the jellyfish helps to determine the timing and extent of a bloom. The Nomura specifically has an adult life span of only a year. In that year, it grows at a rate determined by how much it is able to eat, and it does not stop until it dies.

A single female Nomura produces over a billion eggs, and a male over a trillion sperm. They scatter these into the water, producing tiny fertilized larvae that attach to the sea floor. Each larva matures into a polyp that grows feeding tentacles to catch passing zooplankton.

And then it gets weird. A polyp can move in a sort of walking motion, leaving behind a trail of tissue that develops into new polyps, each a clone of the original. Polyps can lie dormant for decades, until ocean conditions are just right to form saucer-like segments that break off and become tiny jellyfish.

Each of these babies is a miniature version of the giant it will become in a matter of months: a stomach, reproductive organs, and eight light-detecting eyes, all protected by the bell. Eight arms hang below it, surrounded by hundreds of tentacles covered with a network of nerves that react to touch with a sting. A Nomura sting is not lethal to humans, but it can be very painful. Its purpose is to stun its prey.

This fascinating animal on its own or in small numbers is not a problem, but then there are literally billions of it, it’s an ecological disaster. Masses of jellyfish choke out the oxygen in the water, drive or kill off fish, shut down beaches.

The documentary shifts its focus at this point from the natural history of the jellyfish to the effects of the bloom on the humans who fish in those waters. They are, in a word, catastrophic.

Various authorities have tried a number of possible ways to resolve the problem. On the grand scale of things, reversing climate change and eliminating pollution would take care of it, but realistically, that’s not happening. More localized solutions may at least reduce the size and frequency of the blooms.

Direct confrontation turned out to be a terrible idea. Huge nets with metal cables shredded the jellyfish—but as they died, they released all their eggs and sperm. And now there are billions and trillions of polyps lying dormant on the floor of the Sea of Japan, waiting for conditions to be right. That’s nightmare fuel.

For real. It’s all too likely that this species, which to date has bred only in China, may be about to establish a second breeding ground off the coast of Japan. If that happens, a big problem will become huge.

One researcher set out to breed jellyfish in the lab, to study their life cycle in detail and try to figure out a way to short-circuit it. He did finally succeed in producing baby jellyfish, bells and tentacles and all, and he was able to determine that higher temperatures cause jellyfish to grow faster—confirming that climate change is a contributing factor to jellyfish population explosions. But as far as birth control goes, he didn’t really find anything that would work.

Another possibility that seems to have had some success was the building of artificial reefs off the coast, and stocking them with file fish. File fish have thick, tough skins that are impervious to jellyfish stings, and they will happily nibble on the tentacles of a fully adult jellyfish. The principle there is to build up fish populations, especially fish that eat jellyfish, and restore the balance of the ocean.

Meanwhile there are still billions of jellyfish to contend with. China deals with them by eating them. Japan has been a much harder sell.

The documentary shows us a chef who has found ways to process jellyfish and developed recipes that are, according to people who have tried them, delicious. But people are just not interested. Short of a stroke of luck and a viral fad, jellyfish is not about to become a viral food sensation in Japan.

Japan’s problem may only be the beginning. The more the climate changes, the more jellyfish blooms we’re likely to see, until the ocean is full of them. We have to find a way to solve the problem. We have to try to save the ocean.

That’s where matters stood in 2009. I was able to find a paper that provides an update from 2009 through 2024. According to the paper, jellyfish blooms decreased significantly after 2014, but the reprieve was short-lived. By 2021, they were back.

There is a glimmer of hope. The paper lists some very interesting developments in medical and environmental research. A great deal can be done with jellyfish apart from eating them, that may save human lives and help repair the planet.[end-mark]

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Column SFF Bestiary

The Lore and the Weird Magic of the Jellyfish

Even as sea creatures go, the jellyfish is especially alien…

By Judith Tarr

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Published on November 24, 2025

Photo by Katarzyna Urbanek [via Unsplash]

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Photo by Katarzyna Urbanek [via Unsplash]

Even as sea creatures go, the jellyfish is weird. It’s 95% water. It has no bones, no brain, no blood, no heart. It’s been swimming through the sea for hundreds of millions of years. At the rate it’s going, it may be the last thing left after everything else has succumbed to climate change and plain old entropy.

I’ve talked about the jellyfish that may be immortal, but that’s only one of hundreds of different varieties across two phyla, Cnidaria and Ctenophora. They come in all sizes from a tiny pinprick to a monster almost three meters across. What they all have in common is their general shape: a bell or a box with trailing tentacles, nearly always equipped with stinging cells that stun and capture prey.

Jellyfish stings are a notorious problem for humans. Most jellies are not lethal, but their stings can hurt like fury, and it’s often impossible to know they’re there until you step or swim into them. Even if you can see the bell, the tentacles can stretch far beyond it.

The most venomous animal in the world is the Australian box jellyfish. Unlike most jellies, which aren’t particularly strong swimmers and mostly drift on the currents, this jellyfish can swim against the tide, and it has eyes. It can see you. It’s not just scary, it’s deadly. And it’s big: its tentacles are up to 3 meters (10 feet) long.

What we recognize as a jellyfish, or a sea jelly as they’re more properly called, is only one of several life stages: the medusa. That’s the pulsing, graceful, sometimes deadly creature that’s found in every ocean. Under the right conditions it can congregate in groups as small as a meter across and as large as hundreds of meters: a phenomenon called a bloom.

This is a supremely simple animal with a complex life cycle. It consists of a bell or box with an orifice that serves as both mouth and anus, a nerve net that’s capable of detecting levels of light, temperature, and chemical changes in the water (i.e., a sort of sense of smell), and the tentacles I mentioned above, which can trail for many meters behind the bell. They eat plankton and small sea creatures and sometimes fellow jellies. They are eaten in turn by other animals including sea turtles, whale sharks, and humans—some species are a delicacy in Asia.

Jellies reproduce in two stages, one sexual and one asexual. The medusa releases either eggs and sperm into the water. They fertilize there (or sometimes in the mouth of the female) and develop into free-swimming larvae, which eventually attach to a surface and grow into polyps. These polyps in turn reproduce asexually by budding off ephyrae or infant jellies. Those that survive to adulthood become medusae. And so the cycle begins again.

Medusae tend to be short-lived, as little as a few months, but polyps can live for years or even decades. And then of course there’s that wonder of the world, the immortal jellyfish, which can reverse the aging process and transform back into a polyp. Then, when conditions are right, it matures again into a medusa.

It’s a complicated process, but it works. Jellies have outlasted most other species that have existed in the world. They’re invaluable to science not just for their longevity and persistence, but for what they can tell us about conditions in the ocean.

Jellyfish blooms serve as indicators of climate change, as the water temperature rises and their reproductive cycle speeds up. Warmer water, more jellies, bigger blooms. This affects shipping and fisheries, as well as swimmers and beachgoers.

Jellies have been ringing another set of alarm bells for the scientists who study them. As they feed, they accumulate microplastics. When other animals prey on them, the plastics move further on up the food chain. They’re a clear indicator of a growing problem.

But there is a possible upside to this. Jellies, and the mucus some of them generate as a means of trapping prey, can actually trap microplastics. It may be possible to use them as a filter, to help clean up the ocean. That would be a serious benefit to the whole planet, not just to humans.

While I’m contemplating the strangeness and possible usefulness of the jellyfish, I’m trying to remember where I’ve read of jellyfish-like aliens in science fiction. Anne McCaffrey’s Thread, for example is a kind of medusa-less jellyfish tentacle: all sting, no pretty. Where else do we see this particular kind of beautifully weird alien?[end-mark]

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Column SFF Bestiary

Who Wants to Live Forever?

Scouring the animal kingdom on the quest for immortality…

By Judith Tarr

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Published on November 17, 2025

Print by Simon Frisius, based on a design by Antonio Tempesta (c. 1610-64)

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Print by Simon Frisius, based on a design by Antonio Tempesta (c. 1610-64)

The concept of immortality is one of the oldest tropes in literature. The first written work we have, the Epic of Gilgamesh, tells of a quest for the flower of immortality, which can bring the dead back to life. Whether the resurrected person will continue to age and eventually die again, isn’t made clear. In the meantime the flower allows him to escape from death.

Humans are born to die, but they can’t stop thinking about ways to prolong their lives indefinitely. Perpetual youth is not always a given. Tithonus in Greek myth and Jonathan Swift’s fictional Struldbrugs go on and on, growing older and older and more and more incapacitated. Tithonus in the end shrivels into an insect.

Staying young forever is much a more popular choice. Gods and elves, immortals à la Highlander and the vampire mythos, represent various manifestations of undying youth. Many of them can be killed, but left to themselves, they never age or die.

I could go on about this, and many others have, but this is the SFF Bestiary. What about animals? Not mythical beasts but real, living creatures. Can any terrestrial animal be immortal? Is it even possible?

Lists of “immortal” animals, such as this one, stretch the definition of immortality to include animals that live significantly longer than humans, including my favorite, the Greenland shark. By that definition, a human is immortal compared to a mouse or a fruit fly. What about genuine immortality? Actual deathlessness?

Most terrestrial organisms have an expiration date. Their lives begin in some fashion (born, hatched, budded, whatever). They mature, they reproduce, they age, they die. Their cells stop replicating, their systems deteriorate. Eventually they stop living.

Very long-lived animals tend to have slow metabolisms. They grow slowly. They often move slowly—as witness the giant tortoise and our favorite shark. They mature late. They live their lives in slow motion.

Those lives do end. Eventually they succumb to age, as humans do. But much more gradually.

The big fancy animals, the marquee animals, are mortal, even if they can live for centuries. But there are animals that, as far as we can tell, actually do not die. They’re not vertebrates. In human terms, they’re downright alien.

One way to live forever is to reach a certain point in the life cycle and then start over. Reach maturity, and then, under certain conditions, become a larva again. A tiny jellyfish, Turritopsis dohrni, does exactly this. Scientists call it the immortal jellyfish.

The process is called transdifferentiation. The mature animal reverts to its immature form. It’s not like an adult human becoming a child again; the two forms are quite different. As the article puts it, it’s as if a butterfly could change back into a caterpillar.

In theory there’s no limit to how often the jellyfish can transdifferentiate. Barring accident or predation, it won’t die. It keeps on living, shifting from one form to another. There’s a kind of poetry in that.

Transformation is one way to live forever. But there’s even tinier aquatic organism that may be truly immortal. It’s called the hydra: a minuscule relative of the jellyfish and the sea anemone. Its columnar body has a mouth on top surrounded by tentacles; the bottom or foot can stick to a surface or glide slowly along, or it may bend and somersault through the water. It can shrink to a dot or stretch to as much as two inches (5cm).

The hydra reproduces by budding, basically cloning itself. It doesn’t appear to age. Its cells replicate continuously, without deteriorating, but also without the kind of runaway growth that in humans is called cancer.

In its way it’s a perfect organism. It’s sublimely simple: a foot, a mouth, and a set of tentacles to sting its prey. It isn’t really born, and it doesn’t die. It just is. For as close to ever as anything in this world.

God or Elf or Immortal it’s not. It won’t star in an epic fantasy, unless you size it up enormously and turn it into the mythological monster it’s named after. But it’s a kind of miracle.

I’d love to know of genre works that feature unusual variations on immortality. I’ve seen the Elves, the vampires, the various flavors of immortals. Body-swapping is a popular theme; so is cloning a new body and transferring the consciousness. And of course there are all the variations on electronic and digital preservation of the human mind and personality. What else have writers (and filmmakers) done with the concept? What new ways have they found to make their characters—human, animal, alien, terrestrial—live forever?[end-mark]

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Column SFF Bestiary

Down the Rabbit Hole: Searching for the Greenland Shark

Heading down the rabbit hole — or should that be fishing hole? — of shark research…

By Judith Tarr

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Published on November 10, 2025

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There’s a term for where I’ve been for the past few months. I’ve been down the rabbit hole with the marine-animal research, wandering blissfully through the warren, finding all sorts of fascinating side tunnels. I am now a diehard fan of cetacean documentaries, and I’ve been scoping out whale watches. There’s a very nice one that sails (literally; it’s a sailing yacht) from San Diego.

Meanwhile I follow a whole bunch of research feeds. Orca research, dolphin research, shark research. Marine biologists and oceanographers. Videos and podcasts and documentaries. Researchgasms wherever I turn.

One of my sources for the article on Greenland sharks is a Canadian documentary that follows a series of expeditions from around 1996 to 2003. Dr. Chris Harvey Clark of Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia teamed up with professional diver Jeffrey Gallant to answer a question that had obsessed Clark since he was twelve years old, when he read a newspaper article that depicted an ice fisherman with his unexpected catch: a pair of Greenland sharks.

The fisherman’s hole in the ice wasn’t anywhere near Greenland. It was 3000 kilometers (1800 miles) away on a tributary of the St. Lawrence River. Says Clark, “Looking for Greenland sharks in Canada has been like looking for Bigfoot. It’s a bit like cryptozoology in that we started with nothing. There was really no literature on these animals.” What there was was local legend in a remote part of Quebec, “in the heart of French Canada” as the narrator tells us.

In 1995 when Clark and Gallant first met at a conference, and in the early years of the twenty-first century when they began their search, little was known about this rare and elusive species of shark. They focused on a deep fjord at the mouth of the St. Lawrence, where fresh water and salt water mix in powerful tides. It’s tremendously rich in nutrients, and full of a wide variety of aquatic life.

Both arctic and antarctic waters are teeming with creatures of all sizes. You might think that such water would be too cold to support life, but these regions are some of the richest in the world. Giants congregate there: Walruses and elephant seals. Cetaceans including the humpback and the sperm whale. And Greenland sharks.

Clark and Gallant began what they called a grassroots expedition. Gallant traveled around the area and talked to people. They wanted to know why and where this particular species of shark had shown up in the fjord.

Legends of huge sharks went all the way back to the sixteenth century. One interviewee said, “It has almost become a mythical creature, a mascot of sorts for the people. The Greenland shark may be our own Loch Ness monster.”

This isn’t a cryptid. It’s a real, scientifically attested, actual animal. But Clark and Gallant were determined to find it in this particular region. As far as anyone knew at the time, it was only known to exist in the waters around Greenland.

Their expedition, and the documentary based on it, is a great example of the challenges of field research in marine biology. You have to go where the subject of your study goes. Deep-sea species live in an environment that’s actively inimical to human life.

It’s tough enough to mount an expedition in the tropics or in the temperate zone, but the arctic is a whole other level of difficulty. Prime fishing season there is in the winter. According to the documentary, ice fishermen have pulled up dozens of sharks out of that specific fjord since the mid-twentieth century.

We get to see one such episode, a homemade video from 1995. It took five men to pull a shark out of their fishing hole, and they had to widen it to make room for the fish. It’s clearly a Greenland shark: that big pointy nose is unmistakable, and the fish is noticeably larger than the men pulling it in. They were not fishing for any such thing, but there it was.

In 1996, five sharks were caught in a huge ice-fishing camp on the fjord. That’s a lot of sharks for a species that’s supposedly extremely rare. But as Clark says, it’s not like animals on land. Things underwater are invisible. People don’t know they’re there.

Clark and Gallant knew there were sharks in those waters, but they weren’t planning to fish for them. They wanted to observe the animal in its native environment. That meant diving, in the winter, under the ice.

Their experiment began with a hole in the two-foot-thick ice, a large supply of bait, and a metal cage. They hoped not to need the cage, but had it in reserve, just in case.

The weather was terrible, Clark says. Cold enough to shatter plastic. Total darkness under the ice, and only one exit. They had no idea what to expect, or what they would find. The shark itself was virtually unknown to science at that time; it had never been studied in the wild.

I wondered why they didn’t send a remote camera under the ice, at least to scope out the area. Didn’t have one? Wanted a truly hands-on experience?

Whatever their reasoning, the first season yielded nothing. They did learn quite a bit about the ecosystem of the area, but they didn’t find any sharks. The next year they went back, but again, nothing. “Frozen, frustrated, and out of money, it was back to the drawing board.”

Their fruitless search continued for over five years. But they were determined to dive with the Greenland shark in the Saguenay Peninsula. They wanted to believe. They were as dedicated as any cryptid hunters.

Then, in 2003, Gallant had an email from someone in the area who had observed “a large fish.” Divers on social media were seeing “a very big fish” near the town of Baie Comeau. Gallant and Clark packed up and headed north yet again—but this time during warmer weather.

Local divers confirmed the presence of a huge fish, but conditions were the diametrical opposite of the ones Clark and Gallant had been diving in before. It was June, and the water was relatively shallow. But spring that year had come late; the water was still unseasonably cold. An unusually large run of bait fish had congregated in a secluded bay. That would explain why a Greenland shark might be there.

And it was.

Literally as soon as Gallant got in the water, he saw it. “This massive thing [came] out of nowhere, coming straight for us.”

It was huge. Mottled skin, heavy body, swimming calmly along—the first pictures ever taken of a Greenland shark swimming freely in the wild. “It was a scientific coup and a personal victory.”

Clark wasn’t there for it. He was still en route. But the next day, like Gallant, he saw a shark as soon as he hit the water. It was the most amazing feeling in the world. “It’s like finally you’ve seen Bigfoot. You’ve found the secret graveyard of the elephants. You’ve found the thing you’ve looked for for years.”

It was more than just a thrilling experience. The scientific rewards were immense. Just for starters: Clark’s shark was not blind. Its eyes were clear. It wasn’t afflicted with the parasite.

They did not know how it would react to being followed around by humans with cameras. They were diving without a cage, without a clear sense of the animal’s temperament, whether it was dangerous, if it would turn on them.

Clark had found a two-and-half-meter male. Gallant the day before had encountered a female. The male swims faster than Gallant’s female, and it’s keeping a literal sharp eye on the humans.

Up to that point, scientific consensus had been that these are not visual predators. The parasite they were all presumed to be infected with had forced them to rely on their sense of smell. But these sharks weren’t acting like blind scavengers at all. They were quick and agile; Clark clocked the male at 1.4 meters per second, which is faster than a human can swim.

Just when Clark and Gallant were almost out of air, a second shark joined the first. After years of nothing at all, they were seeing multiples: this time, a three-meter female. When they had recharged their tanks and gone back again, Gallant ventured to touch her—and she let him know, in shark, Don’t. She lowered her pectoral fins and bent her nose downward.

Gallant speculates that she read him as a fellow shark. Greenland sharks, like other sharks, will eat each other, and there’s no other predator in those waters that can take them on.

Clark notes that she does not like it when one of them is directly behind her. Her tail is frayed, most likely from nipping by other sharks. It might be how a male approaches a female.

He also notices that the male is missing one of his two sexual organs, the claspers that allow him to hold on to a female during breeding. This indicates that shark courtship could be just a little bit wild.

There are still numerous questions to be answered. Is this is predator or a scavenger? What does it mean when a Greenland shark comes up behind you? Is she seeing you as a threat, or as dinner? Does she live here year-round, or is she migratory? How old can she get? What is her life cycle?

Some of these questions have been answered in whole or in part since, but these first observations were groundbreaking. If there’s a word that describes the whole experience, it’s “unexpected.” Unexpected catch for ice fishermen, unexpected location and environment for the sharks the seekers finally find, and unexpected discoveries. What I didn’t expect was beauty. These are gorgeous fish. Huge and healthy and very much aware of the humans swimming alongside them. And they’ll still be swimming, barring accident or injury, long after all of us are gone.[end-mark]

The post Down the Rabbit Hole: Searching for the Greenland Shark appeared first on Reactor.

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Oldest of the Old: The Greenland Shark

Sharks are creatures of near-myth, and this one can live for centuries…

By Judith Tarr

|

Published on November 3, 2025

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The Greenland shark is the longest-lived vertebrate on this planet, that we know of. It’s been showing up in news feeds for a few years now, described with breathless awe: “This shark can be 400 years old! It’s older than the United States!”

That’s not quite the giant Wowzer! for me that it might be. When I think human-level old, I think Gobekli Tepe. But an animal that lives for centuries, in our own world, not in a fantasy novel, really is amazing.

Sharks are creatures of near-myth anyway. So much of the truth about them is obscured by layers of fear, helped along by popular entertainment. We’re just starting to break through that fear, and coming closer to the sense of wonder. The Greenland shark, the shark that can live longer than any other vertebrate, is a wondrous thing.

Not only does it live a very long time, it’s a very large shark. Twenty feet (6m) or more. It’s not as massive as a great white, but it’s the same length or longer.

We’re still very much in the learning stages about this shark, another name for which is the grey shark. It’s classified as a sleeper shark, specifically Somniosus microcephalus. The name comes from the fact that it’s known to swim very, very slowly. Though not always; it can manage bursts of speed.

Slow movement, as in conservation of energy, is an adaptation to the environment where the species is most often found. That, unusually for sharks (who are generally creatures of warmer waters), is the cold, deep water of the Arctic. It can go as deep as 7200 feet (2200m), though it has been found in much shallower waters. It feeds on pretty much anything it can get, from crustaceans to seals, and it seems to be a scavenger as well as a predator.

Not only is it (at least sometimes) a slow swimmer, it also grows very slowly. Very, very slowly. As little as a couple of centimeters a year. All the way up to 600 centimeters. That adds up to decades. Centuries.

As with other sharks including the great white, females are larger than males. The great old ones mostly likely are grandmother sharks. And they may not be sexually mature until they’re at least 150 years old.

That’s mind-blowing for a human. We’re long-lived compared to many animals on the planet, but to a Greenland shark, we’re as relatively ephemeral as a dog or a cat.

Many or most of these sharks are blind, thanks to a parasite that lodges in their eyes. It’s not the disability it might be for a land animal: there’s no light in the deep ocean, and their sense of smell is acute, as is their ability to detect vibration in the water. Clearly they have no trouble eating enough to survive and thrive, though human interference and climate change are a serious threat.

One particularly potent adaptation to both cold and depth makes the Greenland shark actually poisonous. Their flesh when fresh is full of toxins, including trimethylamine oxide (TMAO), which can produce symptoms similar to extreme intoxication and can be fatal. It can however be prepared so that it’s safe to eat, as it is in Iceland, where it’s called Hakarl.

I would like to know who discovered this and how they did it, because it’s a laborious and lengthy process. Desperation, and starvation, must have played a part in it.

Slow growth and slow movement might be a problem for an animal in this rapidly changing world, but the Greenland shark has one advantage that we’re just beginning to understand. It appears that females are very, very, very fertile. As in hundreds of eggs per pregnancy.

They are what’s known as aplacental viviparous sharks. They give birth to live young, but the young don’t obtain oxygen and nutrients from the mother through a placenta. The baby shark feeds on its yolk sac—and its fellow baby sharks—until it’s ready to be born.

At that point it’s about 15 inches long (35-45cm), and it’s a fully formed predator, a miniature version of its mother. She doesn’t nurture it. Once it’s born, it’s on its own.

We don’t know all the details of its reproductive cycle. Exactly how males and females breed, how long the gestation period lasts, where or when the babies are born—these are mysteries that have yet to be solved.

We don’t even know for sure how extensive the Greenland shark’s range is. An individual turned up recently in the Caribbean, off the coast of Belize. The waters in the region are extremely deep, down to 25,000 feet (7600m), which means that, however warm the shallows may be, the depths are more than cold enough to support a Greenland shark. For all we know, they’re everywhere in the deepest parts of the Atlantic. If the water is cold enough, and they’re not stopped by marine barriers, they could be anywhere. We just haven’t happened across them.[end-mark]

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Up Close With Predators: Ocean Ramsey’s Shark Whisperer

A documentary that seeks to rehab the image of “killer” sharks…

By Judith Tarr

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Published on October 27, 2025

Credit: Netflix

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Credit: Netflix

Ocean Ramsey’s life is sharks. It’s who she is, what she does, and why she does it. With her partner and photographer Juan Oliphant, she’s dedicated her life to changing the way the world perceives sharks. They declare, in so many words, that they set out to be the Anti-Jaws.

Their Netflix documentary, just released this year, tells their story, centering around Ocean’s life and passion for sharks. It aims to be balanced in that it provides alternative viewpoints and touches on the controversy around Ocean’s thousands of hours spent swimming with sharks. No cage. No barricade of any kind.

And much of the time, no air tank, either. She free dives. She has, over the years, trained herself to hold her breath for up to six and a half minutes. This allows her to present herself as a fellow fish, without the distraction of breathing equipment.

This isn’t a vanity project (though some of the controversy alleges that it is). She has a clear goal, to advocate for shark conservation around the world. One of the main story lines of the documentary is her campaign to protect sharks in her home state of Hawaii, lobbying for legislation to make it illegal to harm or kill a shark.

There’s a strong environmental reason for this. Sharks are essential to the health of the ocean. As marine biologist Kim Holland points out, if you take out sharks, you get a ripple effect down through the rest of the ocean. We need the ocean, and the ocean needs its apex predators.

Between 70 and 100 million sharks are killed every year. Ocean’s goal is to reduce that number to zero. She has a long way to go, but she starts by setting out to prove to the world that sharks are not monsters.

Shark attacks, as I’ve noted elsewhere, are actually quite rare. The documentary notes that if sharks really were out to get humans, swimmers and surfers and kayakers wouldn’t just be bitten, they would disappear. And they would do so in large numbers.

What’s happening is that sharks are mistaking humans for their usual prey. If you thrash and splash, you read to a hunting shark as a fish. The shark picks up the vibration, homes in, and boom.

Over and over again, people who have been attacked say, “It came out of nowhere. I never saw it coming. All of a sudden, my leg/arm/body was inside a shark.”

That’s a big part of why people are so afraid of sharks. It’s random. It’s unexpected. It’s the biggest jump scare there is.

And then, because that’s how fear works, it gets blown out of all proportion. The legend grows. The terror mounts. Whole beaches full of tourists are afraid to go in the water.

Ocean Ramsey sets out to be the antidote to that. She meets the sharks in their own domain, on their own terms. “But aren’t you afraid you’ll get eaten?” her social-media followers (and interviewers and opinion columnists) ask her.

Her answer is No. Is it dangerous? Yes. Any human who comes into close contact with another apex predator has to face up to the fact that we may be the apex of the apex, but it’s not because we’re physically stronger or faster. By ourselves we’re small, weak, and slow. What we have is our intelligence, and we can use that to connect with the predator.

Could a shark turn on her at some point? Yes. As with every other naturalist/media star who engages with major predators, she runs that risk every time she goes in the water. But if it happens, she says, “Don’t blame the shark.”

In the meantime, she has been studying sharks since the early 2000s, particularly tiger sharks off the North Shore of O’ahu, Hawaii. Great whites may be the main monster of myth and legend, thanks to Jaws, but in Hawaii, the real fear is of these somewhat smaller, lightning-fast, powerful hunters. It’s actually a tiger shark who first gets accused of taking the first victim in Jaws, until the real perpetrator shows up and starts terrorizing the human population.

Ocean, beautifully filmed and accompanied by Juan, began her study in 2007. She identified multiple individuals, recording their behavior, coming to understand their language.

It’s not a language of sounds, as far as she observes in the documentary. The communications she observes are visual. Her inspiration for her observations is a study she read when she was younger, about the way bees communicate.

She sees in sharks a similar kind of interaction, a dance in three dimensions. They are not swimming at random. They’re communicating through movement, through position in the water: what she calls patterns of social hierarchy.

Where they are in relation to each other is significant. If they’re parallel, if one is higher, if one shows its underside. Lowered pectoral fins are a threat display—“Go ahead, come at me.”

These signals can be subtle, and sharks with their big brains have the capacity recognize small nuances. Ocean has learned from them to control her body in extremely precise ways. If she’s tense, if she’s off, they pick it up. She has to cultivate muscle-deep calm.

She has to be keenly aware of where everyone is at all times, and she has to keep careful track of their moods. Sharks are super fast and super strong. That’s where “it came out of nowhere” comes from.

Free diving allows her to be more agile than if she were carrying breathing equipment. She can interact with sharks as if she were one of them. She swims like a dolphin or a mermaid, rather than with the separate flipper strokes we more often see in divers. She uses her body as a shark will, as much as human anatomy will allow.

She is right there with them, in physical contact. There’s a rule: lock the elbow. If the shark moves in, keep it literally at arm’s length—unless it’s very clear that the shark is inviting her to come in closer.

She comes to know individual sharks, and they seem to recognize her as well. There’s more to this than scientific identification, though that’s important. It’s a way to make the shark accessible to humans who are watching these videos. If you name a thing, you connect with it. You start to understand it. It’s not a monster anymore.

Nikki, Riley (aka Koa or Warrior), young Kalihi who seems to study Ocean as Ocean studies her, and most poignant of all, Roxy with her broken jaw and her tragic story—we get to know them in some small way as Ocean and Juan know them. We see past the big pointy teeth and the killer-shark mythos to the individual. We start to understand that this, however alien, is a person.

As fascinating as tiger sharks are, Ocean realizes that she needs to aim literally for a bigger fish if she wants to bring large numbers of people on board her campaign to protect sharks. That means the great white, which is rare in Hawaii—the unicorn of the ocean.

She travels to Guadalupe, Mexico, where great whites are known to congregate. She starts with a cage there, because she may be at ease with tiger sharks after years of swimming with them, but these sharks don’t know her and she doesn’t know them.

She gets what she came for. The dominant great white in that part of the world comes up to the cage. She seems curious. Her eye is open. It almost feels like an invitation.

Ocean leaves the cage. She swims with the shark. Juan records the meeting, the slender woman with her hand on the shark’s fin, skimming along with her. (In shark world, the dominant individual swims above. It’s not coercion; the shark could turn at any moment and place herself on top. Or simply shake the human off, and leave her far behind.)

That’s the point at which the narrative changed. The footage went viral. Ocean had her defining image, her anti-Jaws moment.

Images have power. Visuals sell not just products but ideas. Humans believe in what they see. If they see a shark and a human swimming together without conflict, they start to lose their fear. They begin to understand.

The film is careful not to let this get out of hand. Basically it adds up to Professional Driver, Closed Course, Do Not Try This At Home. Or as the National Parks Service warns about another large and emphatically not tame animal, Don’t Pet the Fluffy Cows.

No, a shark is not a monster. Yes, it can be dangerous. Be very, very respectful, and only try what Ocean does if you’ve spent as long as she has studying sharks in their native environment.

The documentary has some amazing moments. Aside from Roxy’s story, I’ll long remember what happened after the trip to Guadalupe, sometime around 2019, when a deceased sperm whale fetches up on a Hawaiian reef. Ocean and Juan went out there to study tiger sharks feeding on the huge carcass.

While they were watching, the tiger sharks disappeared. The ocean went quiet. They heard little dolphin noises, but nothing else.

Then out of the depths it came: a great white shark. A good twenty feet long, Ocean says, and massive. She tears at the whale in an ecstasy of hunger, paying no attention to the humans (and that, it’s implied, is emblematic of how sharks really are—they’re not going to eat you unless they mistake you for something else).

I wonder if she’s pregnant, because she’s not shaped like the other sharks in the film. Her midsection is extremely round. It’s not mentioned or explained, but it would be amazing if she’s filling up on fuel to gestate her babies.

It’s an incredible sequence. The beauty and terror of the animal, the way the ocean goes still as she comes, the power she has—it’s all there. But so is her vulnerability.

Human fear, human hostility, human greed, are a clear and present threat to all species of sharks. We need to protect them; we have to stop killing them by the millions every year. The ocean needs them, and we need the ocean. We can’t live without each other.[end-mark]

The post Up Close With Predators: Ocean Ramsey’s <i>Shark Whisperer</i> appeared first on Reactor.

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Misunderstood Monsters: The Truth About Sharks

Are sharks really just mindless eating machines?

By Judith Tarr

|

Published on October 20, 2025

Photo by David Clode [via Unsplash]

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Photo by David Clode [via Unsplash]

The shark in popular culture is pretty much a mythical beast, on a level with the kaiju and the sea serpent. It’s a mindless eating machine, a total and unmitigated monster. All it wants is to turn you into swimmer tartare.

As with so much of what lives in the sea, we don’t know all that much about sharks. Research is ongoing and our knowledge increases steadily, but there’s still quite a lot of mystery. And quite a lot of shark species, too—over four hundred and counting.

Sharks range in size from the dwarf lantern shark at six inches (15cm) to the sixty-foot (18m) whale shark. The great white is not the biggest by far, and the tales of 25- and 30-footers (7-9m) are probably exaggerated. A large male great white runs around 11 to 13 feet (3.3-4m). The largest known male is named Contender, and was measured at 14 feet (4m) and 1653 pounds (750kg). He just showed up in the news, pinging his tag off the northeastern coast of North America.

Females are larger than males, at around 15 to 16 feet (4.5-5m). The longest reliably measured shark was around 20 feet (6m). Still plenty big, and plenty deadly; it’s the largest predatory fish on the planet. But Megalodon it’s not.

Not all shark species are distinctly sexually dimorphic, but many are. Females grow more slowly, and they eat differently—going for larger prey, the better to conceive and nourish their young. Bruce in Jaws is probably a she, and she’s hunting along the Cape to build herself up for making babies.

Some sharks lay eggs, some are ovoviviparous which means the eggs hatch inside the mom (and the babies feed on unhatched eggs and each other until they’re ready to emerge), and some, including great whites, have actual live births. No one had ever seen a newborn great white until very recently (and it’s a bit speculative, based on the evidence, because we have yet to see a great white giving birth). In further beautiful weirdness, a few species of sharks have reproduced parthenogenically, without the presence of a male.

Shark life spans are as varied (as far as we know) as their sizes and shapes. But since we’re into great whites, the range there is pretty similar to its cetacean analogue, the sperm whale. A great white can live about 70 years, and reaches sexual maturity somewhere around age 20. Contender, when tagged, was about 30 years old.

The grand champion in the shark longevity sweepstakes, as far as we know, is the Greenland shark, which has been recorded upwards of 250 years old. That’s far from the oldest living thing (some plants, jellyfish, and mollusks have lived much longer, and the hydra might be immortal), but it’s the oldest large vertebrate we know of, even older than the bowhead whale, some of whom have been found with harpoons dating back over 200 years to the golden age of whaling. Compared to this, humans are mayflies. So while Jaws is not accurate when it goes on about sharks living for thousands of years, it’s not as far off as we might think.

So what about the big question, the reason for all those gory movies—the shark attack? Are sharks really mindless aggressors? Is hunger their main motivation, with rage a close second? Are they, in a phrase, out to get us?

The answer is, pretty much, no. Sharks are apex predators. Some, like whale sharks, are like baleen whales: their prey is tiny and they eat a lot of it. Many, including the great white, eat bigger animals.

To a fifteen-foot shark, a fish the size of a human is a good dinner. The problem for us comes when she reads human activity in the water as fish activity. Especially if there’s blood, because sharks have an acute sense of smell and can detect blood from a long ways away.

She’s not deliberately targeting the human, any more than she’s targeting a fish or a seal. She doesn’t just attack for the sake of attacking. She’s hunting to eat.

What about boats? Again, sharks don’t randomly attack boats. The best explanation for when one does bite a hull is curiosity. “Big fish? Edible? CHOMP!”

Unlike the orcas that have been sinking yachts, sharks don’t gang up on boats unless there’s literally blood in the water. (The orcas may be playing, or it may be a teenaged fad. It’s probably not malevolent. They have not, so far, harmed any humans. Just their boats.) Also unlike the orcas however, they will bite a human who reads to them as prey.

These attacks in fact are quite rare, and fatalities even more so. You’re more likely to be struck by lightning than attacked by a shark. When attacks happen, they’re blown up out of all proportion. Jaws actually addresses this in the first half of the movie, when the mayor argues that if they close the beaches and publicize the first attack, people will panic and kill the tourist industry for the summer.

The film is spot on about the reaction to a shark attack. Long before Jaws and the book it’s based on, humans were terrified of sharks. There was a whole mythos around them, a persistent narrative: Sharks Kill. Sharks Eat. Sharks Bad. A similar, visceral terror used to be aroused by wolves, until the narrative shifted and more humans came to see wolves in a positive light.

With wolves, there’s the fluffy-fur aspect, along with pack loyalty and family bonds. Wolves are attractive, even with their terrible sharp teeth and their haunting howls. Plus we’ve domesticated a significant portion of the species and transformed them into house pets and loyal companions. Wolves are accessible. We can relate to wolves.

That hasn’t happened with sharks. There is nothing cuddly about a fish with sandpaper skin and far too many big, sharp, pointy teeth. To our eyes (and we are very visual animals), sharks are scary ugly. They look terrifying. There’s nothing there to hang our positive feels on.

So, are sharks really just mindless killing machines? Can sharks think? Do sharks think?

We don’t know. What we do know is that shark brains are proportionally as large as mammal brains, and have the same overall structure. That implies that they’re capable of a level of cognition above and beyond hunt-kill-eat. Possibly well beyond. Whether the implication is true, again, we don’t know.

Cetaceans are easier. They’re mammals, they raise and educate their young, and they communicate vocally, which we can relate to and try to understand. Sharks communicate through body language, movement, and chemical signals. Some vocalize, but as far as we can tell at this point, not with the sophistication of dolphin or sperm whale sounds.

Sharks are alien. They are not social animals in the way that cetaceans are. Jaws’ idea of the “rogue shark” is off base in that sharks in general, and great whites in particular, are mostly solitary. In that sense every great white is a rogue. At the same time, when they meet or mate, they appear to interact, and communicate, in complex ways.

We don’t know if, or how, young sharks learn to shark. They aren’t taught by their parents or relatives. Probably they learn by doing, though there is evidence that some species at least also learn by observing others. We’ve only just begun to study the nature and extent of their intelligence, how and how much they learn, and how or if they solve problems.

Again there’s an image problem. Octopuses are also non-nurturers, they’re complete aliens, their biology is bizarre by human standards, but also by human standards, they come down on the cute side of the equation. They’re accessible. We appreciate their aesthetic. We’re motivated to interact with them and study them.

Sharks are a harder sell. In the new but growing field of animal cognition, they are getting attention, but it’s very early days. All we can say is that they’re probably smarter than we think. How much smarter, time, and continued study, will tell.[end-mark]

The post Misunderstood Monsters: The Truth About Sharks appeared first on Reactor.

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The Heirs of Jaws

In the wake of Jaws came bigger, splashier monster-shark movies…

By Judith Tarr

|

Published on October 15, 2025

Credit: Syfy Films

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Credit: Syfy Films

This was going to be an article about big, splashy shark movies. In particular, The Meg (2018) and the Sharknado cycle (2013-2018). Sharks in these films are not so much living animals as an excuse for lavish special effects and over-the-top adventures packed with in-jokes and fan service.

The Meg is your basic monster movie. Humans trapped in impossible situation have to try to survive giant prehistoric monster from the uttermost depths of the ocean. We know what’s actually down there—mostly cute little snailfish and tiny little amphipods—but we can kick back and pretend there really are humongous sharks just waiting for a crew of hapless humans to get on their last nerve.

The Sharknados are outright, gleeful, fully self-aware fantasy. A collection of former teen stars, led by 90210’s Ian Ziering, battles tornadoes full of hungry, hungry sharks. Each of the six films ups the ante on the last one, until by film number six, our heroes are boinging all over time and in and out of alternate worlds.

It seems as if half of genre Hollywood lined up for a cameo. Oh, hello, Wil and Anne Wheaton! Great to see you, Marina Sirtis! Oh, hi, Nichelle Nichols! And is that Dee Snider? David Hasselhoff? Gilbert Gottfried, oh, god, why. Wow, Tori Spelling, I’d never have known you.

All the sharks in these epics fly through the air, apparently able to breathe it, or at least survive in it for long enough to devour random and not-so-random humans and the occasional animal. They don’t appear to have internal organs, though there’s plenty of blood and splashing gore. Ian Ziering’s Fin (get it? Fin?) ends up inside a shark at least once per movie, slides right in and chainsaws or is chainsawed back out again. (Chainsaws are what we in the literary trade call a leitmotif.)

In this universe, a shark is basically a meat sock with big snaggly teeth. Its purpose in life is to chomp whatever it flies by or lands on. Often that’s somebody extremely annoying, whom we’re glad to see the last of.

A single shark can be fought off with various weapons including baseball bats, swords, and of course chainsaws. The full sharknado calls for much more serious weaponry. The bigger the ’nado, the more over the top the weapon. The point is to blow it up, and all its sharks along with it, thereby saving the world.

There’s nothing serious about it. It’s mindless, it’s fun. Grab a bucket of popcorn, put your feet up, and don’t ask too many questions.

As I was finishing up the last Sharknado—It’s About Time, and really, it is—the streaming algorithm gave me a shark movie I’d never heard of. It was late, but I was wide awake. I clicked on it. And that’s the one that stayed with me.

It’s a much smaller film than the others. Its title gives off a B-movie vibe: The Black Demon (2023). Rotten Tomatoes shows a distinct disparity between the audience and the critics. The critics are all meh, not enough blood and guts. The audience says it could become a cult classic.

I’m with the audience. It’s not big and it’s not splashy. It has one recognizable name in the cast, the lead, played by Josh Lucas. The rest are all Latinx, and the settings are minimalist: a family on the road in an SUV, a crumbling Mexican coastal town, an all but moribund oil-drilling platform.

The special effects are as minimal as the sets. The “demon” is another megalodon (called a “meg,” with a nod to the 2018 film). We see its huge fin a time or two; get a glimpse of its horrifically large jaws and teeth; see it surging beneath the surface of the sea.

It’s closer to the aesthetic of Jaws than many of that film’s successors. Tension builds through hints and suggestions rather than special effects. The emphasis is on character and human interactions—and there’s a spiritual/fantastical twist.

It’s not heavy-handed, though it easily could be. The shark is the messenger of a god, Tlaloc, who has dominion over the waters of the world. Tlaloc is angry: the drilling rig has contaminated the sea, and the land and its people are suffering as a consequence. It’s ultimately the fault of Josh Lucas’ character, Paul, and the company he works for.

In Jaws, the shark is pure force of nature. It’s claimed a territory that happens to be the ocean off the resort town of Amity, right in the middle of Amity’s main tourist season. It doesn’t have any agenda except to hunt and eat and to fight back when attacked.

There’s no concern on the humans’ part about preserving its species, or any species. The big issues are human lives and human profits, and the human preoccupation with science.

The Black Demon’s world has lost all pretense to innocence. Humans have polluted it almost to the point of no return. Tlaloc wants the earth’s balance restored, and he demands a sacrifice.

The shark is not the monster here. It is a threat, and that has to be dealt with. But it came for a reason. There’s only one way out for the human characters: to right the wrong that Paul and his company did to that part of the planet.

The movie knows where it comes from. One iconic line harks straight back to Jaws, but the outcome this time has to be different. The original shark was just doing what a shark does. This one swims on a whole different level.

It’s a quiet little film, but it hits the notes it needs to hit. It gets its message across, and it makes us care about its characters. The shark is there to remind us that humans only think they rule the world.[end-mark]

The post The Heirs of <i>Jaws</i> appeared first on Reactor.

Column SFF Bestiary

Jaws: The Greatest Shark Epic of Them All

Spielberg’s iconic shark is in the same mythic category as Godzilla or Smaug…

By Judith Tarr

|

Published on October 6, 2025

Credit: Universal Pictures

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Credit: Universal Pictures

Let’s start with sharks where many of us started: with the film that made millions of people afraid to go in the water. In 1975 the shark had long been a mythic figure, the ultimate terror of the deep, but Stephen Spielberg’s adaptation of Peter Benchley’s 1974 novel captured the popular imagination.

It had everything a summer blockbuster needed. An adventure film set in a resort town in Massachusetts. A police chief from the big city settling in to life in a small town. Family drama. Town drama. Drama on the high seas. And right in the middle of it, a humongous shark.

Spielberg’s shark may not be as straight-up mythical as Godzilla or Smaug, but he’s still more myth than real. We’ll talk about the real thing as we go on with this section of the Bestiary. But for now, sit back, strap in, and let the story carry you along.

Our guide to this world’s version of the shark is marine biologist Matt Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss), though Chief Brody (Roy Scheider) does a fair amount of research on his own before Hooper shows up. First he has to figure out what’s killed a young woman, while fending off the mayor’s insistence that nothing, but nothing, get in the way of the town’s summer tourist season; then, with Hooper’s help, he has to narrow down the list of suspects. There are a whole lot of sharks in the world, but not many who are big enough to shred an adult human.

It doesn’t take them long to zero in on the perpetrator: Carcharodon carcharias (which is a fantasy name if there ever was one), the great white shark. The beauty of the film is that up until the end, we know what the monster does, but we barely see him. Occasionally we’ll get the shark’s POV: zooming through the water, closing in on the legs and feet of swimmers. More often we glimpse a disturbance, see a swimmer disappear, catch sight of a fin—and then suddenly there’s blood in the water. It’s done as much with John Williams’ brilliant musical score as with fast cuts and quick hints.

Even at the end, when we get the scope of the monster and come face to face with all. Those. Teeth, there are still extended sequences in which we don’t see the shark. We see a series of yellow barrels instead, attached to the shark by harpoons. Where the barrels go, that’s where the shark is.

It’s great filmmaking, but it’s mostly an accident of budget and logistics. You can’t train a shark the way you can a whale or a dolphin, so a live shark wasn’t an option. All three versions of Bruce, the mechanical shark designed for the film, were a disaster. They kept breaking down, falling apart, and rusting shut.

Spielberg had to improvise. As he said, “The film went from a Japanese matinee horror flick to more of a Hitchcock, the-less-you-see-the-more-you-get thriller.” And that’s what made it a classic.

So who is Bruce the shark (versus Bruce the glitchy robot) when he’s at home off the beach in Amity? He’s a night feeder (though he seems perfectly happy to go after swimmers in broad daylight). He detects prey by vibrations, tracking rapid, erratic movements in the water—the signs of fish in distress, or humans swimming. Hunters can lure him to their boats by chumming: laying trails of ripe offal.

People don’t know how old sharks can get, says Brody as he reads his way through the literature. They might live for thousands of years. Their digestive system is very slow; a necropsy within a few days will leave no doubt as to whether the shark has eaten a human.

Sharks eat anything and everything. When Hooper opens up the tiger shark that supposedly ate the first two swimmers, he doesn’t find what’s left of them, but he does pull out a whole fish, a partial fish, a crushed tin can, and a Louisiana license plate. That proves, says Hooper, that he’s come up from the south along the Gulf Stream.

Most shark attacks take place in three feet or less of water, within ten feet of shore. Sharks can and will attack en masse, but Bruce is a rogue shark. He hunts alone. Hooper believes in a theory he calls territoriality: that a rogue shark stays in the same area for as long as the food holds out. Bruce won’t leave Amity as long as the beaches are open and there are swimmers to feed on.

Great whites are big, but Bruce is huge. Twenty to twenty-five feet (six to seven and a half meters) long. One of his teeth is the size of a shot glass, says Hooper.

Captain Quint (Robert Shaw) of the Orca knows sharks up close and personal. He was in the crew of a battleship on a top-secret mission in World War II. The ship was torpedoed and sunk with 1100 men aboard, and no help came for days.

What came were sharks, a thousand of them. The thing he remembers most about them is their eyes. Lifeless eyes, black and flat like a doll’s, seeming not to be alive until the shark bites. Then they roll white, and the screaming begins.

A shark is a perfect engine, Hooper says. It’s an eating machine, a miracle of evolution. All it does is swim and eat and make new sharks.

Bruce is more than a simple machine, however perfect. When he feeds on swimmers, he’s just living to eat. But when the Orca comes after him, he retaliates. He chases the boat; he damages it severely. The hunters need a concerted attack and some serious ordnance to take him out.

Bruce is not just a mindless predator. He’s one of the great movie monsters, and he defined an era and a genre. There are multiple sequels and numerous imitators, but none of them quite compares to the original.[end-mark]

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Column SFF Bestiary

Meet the OG Sea Serpent: The Giant Oarfish

In a world full of weird and wonderful beings, the oarfish is right up there.

By Judith Tarr

|

Published on September 29, 2025

A History of the Fishes of the British Islands, Jonathan Couch (1862).
CCA 2.0

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A History of the Fishes of the British Islands, Jonathan Couch (1862).
CCA 2.0

It never ceases to amaze me how rich this planet is with life, and how much of it fills the seas—and how little we still know about its full range and variety. One of the least explored regions of the oceans even now is the one between the light and the dark, from about 600 feet to 3500 feet down, between 200 and 1000 meters. This is the mesopelagic zone, where only 1% of incident light is able to penetrate, where the pressure becomes too intense for the human body to tolerate.

Creatures of these depths and below sometimes rise to the surface, and occasionally wash up on shore. They’re seldom alive by then, and it can be hard to identify the remains. Even when they are living, a human swimming or riding in a boat may have to guess what they’re seeing. Before the invention of the underwater camera or the submersible (either manned or unmanned), there was no way to observe these animals in their native environment.

Sailors out on the ocean told tales of enormous serpents that swam in the sea. Like the Kraken with its many arms and the Leviathan that swallowed Jonah, these myths and legends had a basis in fact. Leviathan, of course, was a whale, and the Kraken a giant squid.

As for the sea serpent, there are a number of possibilities, including the venomous sea snake and various forms of eel including the conger and the moray. But the best candidate may be the giant oarfish.

In a world full of weird and wonderful beings, the oarfish is right up there. It really is a giant: ten to thirty feet long (three to ten meters), with legends telling of oarfish that reach fifty feet (fifteen meters) or more. It’s a fish of many names: oarfish, ribbon fish, king of the herrings, and my favorite, the doomsday fish. In Japan it’s believed to foretell earthquakes; if an oarfish washes up on shore, that’s a warning to get to solid ground.

It looks like a mythical beast: long, serpentine, ribbon-thin, with a blunt, short head crowned with spines, long narrow pectoral fins that trail beneath, and a dorsal fin that runs all the way from its head to its distant tail. The body is silvery with dark spots and a shimmer of bioluminescence, and the dorsal fin is usually red.

That long narrow fin ripples constantly, propelling the fish through the water. It swims vertically, head up, mouth open, feeding on krill. It’s a filter feeder, and it travels up and down with its prey, rising as high as a few dozen feet below the surface, and descending to the borders of the abyss.

Its body has evolved to survive in the crushing pressure of the deep. It has no scales; its skin is smooth and covered with a layer of guanine, its flesh is gelatinous (and apparently tastes disgusting), and its bones are soft and flexible. It’s able, like a lizard, to shed part of its tail if attacked, a process called autotomy, though unlike a lizard it won’t regrow the lost section.

This is an elusive fish. It’s seldom seen alive, but it doesn’t appear to be rare, let alone endangered. It’s found in warmer waters all over the world, even in the Mediterranean, where River Monsters’ Jeremy Wade had a remarkable encounter with two in 2016. He’s fascinated by how they move: “It doesn’t flex the body, just the fins undulating like a wave.” It’s weirdly beautiful to watch.

It’s a gentle fish. It’s not aggressive, it’s not dangerous; it doesn’t even have teeth. Despite its reputation as a harbinger of doom, it’s never harmed a human.

It’s not hard to see why sailors would spin legends around this huge, serpentine creature. Its size and its strangeness stand out, even in an ocean full of giants.[end-mark]

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Column SFF Bestiary

Creatures of the Abyss: An Exercise in Science-Fictional Thinking

There are alien worlds to discover right on our own planet…

By Judith Tarr

|

Published on September 22, 2025

Photo by David Clode [via Unsplash]

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Photo by David Clode [via Unsplash]

Humans have a habit of making everything about them. Animals are compared to humans, seen in relation to them, evaluated according to how well or how badly they stack up to human capabilities. Are they useful in some way? Can we eat them, ride them, turn their bodies into clothing or weapons, vehicles or houses?

Environments, same thing. Can we live there? Is it comfortable for us? If not, how do we alter it to fit? When we imagine living in it, we impose human standards on it.

Even when we’re trying to stay objective, when we’re describing a creature or a place that’s not perfectly human-friendly, we still talk about it in human terms. It’s about making it relatable. A whale is as big as a bus or as long as X fraction of a football field. The depths of the ocean are horribly dark and cold and the pressure is crushing. It’s totally alien and inhospitable.

Science fiction can challenge us to change the way we think. Question our assumptions. Reorient ourselves to a different world. Embrace the alien, and try to understand it on its own terms.

When we think alien, we tend to think extraterrestrial. Something not from this planet. And yet parts of this world are, by human standards, downright weird. More than two-thirds of its surface is covered in water, some of it literally miles deep. We’ve only just begun to realize how much is down there.

The deepest part of any ocean is the Mariana Trench in the Pacific, which goes down as far as 36,000 feet (11,000 meters). There’s no sunlight below 1200 feet (365 meters), and no light at all past 3300 feet (1000 meters), except what organisms may generate through bioluminescence. The water pressure increases tremendously. Plants can’t grow down there. It’s all animals, all the way down, clear to the bottom.

Life has evolved for these conditions. Organisms feed on each other, or on the rain of organic matter from above, everything from microorganisms to the bodies of deceased whales that sink down and down to nourish an amazing variety of creatures. There’s a kind of worm called the zombie worm or bone worm that lives on the fat inside the bones. Talk about the human perspective: there’s nightmare fodder there, creepier than secret government installations or prehistoric mega-sharks or alien invaders lurking in the depths.

I happened across a meme from the site formerly known as Twitter, from 2023, by someone named Victoria:

To which a poster named gravityeyelids replied,

which may be a bit of an exaggeration (or maybe not), but there are some really scary things down there, and the ones that look the scariest aren’t necessarily the most dangerous. Like the anglerfish down around 6500 feet (2000 meters) with her little head lantern and her enormous snaggly teeth and the tiny little polyp that’s what’s left of her husband after he literally joined with her to make baby anglerfish. She’s deadly to other fish, but she’s not death to all that lives.

Down below the realm of the anglerfish, the deadly gives way to the weirdly cute. The deepest of all the deep-sea octopuses, the dumbo octopus, lives around 10,000 to 13,000 feet (2000 to 3000 meters) and has been found as far down as 23,000 feet (7000 meters). This species of octopus has a different mouth structure than its relatives; it swallows its prey whole rather than biting or grinding it. Its body has an internal structure of cartilage that supports it at the crushing pressure of the depths; unlike shallow-water octopuses, it can’t squeeze through minuscule openings. A pair of earlike fins propel it through the water (hence the reference to the Disney elephant with the flying ears).

The dumbo octopus shares its range with a downright adorable fish, the snailfish. These are the deepest of all deep-sea fish that we’ve come across so far. They’ve been found all the way down to 26,000 feet (8000 meters).

They’re a soft, tadpole-like fish, with a smooth or bumpy skin, and a big head with a sucker on the underside, for attaching to the sea bottom or a suitable surface. They aren’t very big, a foot long (30 centimeters) at the most. And there are a lot of them, over a hundred different species, with more being discovered as scientists explore the deepest of the deep sea.

From the human point of view, these creatures live in a hell of darkness, cold, and brutal pressure. But when we’re lucky enough to get video, they look perfectly cheerful, swimming along and living their lives in a world as alien to us as the storms of Jupiter. It’s home to them. They’re adapted to it. They belong there.

Someday we may encounter life on other planets, and find even more amazing and wonderful variations. But until we get there, there are whole worlds to discover on our own planet, new forms of life, new species, new versions of those we’ve met before. Some of them live in environments that we would never have imagined, in conditions that we once considered inhospitable to life—the bottom of the ocean, the areas around hydrothermal vents. It’s illuminating, and humbling, to realize how little we really know of what’s down there, and how much there still is to learn.[end-mark]

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Column SFF Bestiary

It Was Like a Dance of Light: The Abyss (1989)

James Cameron’s ambitious film finds something weird and wonderful in the ocean depths…

By Judith Tarr

|

Published on September 15, 2025

Credit: 20th Century Fox

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Credit: 20th Century Fox

Prolific filmmaker James Cameron wrote and directed the 1989 release, Abyss, in among all the Terminators and the Rambos. It’s beautifully filmed, with real submersibles and actual underwater sequences filmed “in a water-filled cooling tower of an abandoned nuclear reactor construction site”. That must have been quite the experience for the cast and crew.

The plot revolves around a set of tropes. A U.S. nuclear submarine “chasing Reds” in the waters near Cuba (presumably around the Cayman Trench) is attacked by a mysterious force. An oil company’s drilling operation nearby is tapped for the rescue: a company ship, the Explorer, on the surface and a deep-water rig below. The people up top are various forms of company hacks; the crew in Deep Core 2 is a gang of rough-and-ready types, all hair and dirty t-shirts, led by ruggedly handsome Bud Brigman (Ed Harris). They’re assisted and/or obstructed by a handful of SEALs and “the queen bitch of the universe,” Lindsey (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio), who just so happens to have designed the rig, and who also happens to be married (but on the brink of divorce) to Bud.

Much drama ensues. A hurricane separates Deep Core from the Explorer, and nearly flattens the rig when the crane breaks off and plunges below. The SEALs have a hidden agenda which involves one of the sub’s nuclear warheads. Their commander turns out to be one of a percentage of humans who can’t handle the pressure of the water even in the pressurized rig (which rests on a shelf at 1700 feet/500 meters). We’re reminded early and often of the symptoms of pressure-induced psychosis: tremors and paranoia.

Lieutenant Coffey is a Stiff Government Robot type. He’s convinced that the sub was destroyed by Russians. Once it becomes clear that Russians had nothing to do with it, he’s all about arming the warhead and nuking whatever is down below in the trench. Don’t know what it is? Don’t understand it? Nuke it.

Bud and Lindsey, meanwhile, spar over everything from the state of their marriage to the predicament they’re in, between the hurricane, the damage to the rig (with only twelve hours of oxygen left before they’re all dead), the downed sub, and the thing that took the sub down. Their situation becomes ever more dire, and the humans in the rig split into two hostile camps, SEALs and rig crew (with Lindsey in the latter).

Just when it seems as if we’re never going to find out what really happened to the sub, Lindsey suits up and heads outside to try to extend the oxygen limit by accessing the auxiliary tanks. Lindsey may be a proud corporate bitch, but she’s a hands-on engineer and she knows every inch of Deep Core 2. While she’s out there, the power glitches (because of course it does) and she loses contact with the rig.

And there, at last, we see something weird and wonderful. It’s a translucent, wormlike, vaguely squidlike creature that shines with its own light. Lindsey is so enthralled she almost forgets to film it.

And then the main event surges up from below. It’s huge, gorgeous, and made of light. She’s completely captivated and utterly unafraid. She even touches it.

When she makes it back into the rig, she’s all aglow with what she’s seen. Engineer she might be, but with this she’s all about her feelings. She just knows it’s nonhuman, but intelligent: an NTI, a Non-Terrestrial Intelligence. It’s beautiful. It’s not a “clunky steel can” like what humans build; it’s a machine, but alive, “like a dance of light.”

Of course nobody believes her. Her film doesn’t show anything definitive, just blurry bits of light. She’s the Hysterical Female trope, the Woman Burbling About Impossible Things.

In between fits of bickering, collapsing systems, and hostile SEALs, Lindsey and tech guy Hippy rig a camera to send below. Coffey hijacks it and hooks it up to the nuke.

Amid this part of the drama, a pseudopod of water emerges from one of the flooded bays. We get the alien POV, exploring the rig and eventually finding Lindsey holed up with the rest of the crew. The pseudopod proceeds to surround the nuke and carry it off—until Coffey slams a hatch shut and slices it in two, with the warhead still on the humans’ side.

That convinces everyone that something not-human is definitely out there. Something they’ve never met before, that can control water “at a molecular level.” Lindsey is sure it’s benevolent. The others aren’t so sure. Coffey is more determined than ever to blow it up.

Further drama follows. Coffey drops off the cliff into the abyss, taking the warhead, and the camera, with him. Somebody has to retrieve it before it blows.

We know it has to be Bud, because Steely-Jawed Hero. The couple of SEALs who have kept their heads and decided to cooperate with the Deep Core crew suit him up in their special high-tech suit, which is basically a spacesuit, and their even more special breathable liquid oxygen, which lets him breathe for a limited period at extreme depth. The danger of pressure psychosis is very much there, but we just have to hope it doesn’t incapacitate him before he can disarm the warhead.

He expects to die down there. It takes him too long to go down, and there’s too little oxygen left after he complete his mission. But we have a pretty good idea what has to happen next, because we know how the tropes work.

And so they do. There’s a whole huge city/installation/mother ship down there. And there are beings. Aliens? Beings who evolved in the deepest part of the sea?

They look like a cross between a butterfly, a fairy, a classic big-eyed UFO alien, and a stingray. They’re beautiful and eerie and gently inquisitive, eyeing the human quizzically and, of course, saving him.

The end is soaring and beautiful and inspiring. There is much smiling and laughing and wonder and all those good things. We never find out if these are space aliens—true extraterrestrials—or natives of this planet. Are they non-terrestrial in the sense that they’re from another planet, or non-terrestrial as in not land animals?

All we know is that they’re benevolent. They don’t want to destroy the humans. They want to help them. They want to communicate; to understand.

They’re lovely and they bear some resemblance to actual deep-sea creatures, but they show up the big hole in the film’s worldbuilding. There is no actual marine life. No fish, no cephalopods, no cetaceans. Nothing. Not even a sea bird. The ocean is empty. All that’s there is the alien and the humans.

I’m sure that’s a budget decision as much a creative one—to narrow the focus and avoid cluttering the already very busy plot. But it turns the ocean into a huge, empty tank. The real ocean is full of life, all the way down. Even, in places, to the bottom.

That’s next week’s expedition. We won’t find any aliens, but what we will see are creatures who are as strange as anything in science fiction. There’s a whole world down there, full of wonderful things. We’re just beginning to explore it.[end-mark]

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Books SFF Bestiary

Moby-Dick Turned Upside Down: Patrick Ness’ And the Ocean Was Our Sky

An experimental SF retelling from whale’s point of view…

By Judith Tarr

|

Published on September 8, 2025

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Herman Melville’s famous novel has been inspiring other authors’ works for well over a century now. It’s about to have another moment in February with Alexis Hall’s Hell’s Heart. While I wait for that, I’ve happened across one from 2018 that comes at the original story from an unusual angle: Patrick Ness’ And the Ocean Was Our Sky, with powerful and evocative illustrations by Australian artist Rovina Cai.

I had hoped to find a version from the whale’s point of view, and Ness does that, though he takes a somewhat different slant. His genderbends it, for one thing. His narrator is a whale, and she’s female; she bids us call her Bathsheba. It’s not too distant a parallel with Melville’s Ishmael.

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And the Ocean Was Our Sky

Patrick Ness

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And the Ocean Was Our Sky

Patrick Ness

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This is an interesting book, on multiple levels. As a Harper Teen release, it ticks the “Young Adult” box with its young protagonist and its theme of discovery and redemption. It turns the whole world on its head, literally: for the whales of this world, the ocean’s depths are the sky, and the Abyss is the ocean’s surface. Whales go “up” to the darkness of the deepest sea, and “down” to the air.

These are not whales of our Earth. They have a sense of smell, which our cetaceans do not—it’s one of the things that got lost in the transition from land to water. Their females can grow huge, whereas Earth’s sperm whale females are half the size of the males. Whales of both sexes have almost totally dispensed with the need to surface for air. They able to stay underwater for long periods thanks to bubbles of air that they carry in their throats.

And, most different of all, whales fight back against human hunters in a direct and immediate way. They have ships, which are attached by harnesses to their huge captains. They have a hierarchy in the crew, with three young Apprentices to the captain, and sailors who are a different, much smaller species of whale. Their civilians live in cities in the deepest part of the sea. The whales with the ships are hunters, defending their people from the great enemy below, the humans.

This is all-out war. Humans hunt whales in the manner of our own world, and whales hunt humans in the same way: whaling ships, harpoons, harvesting of the enemy species. Whales harvest humans exactly the same way humans harvest whales.

Their enmity is absolute. Both sides set out to eradicate the other. There’s no common ground. No meeting of minds. No diplomacy. Just slaughter.

Bathsheba’s tale brings it all to a head. The key and the catalyst is the mythical, legendary, possible or impossible, real or unreal Toby Wick (related to John, perhaps?). Alexandra, the captain and her eponymous ship, pursues him as Melville’s Ahab does, and she has a disability as well, a kind of mashup of the harpoons lodged in Moby Dick’s side and Ahab’s lost leg: a harpoon in the head, right in the center of the organ that controls echolocation.

Bathsheba, like Ishmael, makes contact with a representative of a culture completely alien to hers, but her case is far more traumatic than Ishmael’s very physical friendship with Queequeg. Her window into a different world is a human captive. As the most junior member of the command crew, she is forced to look after him, and it’s a harrowing task.

She has to interact with the great enemy, and as she does, her feelings change in disturbing ways. She starts to see the enemy as a fellow being. In the terms of our world, she humanizes him—or should I say, whale-izes him.

Who and what Toby Wick is, is key to the resolution of the story. The debt to Melville is considerable, both in the plotting and in the significance of the legendary monster with his great white hull. The ending is a tragedy but it leads to triumph, which takes it past the ending of Melville’s novel.

There’s a whole lot of handwavium going on in both the plot and the worldbuilding, and a whiplash-level about-face that as a reader/writer/editor I was not buying, though it’s meant to be heartwarming and inspiring and all of that. Ness’ whales are deeply spiritual and strongly fatalistic. They’re very much children of prophecy. Bathsheba herself is a fated hero, a reluctant hunter, but bound to it by the forces of destiny.

It’s a classic fantasy trope. Melville plays on it with both Ishmael and Ahab, but Ness’ whales take it literally. It’s baked into their culture.

That culture is built on scavenging from humans. The whales’ ships are repurposed human ships. Their technology is human: harpoons, sails (that catch the ocean currents), harnesses that attach the ships to the huge captains. Their catch is processed the same way humans process whales.

Even the names are human, though whales have their own language. There’s more of a sense here of talking animals than actual whales. They’re a mirror held up to humans: a reflection of human flaws and failings.

As an SFF reader and writer, I have questions. How are whales building ships with scavenged parts? They don’t have hands. Their small, barely acknowledged sailors don’t, either. How do they construct their harpoons?

What about the harnesses? Who or what makes them? And how do they get into them? How are they fastened?

I feel as if there’s a piece missing here. Something with fine manipulative capability. If it were me, I’d look at octopuses, enlisted as allies and enrolled as artisans and builders.

But that’s not what this book is about. It’s a thought experiment. It addresses the issue and the morality of total war, along with the power of belief and the concept of destiny. Its worldbuilding serves the concept and the theme. It’s not concerned with fine details.

It is well written, and Kai’s greyscale illustrations are a beautiful complement to the prose. My brain had to turn itself inside out for a bit before it could wrap itself around the upside-down-ness of it all. I appreciated the chance to stretch my consciousness.[end-mark]

The post <i>Moby-Dick</i> Turned Upside Down: Patrick Ness’ <i>And the Ocean Was Our Sky</i> appeared first on Reactor.

Column SFF Bestiary

Learning to Decode Whale Language: Dawn of the Universal Translator

Complex communication with nonhuman species may seem like a science fiction dream, but it’s not an impossible one…

By Judith Tarr

|

Published on August 25, 2025

Photo by svklimkin [via Unsplash]

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Photo by svklimkin [via Unsplash]

Since the flurry of excitement over talking to dolphins in the latter half of the twentieth century, which revolved around teaching dolphins English, the focus has shifted to another cetacean, the largest of the toothed whales: the sperm whale. The focus has also shifted away from forcing the animal to learn human language, and toward learning the animal’s own language.

We’ve come a long way since Moby-Dick. Up until 1957, humans did not know that the strange, haunting sounds sailors had been hearing since the dawn of sea travel were made by whales. By the 1970s researchers had begun to believe that these sounds were a form of communication.

The most famous whale sounds are probably the songs of male humpback whales, but recent studies have concentrated on the Morse-code-like clicks of sperm whales. Sperm whales are the largest of the toothed whales, and have the largest brains of any animal on this planet—six times the size of a human brain. Much of that brain power seems to be dedicated to the processing of sound, to echolocation which is a superpower of the toothed whales, and a good deal of that processing happens in what in other mammals are the visual centers. Whale sonar allows them to effectively see in the depths of the ocean where they spend as much as ninety percent of their lives, hunting and feeding primarily on squid.

While they dive and hunt, and during their brief stints on the surface where they come to breathe and sleep and raise their young, sperm whales click. A lot. These clicks form coherent patterns called codas.

Some of these appear to be a form of identification—in short, a name. The whale identifies itself by this series of clicks. But there’s far more to it than that; complex sequences of clicks that may correspond to units of human language. It is possible that sperm-whale language is at least as complex as ours.

It’s particularly telling that young sperm whales do not produce coherent codas until they’re about two years old. Up to that point, they babble like human babies. They aren’t born knowing how to make these sounds in these patterns; they have to learn.

We’re just beginning to touch on understanding what they may be saying. One particular set of studies revolves around the whales who live off the shores of the Caribbean island of Dominica. Here, in a newly established ocean preserve, several hundred sperm whales, primarily females, live and hunt and raise their offspring.

Researchers have been studying this population for going on twenty years. They’ve compiled a massive database of sounds, clicks and codas. In recent years they’ve turned to language learning models to process all this data, to try to find meaning in the sequences of clicks.

Breathless headlines notwithstanding, these studies haven’t deciphered whale language. They’re very much in the early stages of figuring out how it all works. As one article notes, they’ve made strides toward figuring out a kind of phonetic alphabet, a combination of rhythms and modulations, nuances and variations, that appear to convey whole ranges of complex concepts.

What those concepts are, we don’t know. We’re not there yet. Two things are happening however, and they’re right in the middle of science fiction’s wheelhouse.

One is the idea of communication with nonhuman species. Sperm whales are nowhere near as alien to us as octopuses. They’re mammals, they live in family groups, they nurture their young. There is some common ground, some concepts that we may be able to share, once we learn the words in whale language.

We will have to be aware of implicit bias. As humans, we tend to put ourselves in the center of the universe. We may impute human motives to nonhuman entities, and impose human values and emotions on beings whose frames of reference are completely different.

Still, if we can crack the code of whale language, it will be a first for us. The first time we’ve communicated on such a complex level with a being who is not a human.

The other thing is the development of a universal translator. One of the challenges of processing the data from the whale studies is that there’s no point of contact. No Rosetta stone. There’s nothing to tell us what the individual phonemes mean. Somehow we have to find a reference point, a way in.

If we can figure that out, we may be able to apply it to other modes of communication, and possibly other species. Even, potentially, extraterrestrials.

The start of it is here, in these masses of data. The more of it we can gather, the more likely we are to detect patterns, to make connections that tell us what a sequence of sounds may mean. Then we’ll be able to have actual conversations. What we might learn from it, and what the outcome of that might be, could get very interesting indeed.[end-mark]

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Column SFF Bestiary

 A Deep Dive Into the World of the Sperm Whale

How does one of the largest mammals on earth survive in the deep sea?

By Judith Tarr

|

Published on August 18, 2025

Engraving by W.J. Linton

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Engraving by W.J. Linton

My summer of hiding out from the heat and watching cetacean documentaries continues, with a collection of films about sperm whales.

Moby-Dick is remarkably knowledgeable about the anatomy and behavior of the species, but Melville acknowledges that humans know very little about the sea or its creatures. It’s so vast and so diverse, and we can only see what rises to the surface. There are whole worlds below, that humans have never seen and, as of 1851, could never see.

Advances in technology in the twentieth century and into the twenty-first made it possible for the first time to dive down deep and learn the secrets of the sea. Among those secrets are those of the sperm whale.

This ocean giant, one of the largest animals that has ever lived and the largest toothed predator, was hunted almost to extinction for the oil in its enormous head. What that oil was, the whalers of Melville’s time didn’t know. They called it spermaceti and believed, for reasons not particularly clear to the modern mind, that it was actual sperm, as in spermatozoa.

That’s not what it is at all. It’s a complex organ that does two things. One it shares with other toothed whales including dolphins and orcas: it’s a mechanism for generating and processing sonar. The other is a bit more speculative; it’s believed that spermaceti contributes to the whale’s ability to dive deep in search of the giant squid that are the staple of its diet.

Spermaceti becomes more liquid the warmer it is. Scientists hypothesize that when the whale is on the surface, the contents of its head, which takes up a third of its body, are light and buoyant. But, as it descends into the near-freezing cold of the abyss, the waxy substance solidifies, becomes more dense and less buoyant, and allows the whale to dive down deep. Then when it’s ready to come up, the spermaceti warms and lightens, and back to the surface the whale goes. It’s thought that the whale can control this; that the process is voluntary.

What’s it doing down there, and how does it survive pressures hundreds of times stronger than at the surface? We have not, so far, seen the mythical battle of whale and giant squid. We know sperm whales eat squid: deceased whales’ stomachs are full of squid beaks, or squid bones as Melville called them, and round scars from squid tentacles are a common sight on whales’ bodies. In Ocean Giants: The Secret Lives of Sperm Whales, a young whale comes back from a hunt having overindulged, and he horks up a whale-belly-full of squid parts.

Comparative anatomist Joy Reidenberg has a theory.  She notes that when whales have been fitted with trackers, they go down into the deeps, and as she puts it, they hang around there for a while, then come back up. They don’t seem to be pursuing anything. She proposes that they’re not pursuit predators, they’re lie-in-wait predators. They go down, they wait, the prey comes to them.

They do this, she thinks, with their teeth. Sperm-whale teeth and jaws are not designed for chewing. They’re not optimal for grabbing and holding, either, unlike orca or dolphin teeth: there aren’t any on the upper jaw, just on the lower. Maybe, she says, they’re actually meant to serve as lures, with some sort of bioluminescent mechanism, bacteria or whatever, that makes them glow in the dark.

She doesn’t produce any proof of this. It’s true that deep-sea organisms quite often do have some form of bioluminscence, and it is designed to attract prey into the predator’s jaws. If that’s what’s happening, it’s not as dramatic as the battle scenario, but if it works…

Another possibility is that whales are cruising along the bottom, using the lower jaw as a scoop. Still no epic battle, but plenty of food to fuel a body that, in maturity, ranges from 30 feet (10m) long in females to 50 feet (20m) in males. That body spends 80 to 90 percent of its life far below the surface, only coming up to breathe.

It eats in the water. It sleeps there, floating upright, usually in the company of its family and friends. It delivers its young there; a young calf has to stay close to the surface, and has to be protected and nurtured until it’s ready for the deep dive, but its mother will leave it in the care of another family member while she hunts.

We’re still finding out just how deep a sperm whale can go. Some sources say 10,000 (3000m). There’s proof that whales have gone down to 6000 feet (2000m).

How does an air-breathing mammal even survive in the uttermost darkness and crushing pressure? Let alone spend most of its time there, and do most of its hunting and feeding. Why doesn’t it implode?

The whale’s body has some incredible adaptations. I’ve mentioned sonar, and will say more about that in the next article. Here, what’s important is that a whale doesn’t need light to “see.” It can map its surroundings via echolocation, a sequence of clicks that resonate through the water and bounce back off objects and animals. The whale processes these echoes through the structures of its head, generating what amounts to series of images, a video as it were. It “sees” with sound.

A whale’s eyesight is pretty poor. A sperm whale has a narrow range of vision on either side, and can’t see behind or in front of itself at all. But its sonar can map everything around it, in absolute darkness.

Its body meanwhile is able to stay down for over an hour, even up to two hours, before it has to come up for air. Unlike humans, for whom each breath only replaces about fifteen percent of the oxygen we need to survive, a whale’s breath replaces ninety percent. It does so not only by filling the lungs; its muscles are rich in oxygen-storing proteins, and can store ten times more than humans’ can. A whale effectively has its own, personal, default-issue oxygen tank.

When the whale dives, its metabolism slows down to conserve oxygen. Its blood concentrates in vital organs including the heart and the brain; a net of blood vessels surrounds the brain and maintains oxygen levels and blood pressure to that organ, which is the largest of any living animal’s (even larger than that of the blue whale, which is the largest animal that has ever lived). The lungs collapse, and the ribs hinge shut around it. The trachea is fortified by extra rings of cartilage, which allow nitrogen to be stored there rather than dissolved into the tissues—a process that causes a potentially fatal condition called decompression sickness or the bends.

A whale can get the bends if it surfaces too fast; it’s not immune. But it’s extremely well protected by its physiology, and except under extraordinary circumstances—such as sonic shock from military sonar experiments—it can both dive and surface safely. Its whole body is designed for it. It’s meant for the abyss, and it thrives there, even though it’s an air-breathing mammal descended from one that, not so terribly long ago in evolutionary terms, walked on land.[end-mark]

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Books SFF Bestiary

A Master Class in Epic Worldbuilding: SFF Bestiary Tackles Moby-Dick

If you love sprawling adventures liberally laced with passages of exposition, this classic novel might be for you…

By Judith Tarr

|

Published on August 11, 2025

Illustration by A.B. Shute (1892)

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Illustration by A.B. Shute (1892)

Before Godzilla, before the lore and legend of the Kaiju, before the wrath of Khan, there was a fabled monster, and the whale he hunted and hated to the ends of the earth. Too many of us in the US have had our noses rubbed in Herman Melville’s epic novel, Moby-Dick, and grown up ritually loathing it. But if you’re a fan of science fiction and fantasy, if you love sweeping, sprawling, headlong adventures liberally laced with passages of exposition, where the worldbuilding happens right up front and center, this might be for you.

A whaling ship in the first half of the nineteenth century took to sea in much the same way a starship heads for the stars. Melville’s protagonist, of “Call me Ishmael” fame or infamy, signs on to the Pequod for three years. Unlike merchant vessels, whalers seldom touched land. They carried everything they needed for the length of the voyage—food, water, supplies. They cruised the open ocean, hunting for whales, harvesting their precious and highly lucrative oil.

The Pequod is as self-contained as a starship, and its crew is as diverse as you’ll find in Star Trek. Its captain and mates are white men from Massachusetts, its skilled and highly valued harpooneers are a Black man, a Native American, and a South Sea Islander, and the rest of its crew come from all over the planet. For the most part they sail alone, but every so often they meet another whaling ship, each of which has its own contribution to make to Melville’s epic.

But this is the Bestiary, and it’s the whale we’re here for. Whalers of the time tended to specialize. Some hunted the right whale, a baleen whale of great size. Its blubber, rendered down, produced a lower grade of oil. The Pequod however, like the rest of the Nantucket fleet, hunted the great predator, the sperm whale. Its oil, called spermaceti, was of much higher quality, and could be scooped out of its head in great buckets, before the rest of the whale was rendered down to its component parts.

Melville has done his homework, extensively, and he has Feelings about it. We learn all about the history, the lore, and the science of the whale, as well as the minutiae of hunting, killing, and processing it. There’s even a meditation on hunting species to extinction, which resonates strongly in our twenty-first-century context.

These passages are roundly mocked, and they weren’t terribly popular when they were first published, either, but we’re science-fiction fans. We live for the finer points. We can see what they’re there for, and how they build the world.

In 1851 when Moby-Dick was published, science had classified the whale, but not everyone agreed with it. Linnaeus in the 1700s observed that the animal has lungs, breathes air, is warm-blooded, breeds in mammalian fashion, and its young drink milk. Therefore it must not be a fish. Melville, or rather his character Ishmael, disagrees. Lungs or warm blood or whatever, as far as he’s concerned, it’s still a fish.

In spite of this conviction, he’s highly knowledgeable about the anatomy of the whale. That’s inevitable considering that a whaleman performs a full dissection of every whale he catches. He’s intimately acquainted with its inner workings, its organs and its skeleton.

He makes a close study of its behavior as well, though as he notes, a man can’t know any more of the whale than he sees on the surface. The technology isn’t there to follow it below. He knows that once a whale surfaces to breathe, it takes a set number of breaths before it goes back down, and it stays down for an hour. A hunter can track a whale by feel or instinct, can gauge how long he’ll stay under and how far he’ll travel before he comes up again.

As for what the whale eats, the general consensus of the time is that it feeds on giant squid far in the depths. When a whale’s stomach is opened, it will be full of squid beaks (or bones as Melville says). And when a great squid surfaces and is mistaken for the White Whale, Queequeg the harpooneer says that they’re closing in on a whale, if not the whale, because squid are sperm whales’ natural prey.

Well before the Pequod and its revenge-ridden Captain Ahab meet the White Whale, they come across pods of ordinary sperm whales. These once swam together in smaller groups, but Melville observes that in recent years—that is, the 1840s—sperm whales have begun to gather in huge numbers, in massive pods, apparently as a form of defense against the marked increase in whale hunters.

The Pequod comes across one such mega-pod. Ishmael’s boat ends up in the middle of it, in a weirdly tranquil circle of sea where the much smaller females and the calves swim without fear, and the much larger males form an outer rampart that’s deadly dangerous to cross. They’re lucky to get out of it alive.

That’s an ongoing theme in whaling. When the quarry is as big as the ship, big enough to snap a whaleboat like kindling, every encounter is as likely to end up with human casualties as a dead whale. It’s not just whales that threaten the hunters, either: once the whale is caught and hauled laboriously to the ship, swarms of sharks head for the carcass. The hunters have to work endlessly to keep the sharks off, while wrangling the huge weight and mass of the whale, all with hand labor; no engines, no hydraulics. Just block and tackle and human muscle.

This isn’t a world that cares about the feelings of the whale, or gives much thought to the possibility of its sentience. The great enemy, the White Whale, is more force of nature than deliberate adversary. He’s supernaturally huge, he’s elusive, when attacked he retaliates, but there’s no sense of his inner life.

The most compelling image we see is the huge white mound of his back, and the featureless mass of his forehead as he aims straight at the ship. Melville speculates that his senses are minimal: his eyes are tiny and set far back along his body with no ability to combine their individual ranges of vision, his ears are tinier still, and his nose is a single blowhole on top of his head. 

It will be decades before humans understand how a whale’s senses work. In Melville’s world, he seems to be swimming mostly blind, mostly deaf, with no sense of smell, but somehow managing to survive and thrive in his watery world. He’s as incalculable as the typhoon that hits the Pequod and nearly destroys it—and unlike the typhoon, he actually does take the ship down. Not because he knows or cares who Ahab is, though Ahab has hunted him across the world with obsessive rage and thirst for the creature that robbed him of a leg, but because he’s been struck with harpoons and wound about with ropes and driven to madness by pain.

He doesn’t care what humans are or why they are or what they’re for. They attack him. He fights back. He’s pure raw strength.

At the end, Ahab gets him, but he gets Ahab, and Ahab’s ship, and all his boats, and every man of his crew except one. The final score: Ahab 1, Whale 29. And a single human survivor, whose epic narrative celebrates both men and whale.[end-mark]

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Column SFF Bestiary

Evolution in Action: PBS’ When Whales Could Walk

Land animals evolved from aquatic creatures — but whales turned around and went back into the ocean…

By Judith Tarr

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Published on August 4, 2025

Credit: PBS

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Credit: PBS

Reading David Brin’s Uplift Saga combined with this summer’s hole-up-out-of-the-heat obsession (watching documentaries about cetaceans) has led me to a particular episode of the PBS series, Nova. In this one from January 2024, we take a deep dive into the evolution of whales.

It’s not about sentience. We can’t judge that in the fossil record. But there’s ample physical and anatomical evidence, and it tells a unique story.

Whereas it’s generally agreed that land animals evolved from aquatic creatures that came out of the water to hunt and feed, it seems that cetaceans turned around and went back in. The question the documentary asks is, How and Why? And, along with that, When?

One key to the mystery is an extinct aquatic giant first discovered in fossil form in 1834. Its fossils have been found around the world, but a particular site in Egypt has, since 1902, unveiled over 600 individual skeletons, all around 40 million years old.

This is the Basilosaurus or “King Lizard,” so named because in 1834, it was presumed that this 60-foot (20m) monster must have been a reptile. Later scientists however looked at the skull and noted that it has the teeth of a carnivorous mammal. It’s not a dinosaur. It’s a whale.

A team from Mansoura University, led by Hesham Sallam, has been studying the fossils in Wadi Hitam, the Valley of the Whales. Here, in an area of 75 square miles, hundreds of fossils have been found, including some of the most complete in the world. This was once a sea bed, left behind when the primordial ocean retreated from what would become northern Africa. It’s now part of the Sahara Desert.

But where do whales come from? One of the answers was found in 1978 in Pakistan by a young paleontologist who happened to be looking for prehistoric horses. Instead he found a fragment of a skull that was definitely not a horse. His initial disappointment turned to excitement and then to a lifelong obsession.

What Philip Gingerich discovered in the skull fragment was a structure of the ear bones that is unique to whales and dolphins. It’s designed to help the animal locate the direction of sounds underwater.

This fossil was around 50 million years old, and he named it Pakicetus. He concluded that it must have been a very early whale—the earliest that has yet been found. But this whale, which was a little larger than a wolf, could walk.

It had long, sturdy legs with toes that ended not in claws but in tiny hooves. It had a long snout with sharp teeth and eyes on the top of its head, and it might have had webbed toes. It seems to have hunted and fed on fish in fresh-water rivers, and possibly come on land to breed.

But how do we get whales and dolphins from a wolf-sized, wolf-like predator with, of all things, hooves? Comparative anatomist Joy Reidenberg and evolutionary biologist Michael McGowen dissect the carcass of a young beaked whale (tragically beached but able in death to teach us about whale evolution) and find some fascinating connections with hooved mammals. Whales have retained not the single stomach of a predator like a cat or a wolf, but multi-chambered one like a cow or a deer. They also have a minuscule pelvis that is still used in locomotion, connected to the muscles of the belly for swimming in the characteristic cetacean up-and-down motion (versus side to side for fish and reptiles). It’s the same way of going that we see in deer.

What about legs? Legs are how land mammals get around. What’s happened to them in cetaceans?

They’re still there. The forelegs have become flippers. The hindlegs have receded into the body.

Here’s where we come back to Basilosaurus. Its front limbs have clearly evolved into flippers. But far in the back is a pair of tiny legs and feet, each smaller than a human arm. It’s not a functional structure. It can’t in any way support 60 feet and seven tons of animal.

Between Pakicetus and Basilosaurus there must have been a number of intermediate stages. One has been named Phiomicetus Anubis after the ancient guardian of the dead. It’s 43 million years old, and was about 10 feet (3m) long and about 1000 pounds. It would have been a deadly and efficient predator.

Only fragments have been found, but we have a skull with a carnivore’s teeth and a set of nostrils a third of the way back from the tip. Compare this with the nose of a land mammal, with nostrils on the tip, and the head of a whale, where the single nostril has migrated to the top of the head to form the blowhole.

No leg bones of Anubis have been found, but its vertebra tells us a great deal. The bony projection at the top, called the neural spine, is an indicator of whether and how the animal walked. A cow’s neural spine is quite tall, supporting powerful muscles. A dolphin’s by comparison are almost nonexistent; it has no legs for the muscles to connect to.

Anubis’ neural spine fits almost exactly in the middle between the cow and the dolphin. This animal could walk. It would have been a strong swimmer, but still able to get about on land.

When the documentary was filmed, no further intermediate stages had been found. But DNA studies had turned up some very interesting connections. Whales share numerous genes with land mammals, including genes for color vision, sweat glands, and salivary glands, all of which are inactive but they are present. Their closest relative, it turns out, is the hippopotamus.

Whales and hippos diverged from a common ancestor about five million years before Pakicetus. In hippos we get an idea as to how Pakicetus lived: semi-aquatic, fast and powerful in water, and a deadly hunter. Hippos, like whales, give birth underwater, and the mother lifts the baby up so that it can take its first breath of air.

Once the whale became fully aquatic, giving up its legs in favor of a long, streamlined body terminating in a powerful tail, it went off in a couple of directions. Some kept their teeth and became the toothed whales, including sperm whales and orcas and dolphins. Others evolved a unique set of structures called baleen: plates of keratin with hairlike edges, designed to scoop up large amounts of water and filter out tiny fish and krill.

Baleen whales are able to grow to huge size, both as a defense mechanism against predators (including their toothed relatives) and as a means of taking in larger amounts of food. The bigger the mouth, the more krill it can consume. The modern blue whale is the largest animal that has ever lived, getting up to 100 feet (30m) long.

Toothed whales have also evolved senses that make it possible for them hunt at great depths, in the absolute darkness and at pressures that would implode a human body. They “see” by sonar, by echolocation, emitting clicks and high-frequency sounds that bounce back off objects and are processed by a specialized apparatus in the forehead called the “melon.” That’s the bulge in a dolphin or a beluga’s head and the iconic cylindrical structure of the sperm whale’s massive front end.

All of this comes from a relatively tiny land mammal that did so well hunting and feeding in water that it eventually lost its ability to function on land. We’re still learning about the process, and still looking for the intermediate stages. But even with what we have, it’s pretty clear where whales came from and how they became the rulers of the sea. They’re one of the great sagas of evolution, and one of the great success stories. The documentary expresses hope that that success can continue in the face of human meddling and changing climate.[end-mark]

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Books SFF Bestiary

Living With Dolphins: Audrey Schulman’s The Dolphin House

A fictionalized account of a wild 1960s experiment…

By Judith Tarr

|

Published on July 21, 2025

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Audrey Schulman’s novel The Dolphin House is a pretty much straight retelling of an experiment performed on St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands in 1965. The serial numbers have been lightly filed off, the names changed and the situations played up for maximum drama, but the actual history is if anything wilder than the fictionalized version.

In our timeline, a young woman named Margaret Howe followed a rumor to a house by the sea, where a small company of scientists were studying dolphins. Neuroscientist John Lilly had conceived the project, to explore the then-radical new concept of animal cognition. Lilly was not just trying to understand how dolphins think. He wanted to teach them English.

The director of the lab was Gregory Bateson, Important Thinker and Great Intellectual. When Howe showed up, he invited her to observe the three captive dolphins in the lagoon and record what she saw. It turned out that she was good at it.

Howe was not an academic scientist. She had dropped out of college after a year and had been working in a hotel on the island. But she was sharp and observant and she had an intuitive understanding of the animals.

She ended up turning part of the house into an aquatic apartment and living there with the youngest dolphin, an adolescent male named Peter. She lived, ate, slept in and just above the water, with a ten-foot, sharp-toothed, sonar-using roommate who learned, over a period of six months, to mimic human sounds using the flap of his blowhole.

NASA funded the experiment, seeing it as a possible insight into communication with alien species. The male scientists observed and took notes, but was Howe who did the teaching and training and who learned a great deal about how dolphins live, think, and communicate.

It was a most unusual experiment. And that was before it got really weird.

Schulman follows the outline and the timeline of the historical experiment, but fictionalizes the characters. Her version of Lilly is named Blum, and his second in command is Tibbet. There’s a third, whose name we never quite get; the protagonist hears it as Eh.

The protagonist’s name is Cora. She’s a high-school graduate, a cocktail waitress, and she has a Magical Disability.

Cora is hard of hearing. This makes her more observant and more focused on subtle signals, though it causes confusion, as with Eh’s name. It also isolates her from her fellow humans, and allows her to be a kind of bridge between the human and the nonhuman.

Because she’s Magic, she can hear much better in water than in air, which means she hears dolphin sounds clearly as long as she’s underwater. On land she wears a set of glasses that have hearing aids built into the arms.

This ingenious device helps her to hear fairly clearly, but the delicate circuitry is not waterproof. Good thing the magic kicks in when she takes the glasses off and dives in. Kind of like a Clark Kent effect, with water. And dolphins.

Disclosure here: I am hard of hearing. I’m quite a bit younger than Margaret Howe, but I remember hearing devices in the mid-Sixties, in between the clunky cigarette-carton-sized thing you wore on a harness on your chest and the tiny, all but invisible digital machines of the new millennium. I had a barrette that attached to a plastic tube and an earpiece, and clipped onto my hair. I could wear in the open or I could comb my hair over it. It was the latest technology, and it was a miracle for its time.

Schulman writes well and vividly, and she’s done her homework. She does a good job of describing what it’s like to live with a hearing disability; how lipreading works, how a person learns to pick up visual cues and read body language, and how the human world can seem remote or disconnected. She also understands how exhausting it can be to try to meet the hearing world on its own terms, since it’s generally unlikely to go the other way.

Cora is as alien to the scientists as the dolphins are. She’s female, disabled, not an academic, and for further Other Points, she’s part Seminole. Blum at one point pontificates about how her “Indian” heritage makes her more in tune with nature and more able to commune with animals. Cora keeps her mouth shut, but reflects that her ethnicity has nothing to do with it. She’s a woman, and women spend their lives studying and accommodating men. It’s a short leap to studying animals.

Cora’s character is fictionalized, and the male scientists are written to be less than likeable. Blum’s experiments on the dolphins range from abusive to downright horrific. He and his colleagues are arrogant, oblivious, and often patronizing to the little girl without the college degree. But she’s the key to their experiment. It can’t work without her.

It all starts to fall apart when Blum gets into LSD (and wants to try it on the dolphins, to Cora’s horror). What finishes it off however is something intrinsic to dolphin behavior.

When Cora sets up her live-with-the-dolphin experiment, she chooses the young male, Junior, for her companion. The younger of the two females, Kat, is a more focused and willing learner, but Cora calculates that the scientists will pay more attention if the subject is male.

Junior is not an easy pupil. For a while it seems he’s not going to cooperate at all. The breakthrough comes in a way that will cause major trouble, but at the time, it seems logical and sensible. Which, in dolphin terms, it is.

Dolphins are tremendously social and very tactile. They’re in constant physical contact. They have sex early and often.

It starts fairly innocently. At night when Cora sleeps in her floating bed, Junior takes her foot gently in his mouth and holds it while he sleeps along with her. It’s the same thing a young dolphin does with its mother, holding her fin for support and security.

Junior is fascinated by human anatomy. The back of Cora’s knee particularly intrigues him, and the touch of her fingers sends him into a state of bliss. Separate, articulated fingers, separate toes, are completely alien to a dolphin with its smooth, curved body and its solid flippers and tail.

The longer he and Cora live together, each apart from their own species, the more Junior pushes the boundaries of physical contact. It comes to a head when he charges her and knocks her unconscious. She comes to with him holding her above the surface as he would an injured dolphin, carrying her to the edge of the pool and keeping her head above water.

Cora realizes that Junior needs a release. That release is physical and sexual. When she offers it, for the first time he actually does what she’s been trying to teach him to do for days and weeks. He speaks an approximation of human sounds, in the order in which she’s been trying for days and weeks to teach him.

Stimulus-reward. It’s solid practice, but the manner of it is controversial to say the least. Cora knows that. She also knows that it’s getting results.

It’s Blum who blows it wide open. Cora tries to conceal what she’s doing, but between professional jealousy and plain malice, Blum extracts the truth. He spreads it to the other two men, and from there it gets to the media.

Never mind the rest of the experiment, the demonstration of a dolphin’s ability to mimic human sounds (and quite possibly understand what they mean), the tantalizing vision of communication between human and animal. Human-on-dolphin sex is a massive scandal. It culminates in the cover of a men’s magazine, depicting a woman having passionate sex with a dolphin.

The whole thing collapses under the weight of the scandal. Cora tells herself it’s her fault—though it’s really Blum’s, and Tibbet’s and Eh’s. The funding evaporates. The media, apart from the porn industry, cancels its interviews. The project shuts down.

For Cora, life goes on. For the dolphins, not so much. Blum has an awakening of sorts, becoming an advocate for freeing captive dolphins and studying wild dolphins in their native habitat. But he’s come to this through tragedy.

That’s part of dolphin behavior and anatomy, too. Dolphins’ breathing is always voluntary. It is not autonomous. Every breath has to be made with intention. A dolphin can decide not to breathe. It’s a choice he makes.

Most of this really happened. In a concise but comprehensive author’s note, Schulman lists the things that are real, and the things that are enhanced for dramatic effect. Very little of it is truly imaginary.

It’s so very Sixties. The far-out science. The drugs. The sex, the sexism. The grand optimism of it all, and the human-centrism, the idea that an animal should learn to speak our language. It took another several decades for the focus to shift and for Dr. Denise Hertzing to try to discover if dolphins have a language of their own. It seems they might.[end-mark]

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Column SFF Bestiary

Everyone’s Favorite Cetacean: The Dolphin

Dolphins, with their playful personalities, are among the most beloved aquatic creatures…

By Judith Tarr

|

Published on July 14, 2025

Photo by Ranae Smith [via Unsplash]

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Photo by Ranae Smith [via Unsplash]

On the opposite end of the cute spectrum from the orca is what we mostly mean when we say “dolphin”: the bottlenose dolphin made popular by films and television shows, notably Flipper, and some of its relatives including the spinner and the spotted dolphin. Orcas are actually the largest of the dolphins, and both are, more broadly, toothed whales, related to the beluga and the sperm whale (versus baleen or krill-sifter whales like the humpback). Toothed whales are predators, and as a class, they’re highly intelligent. We’ve certainly seen that when it comes to orcas.

Dolphins with their playful personalities, relatively unthreatening size, and their naturally adorable, smiling faces are the most appealing and accessible of the cetaceans. They seem to enjoy human contact, or at least not to be overtly stressed or terrified by it. “Swimming With Dolphins” experiences are a staple of the vacation industry.

Human-dolphin contacts go back a long way. There’s an ancient Greek story of a man called Arion, a poet and singer who had been robbed and thrown overboard by the crew of a ship. A dolphin rescued him and carried him on its back to the shore. May be a myth. May not be. It’s not impossible, from what we know of dolphins.

These are highly social animals. They live in pods or family groupings, and they have a language, though it’s not exactly like the human version. It appears that they have names, and call each other by them. They hunt together, and they use strategy and tactics. They play—constantly, enthusiastically, creatively.

And they use tools. Take for example the dolphins of Shark Bay in Australia. A particularly sprightly series of articles describes two different groups, the spongers and the shellers (as well as the beachers, who herd fish to shore and beach themselves to feed).

The spongers select a sponge from the sea bed and fit it to their noses, and use it as a sort of glove to protect their skin while they forage for sea perch. They’ll carry a sponge around and reuse it. It’s not a natural or instinctive behavior; it’s passed down from mother to daughter and sometimes son. Spongers tend to associate with each other, share tips and finer points, and refine their art as they mature.

Shellers are a different cultural group, a bit more equally divided between the sexes. They lift giant sea snail shells from the bottom, scoop up fish, carry the shells to the surface, wiggle and flip them over, and dump the fish into their mouths. The level of sophistication it takes to do this, and the number of steps and the degree of finesse, is pretty impressive.

But not all that surprising. Dolphins have big brains for their size, comparable to humans. Also like  humans, they have a highly developed neocortex (associated with problem-solving and self-awareness among other things) and Von Economo neurons, which are linked with emotions and social cognition. There’s a lot going on there; how much, we’ve barely begun to understand.

We want to. We try. Someday maybe we’ll crack the code of dolphin language. We’ll learn more about how they perceive the world: how their sonar works, and what it feels like.

We know it can act like ultrasound, allowing them to see into and through a solid body. They’re fascinated by pregnant human swimmers. Imagine being able to look at another person and see what’s going on under the skin, and know what’s happening inside. We have to invent machines for this. Dolphins come with it already installed.[end-mark]

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Column SFF Bestiary

When Orcas Strike Back

In 2020, something strange started happening off the coast of Spain…

By Judith Tarr

|

Published on July 7, 2025

Photo by Vidar Nordli-Mathisen [via Unsplash]

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Photo by Vidar Nordli-Mathisen [via Unsplash]

In 2020, something strange started happening off the coast of Spain. Orcas were attacking boats and in some cases sinking them. Most of the boats were sailing yachts, 30 to 50 feet (9 to 15 meters) long, and the orcas tended to aim for the rudders, though they were also chasing after boats and ramming them.

These attacks have continued for years and run up in the hundreds. They’ve occurred as far south as the northern coast of Africa and as far north as the Shetland Islands. They’re still happening.

What is going on here?

In spite of their nickname, killer whales, and their role as apex predators who can take down a great white shark, no wild orca has ever been recorded attacking, let alone killing a human. One speculation, that they’re taking revenge on humans for damaging their environment, doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. If that’s what they’re doing, why aren’t they going for the humans instead of their boats?

Orca experts have a couple of theories. They’ve identified three pods that have been going after boats, the largest of which is led by the matriarch Gladis Lamari. These orcas’ territory is centered around Gibraltar and up toward the Bay of Biscay.

One possibility is that the matriarch was in labor and in pain, and a yacht just happened to be there when she needed to take it out on something. Which is fine as a one-off, but how did it blow up into hundreds of attacks, multiple attackers, and no apparent end in sight?

Orcas learn by observation. If one does something, the others will imitate her. That still doesn’t explain why ramming boats and breaking rudders became a years-long habit, game, crusade, whatever it is.

Maybe it is a game. Many of the perpetrators appear to be on the younger side. Are the teenagers wilding? Is it an initiation rite? A hazing ritual? A contest? Are they going after rudders as part of the game, because they’re these mobile objects sticking out of the bottom of the boats and offering a convenient target?

Orcas are highly intelligent and extremely social. We’ve discovered that they use tools.

A population of orcas on the other side of the world from Gibraltar, the Southern Resident orcas of the Pacific Northwest in the Salish Sea, have been observed using stalks of bull kelp to massage one another’s skin. They play games with kelp, too, draping it over their heads and playing keep-away with fronds, but this kicks it up a notch. An orca will insert the stalk between itself and a podmate of any age or gender and wiggle and rub back and forth. They seem to be using it to exfoliate.

Tool use is one of the indicators of high intelligence. There’s something else, too, that’s catching the attention of orca experts, and it’s maybe the most remarkable thing we’ve seen. Over the past couple of decades, orcas have been known to offer food to humans.

It’s not restricted to a single pod or regional population. It’s happened all over the world. Orcas will approach a human in the water or in a boat or even on the shore, and offer a piece of fish. If the human refuses, they may repeat the offer. It’s not accidental. It’s clearly intentional.

Is it altruism? Attempt to communicate? Manipulation of some sort—trying to train the human? Are orcas trying to make some sort of connection?

Orcas share food with each other within their pods. It may be they’re trying to invite humans into their world or their culture. Maybe it’s a peace offering. A form of diplomacy. An experiment—to see what the weird little land animal will do next.

Maybe the attacks on boats aren’t attacks. Maybe they’re attempts to communicate. They may be trying to get the boats to join in a race or a game of tag. Orcas will grab each other’s fins with their teeth; if one of them is sick or injured, they’ll pull her up to the surface and support her there, and keep her from sinking back down. Maybe they’re grabbing rudders to try to get the boats’ attention.

What it’s not reading as, to experts who understand orcas (as far as humans can at this point), is hostility. The boats may be doing something that sets the orcas off, either in play or in some form of annoyance or frustration, and it’s probably become a fad of sorts to chase and ram them, but it’s not about the humans. They’re not out to get revenge on the species that’s burning up the planet. In fact, when they do interact directly, it seems they come in peace, and bearing gifts.[end-mark]

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Column SFF Bestiary

Killer Orcas

Anyone who has worked with large animals can tell you how easy it is to get hurt…

By Judith Tarr

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Published on June 30, 2025

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It’s amazing that in sixty years of captive orcas, including orcas bred in captivity, the human body count is quite low. Small weak humans and large, powerful animals can be a volatile mix, with the humans very much on the losing side. And yet in all that time, there’s been a scarce handful of fatalities in the orca tanks.

Injuries there have been. Trainers, handlers, and more or less random persons have been bitten, battered, and nearly drowned. Some injuries have been serious, if not actually fatal.

Anyone who has worked with large animals can tell you how easy it is to get hurt. They don’t always know their own strength, and a moment’s lapse on the part of either human or animal can have unfortunate results.

[Content warning: This article contains descriptions of serious injuries, trauma, and death, as well as a discussion of animal welfare that some readers may find upsetting.]

One of the most notorious non-fatal incidents happened at Sea World in 1971. Shamu, the first intentionally captured orca, had been showing signs of mental distress, but money ruled, and the show had to go on. As part of a publicity stunt, a park employee in a bikini was ordered to ride the orca.

Shamu had been conditioned to respect trainers in wet suits, but a human in a bikini was a different animal. She dumped the rider, Anne Godsey, and pulled her under. Godsey survived, but needed 200 stitches in her leg and hip, and suffered severe emotional trauma.

So did Shamu. She was retired from performance after that incident, and died four months later, at the terribly young age of nine.

That did not deter the park from continuing its “Shamu” shows. In 2010, almost forty years later, trainer Dawn Brancheau was performing in front of a large audience with an adult male orca named Tilikum. Brancheau was an experienced trainer, and she believed she had a special relationship with Tilikum.

The day she died, she had completed a lunchtime show and lain down on a ledge beside the tank for a “relationship session” with the orca. Her long ponytail trailed out in the water. Tilikum seized it and pulled her in.

Brancheau fought hard, and her fellow trainers did their best, but there was nothing they could do to stop six tons of orca. Brancheau died in full view of a horrified crowd.

Brancheau was not the first trainer to be killed by one of the park’s orcas. Keto, a male who had been born and raised in captivity (unlike Tilikum, who was born in the wild), had killed Spanish trainer Alexis Martinez two months before during a training session at Loro Parque in Tenerife. It was a similar situation: trainer working with orca, orca pulling trainer down and resisting efforts to save the trainer.

Tilikum’s very public attack was not his first. He came to Sea World in 1991 from Sealand in Canada, where he and two female orcas had drowned a trainer who fell into their tank. At Sea World in 1998, his caretakers came in one morning to find a naked and very dead man draped over his back. Daniel P. Dukes had hidden in the park before closing and apparently gone swimming with the whale in the night. He did not survive the experience.

After Brancheau’s death, Tilikum continued to perform solo or with other orcas, but never again with humans in the water. He died in 2017 at the age of 35; he had sired a number of offspring and grandoffspring, and was one of the longest-lived males in captivity.

Was Tilikum a serial killer? Did his life in orca hell—ripped away from his family, confined to concrete and metal tanks, subjected to training and conditioning, forced to perform day in and day out—cause his mind to snap? The first killing may have been accidental, with a surprise human-shaped toy thrown into the tank he shared with a pair of aggressive females. The second could have been an accident, too: no one knows; apparently there were no cameras in the tank.

The third happened in full public view, and there is video. Did he intentionally kill Dawn Brancheau? Had he been pushed to the limit of what he could stand, and he took it out on a convenient target?

He did indicate that something was not right. His quality time with his trainer normally ended with her commanding him to dive down toward the observation windows and offer a photo op for the patrons below. That day he didn’t wait for the command. He grabbed her hair instead and dragged her down with him.

Or was it essentially a cultural clash? An orca can stay underwater for long periods. It might not have occurred to him that a human can hardly stay under at all by orca standards. When Branchard’s long hair slipped into the water and streamed out, maybe, like a cat, he pounced on it as if it had been a toy. She just happened to come along with it.

Once he had her, he wouldn’t let her go, though park staff did their best. He shook her and dragged her and pushed her along with his nose, until eventually he let himself be herded to a small tank with a floor that could be lifted to confine him and to extricate Brancheau from his jaws. Did he think he had a toy? Prey? Toward the end, was he trying to do what orcas will do with one of their own who is injured or sick, supporting her and carrying her up to the surface?

Or maybe it was a combination of all of these things. He was in no way suited to the life he was living. He was designed for the open ocean, for a complex culture and a close-knit family. Just about everything he did during his life in captivity conflicted, in one way or another, with his nature and instincts.

Sea World insisted that it gave him and the rest of its orcas the best possible facilities and care, with expert trainers and a wide range of enrichment activities. Dawn Brancheau believed sincerely that she had a wonderful relationship with him; she loved him and was convinced that he loved her. Maybe that was true—right up until it wasn’t.

Anyone who lives and works with animals learns sooner or later that animals are not humans. Even dogs and cats, who live intimately with us, still have their own agenda, to which they will default. The dog who digs up your garden, the cat who claws your furniture, is doing what comes naturally.

Training and conditioning only go so far. There comes a point when nature takes over. With a truly wild animal, which hasn’t been bred for generations to cooperate with humans, even the most careful training and handling can fail.

It says a lot for the nature of the orca that there are no verified cases of humans killed by wild orcas, and that captive orcas have only killed a handful in sixty years. These huge predators with their powerful jaws are literal death to fish, squid, and marine mammals, but aside from their natural prey, they’re very much into live and let live. It may be that Shamu and Tilikum and Keto simply snapped. It’s remarkable that dozens of other orcas haven’t and didn’t.

Marine parks are still holding orcas captive, and still putting on shows. Sea World announced in 2016 that it was ending its captive breeding program, but it refused to consider either retiring its orcas or releasing them into the wild. What remains, according to them and other parks, is the study of cetaceans in captivity and in the open ocean. They’re too educational (and too lucrative) to let go. It’s probably too late for these animals anyway, barring a Keiko-style, full-on, complex and expensive project. The ones who were captured in the wild can’t return to their families—it’s been too long. The ones who were born in captivity have nowhere to go and lack the knowledge or the skills to survive outside of the tanks. The only viable option is what Sea World is doing: letting time and attrition put a gradual end to their programs. Eventually there may be no captive orcas, but the knowledge gained from the them may help protect and manage the wild population.[end-mark]

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Column SFF Bestiary

The Other Half of the Story: Keiko, the Star of Free Willy

Keiko’s story may be more harrowing than his movie counterpart, but it still offers hope…

By Judith Tarr

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Published on June 23, 2025

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When Free Willy was filmed, it presented a serious moral dilemma. Its star, an orca named Keiko, was a captive himself. Whereas the fictional Willy got to go free, Keiko remained in captivity.

Viewers recognized this. Schoolchildren wrote letters. Their objections were loud enough and prolonged enough that the studio actually paid attention.

There were practical considerations in any case. Keiko’s story—documented in Keiko: The Untold Story of the Star of Free Willy—is if anything more harrowing than his movie counterpart.

He was captured in Iceland around 1978, when he was about two years old. Normally orca hunters aim for the four-year-olds, young and small but weaned from their mothers. Keiko at half that age would still have been a nursing infant. Mostly likely he was swept up in the net and kept, and shipped off to a marine park in Japan.

The park already had a pod of orcas, and Keiko as a stranger did not do well. He was bumped around for a while until he ended up as a solo orca in a park in Mexico City. His tank was small but so initially was he; the climate was much too warm, which caused problems as he grew, including a case of papillomavirus—that’s the weird crusty growth we can see in the film.

Warner Brothers had been looking unsuccessfully for an orca to star in its story of a whale who was rescued from a park and freed into the wild. Most parks were not in favor of such a message; their orca shows were major sources of income. But the park in Mexico was willing, probably because they could see that Keiko was not doing well.

By the time he became a movie star, Keiko was fast outgrowing his tank. He had occasional dolphin company, but nothing consistent. His health was deteriorating and so was his energy and his attitude.

When filming ended, the studio knew it had to do something, even without the public outcry. To its credit, it developed a plan, and the Keiko Project was born.

The first priority was to get Keiko out of the park and into a purpose-built facility in Oregon. This took a while. The tank that was built was deep and large and filled with fresh, cold sea water. For the first time since he was captured, Keiko would be able to dive deep and swim relatively freely, while being fed high-quality herring—his natural diet back in Iceland.

Within six weeks of being shipped from Mexico to Oregon, Keiko was a changed whale. His color had deepened, his skin had cleared up, and he was building muscle and stamina. His whole attitude had changed. He was bright, curious, and engaged with the humans who cared for him.

By the time the documentary gets to this point, we’ve learned a lot about orcas in the wild. Orcas are the largest of the dolphins, and they live quite a long time. Females can live ninety years or more, males fifty to sixty years. They live in large families, or pods, led by a senior female. Her offspring will stay with her all their lives; she nurses her calves for two years.

Orcas are very, very intelligent. They have language and culture, and different pods have their own dialects and ways of doing things. Young orcas learn social skills from their families. The males, the fathers and uncles, teach them to hunt.

Their eyesight is very good, but not much use down in the depths where they do much of their swimming and hunting. They have a highly developed sense of hearing, and the ability to use sonar to build pictures of, for example, schools of herring herded into a ball to be picked off by hunting orcas.

When a male reaches the age of twelve or so, he has a growth spurt. That’s when he develops the distinctive long, upright fin. A male in captivity, confined to a small tank without the opportunity to build strength and stamina, doesn’t do this. That’s why captive males’ dorsal fins flop over. (Which answers the question Jess asks in Free Willy.)

All of this makes clear just how tragic the life of a captive orca is. Males in captivity seldom make it past age twenty. (Females live a lot longer, as witness the Free Corky campaign, which has been trying for decades now to free a female orca captured in 1969 and still alive at Sea World.) By the time Keiko reached Oregon, he was around sixteen years old, and his clock was ticking.

The Keiko Project’s goal was to rehabilitate him in Oregon, then when he was ready, ship him back to his home waters in Iceland. A team of orca experts, veterinarians, and trainers got together to get him healthy and fit—and they succeeded.

They learned a great deal in the process, and demonstrated just how smart an orca is. Not just in how he responded to his trainers and to the people who came to see the world-famous whale, but in how he learned—watching television at night, including his own movie, and viewing documentaries about orcas. During the day he trained his trainers, especially a young woman who could not get him to perform as such, but if she did crazy silly things, he rewarded her with his own goofy tricks.

When the vets cleared him for travel, he flew by Air Force troop transport to Himaey in the Westman Islands of southern Iceland, near where he was captured. The whole world followed his journey, and the people of Iceland were enthralled. The upshot of that was his greatest legacy: the end of the captive orca industry in Iceland.

Gradually the Keiko Project team acclimated Keiko to the ocean, first in the bay and then out in the open sea. There at last he met wild orcas, swam with them, foraged with them, lived among them. It seemed the project had succeeded. Keiko had returned to the wild.

But he hadn’t found his mother or his birth pod. That part of the dream didn’t happen. The team tracked him from Iceland down to Norway, extrapolating from his route that he was hunting and foraging for himself.

Then one day he turned up beside a fishing boat outside of Skelvik Fjord, and followed it in. Keiko had tried life in the wild, and he opted to return to humans. They were, in the end, his pod—or as close as anything could come.

The Keiko Project moved him to a relatively isolated fjord near Taknes. He lived the rest of his life there, with occasional brief forays back out to sea. He was free to come and go, and for the most part he chose to stay. He lived in between worlds, unable to rejoin his family but seemingly content with his human friends and caretakers.

In December of 2003, ten years after the release of Free Willy and some twenty-five years after he was trapped in a net off the coast of Iceland, Keiko declined rapidly and died of renal failure. He had made it past the age of twenty-five, which was exceptional for a male orca in captivity. As Naomi Rose of Humane Society International said, he might have lived that long in the tank in Oregon, but no one in the project regrets their decision to offer him the open ocean. “We gave him five years of home.”

The project still hopes to set other captive orcas free, but so far none of the parks has been willing to cooperate. Even now, with what we know of orcas and the horrors of captive life, orca shows are big business. Free Willy’s sleazy park owner and his adamant refusal to let the whale go, no matter how much he suffers, is pretty much how it is. There’s no practical way to ship the orcas out of the parks, rehabilitate them, and send them home.

All anyone can really do is try to stop the industry at the source, put an end once and for all to the capture of wild orcas. That at least seems to be happening, though the larger parks have produced their own micro-pods, breeding orcas in captivity—with distinctly mixed results. Ultimately, there needs to be a ban on orca shows, period. As long as that’s not happening, the same stories will be told over and over, and the same tragedies occur and recur. Keiko’s story offers hope, if anyone will take it.[end-mark]

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Column SFF Bestiary

Saving the Killer Whale: Free Willy

A solid entry in the “misfit kid bonds with captive animal, adventures (and liberation) ensue” genre.

By Judith Tarr

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Published on June 16, 2025

Credit: Warner Bros. Pictures

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Credit: Warner Bros. Pictures

Somehow I’ve managed to have Free Willy on my radar since it first aired, but I’d never actually seen it. I had it figured fairly accurately as “misfit kid bonds with captive animal, adventures (and liberation) ensue.” The animal in this case is an adolescent orca, and the kid teeters on the edge between the safety of a foster family and a life of crime.

It’s long for a kid-focused film at nearly two hours, and much of it is kid-drama with the protagonist, Jesse, his years-long conviction that the mother who abandoned him will come back, and the trouble he gets into because of it. But it’s framed and tightly woven with the orca’s story.

The opening sequence is long, dreamlike, and surprisingly compelling. A family of orcas swims and plays and lives its life off a rocky coast—until human hunters emerge from a hidden cove and a set a net to capture one of them. The whale they catch is distinguished by a small set of black dots on its otherwise pristine white chest.

This is Willy (played by an orca named Keiko and an assortment of mechanical stand-ins). He is, we’ll learn later, twelve years old, twenty-two feet long, and weighing over three and a half tons. We’re also told that he was too big and too old to be captured in the first place—with the implication that if you’re going to hunt orcas for the water-park trade, you’re better off ripping babies away from their mothers.

Orcas are a highly social species. They travel in family groups called pods, sometimes as many as fifty or more, and they may stay with their mothers their whole lives. It’s no surprise that Willy is not working out as a marine-park attraction: a lone orca in a tank designed for dolphins, in the seedy Northwest Adventure Park. There is nothing good about his situation.

Willy is proving to be untrainable, at least by the young woman trainer who works for the park. This is a problem for the park’s skeevy owner, Dial, and his equally skeevy henchman, Wade. The park needs to make money, and the whale is supposed to be the main attraction. If he doesn’t work out as a performing animal, he’ll be worth more dead than alive.

Jesse and his gang of runaways stumble into the park one night while escaping police pursuit. They end up down in the observation deck, find cans of spray paint and vandalize the place. Ringleader Perry escapes, but Jesse is caught—and not just by the cops. He comes face to face with Willy through the glass.

This adventure changes his life. His punishment for vandalism is to clean up the mess, and his jailers, as he sees it, are a young couple named Glen and Annie. Glen owns a garage. Annie is a writer. They’re his new foster parents, whether he likes it or not.

I expected Annie to use her skills to publicize the Willy situation, but her career is a throwaway. Glen gets to be a hero later, and so does she, but not because she can write.

It’s not about them, anyway. Jesse does his community service and bonds with Willy. They seal the deal one night when Jesse falls into the tank and nearly drowns. Willy retrieves him and deposits him on the rim, and saves his life. That, by the rules of Hollywood, binds them together forever.

Jesse also makes friends with Randolph, who plays the role of Wise Native American. Randolph teaches Jesse about his people, the Haida, and tells him a story about a hero and an orca. He teaches Jesse a prayer in the Haida language. “You have something special, kid,” says Randolph.

Rae, the trainer, is a good person who cares deeply about her charge, but Willy despises her because she’s had to subject him to uncomfortable medical procedures. He won’t work for her at all. Every time she goes near the tank, he drenches her with a massive tail-slap.

But he will play with Jesse. Jesse wins him over with harmonica music, then starts bringing him treats from the fish market. Willy is fed a diet of carefully selected fish, but his favorite is salmon. “That’s his chocolate,” says Rae.

She knows other things that will please him, too. Orcas are very tactile. They like to be touched and stroked and petted. They especially like to have their tongues rubbed—which takes guts, reaching into that huge mouth with its rim of daggerlike teeth.

Rae shows Jesse how to train a whole series of tricks. Willy is happy to cooperate: orcas love to play with people they like.

There’s a bit of urgency there. Willy has to make money for the park or else, it’s strongly implied, he’ll be killed for the insurance. Jesse, Rae, and Randolph come up with a plan to turn Willy into a star.

Unfortunately they fail to allow for human stupidity. On the day of the big debut performance, the crowd in the bleachers around the tank is fairly normal but still way too much for Willy’s senses. But a major failure in judgment seals the deal. Nobody thinks to close off the observation deck below.

It’s jammed with people, and they start hammering on the glass. The more they pound, the more agitated Willy gets.

Willy does his best. At first he just refuses to perform. He dives to escape the crowd on the surface, but that puts him face to face with the mob below. And the pounding will. Not. Stop.

Finally he does the only thing he can reasonably do. He charges the observation windows.

That sends the mob shrieking for the stairs, just as the bolts start to go on the bulkhead. The tank is close to being breached.

It’s an unmitigated disaster. Jesse pitches a massive sulk and decides to run away to California, where Perry has gone to get rich—presumably by dealing drugs. But first he makes sure Willy knows how mad he is.

Willy tries to apologize by inviting him to play with a favorite toy. Jesse isn’t having it. Then he hears what Willy has been hearing: whales out in the bay, calling. It’s Willy’s family, Jesse is sure.

That pulls Jesse out of his sulk—just in time to catch Wade and a crew of welders down in the observation area, attacking the bolts that were already weakened by Willy’s attack. Jesse overhears their conversation, and realizes what they’re doing. They’re sabotaging the tank. They want to kill Willy.

Jesse has completely forgotten both his tantrum and his trip to California. Finally, at long last, the film is getting to the point. It dawns on Jesse that he has to free Willy. It hasn’t occurred to him at any point previously, in spite of everything he’s learned about orcas and captivity, but better late than never.

He can’t do it alone. He calls on Randolph, who is more than willing, and Rae comes to help as well. They have to coax Willy into the sling that he hates, that’s used for vet checks. Then they have to lift him out of the rapidly draining tank and load him on a trailer, and get him to the nearest ocean access, with the bad guys and the police in hot pursuit.

Willy can survive out of water for a while, if he’s kept wet, but there’s not a moment to waste. It’s a race against time, bad guys, wonky equipment, and bad roads. And, at the end, Dial blocking the way to the marina, and the whale hunters in the water, spreading a net across the entrance to the harbor.

In the end, a combination of crazy courage, orca strength, and Haida magic wins the day. Jesse, in the time-honored tradition of wild-animal-loving kids, has to say goodbye to his friend. With the help of his own friends and chosen family, he sets Willy free.

The lesson here, true to the genre, is that wild animals need to stay wild. Orcas are not meant to be stolen from their families and kept in captivity. Trained-whale shows are a form of abuse; they’re torture for the whales.

One thing we learn, among many, is that stress damages their bodies. Jesse notes a clear sign that I had wondered about as well. He sees a chart on the office wall that shows an orca, but it’s not Willy. The orca on the chart has a long, upright dorsal fin. Willy’s has flopped over.

That happens to captive orcas, Rae says. Nobody knows why. Maybe, Jesse suggests, it’s because they need room to swim. A tank just isn’t enough.

Willy at least, and at last, gets to return to the wild. I’ll have more to say about that next time. Free Willy premiered in 1993, but it’s just as topical now as it was then. More, maybe, with what’s happened with orcas since.[end-mark]

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Column SFF Bestiary

Back From the Brink: Star Trek and the Humpback Whale

Star Trek helped save a species, but that’s just the beginning…

By Judith Tarr

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Published on June 9, 2025

Credit: Paramount

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Credit: Paramount

In Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, the humpback whale is nearly extinct. By the twenty-third century of that particular universe, it’s gone. That’s the plot, and that’s the problem Kirk and his ever-loyal crew have to solve.

By 1986 when the film was released, Star Trek, a quirky Sixties television show canceled after three seasons (and it had to fight for the last one), was well on its way to becoming a cultural icon. It had found new life and new viewers in a series of feature films, and in 1987, the first spinoff series, Star Trek: Next Generation, would begin its seven-season run. More films and more series would follow.

The influence of Star Trek is broad and deep, and “the one with the whales” is no exception. Its message is clear: Human interference has brought innumerable species to or past the brink of extinction. The humpback whale, one of the largest animals that ever lived, had been hunted so relentlessly that there were only a few hundred left. Even after whaling was banned, the hunt continued, and we see it on the screen, with George and Gracie standing in for all the whales who had been killed or were about to be killed.

In the Trek universe, the hunt goes on and the species is exterminated, with dire consequences for the future of Earth. It’s even been speculated that Kirk’s way-out-of-the-box attempt to save the species and the planet may have contributed to the whales’ extinction. I don’t know that I agree, but it is an interesting take on the film.

In our universe, the film did a thing that Star Trek has done remarkably often. It educated while it entertained. It got people thinking about the plight of the whales. And it contributed to something remarkable.

The humpback started to come back. The ban on hunting had a good deal to do with it, but raising awareness and making people care goes a long way toward influencing how they act and how they think. By the first quarter of the twenty-first century, instead of being exterminated, the whales’ numbers had risen significantly. They might even have been comparable to what they were before modern commercial whaling began.

Experts were astounded. These huge and gentle creatures with their eerily beautiful songs were back. If an alien probe happened to show up in our solar system, there would be thousands of responses, instead of none at all.

That’s a miracle, and it’s wrapped in a mystery. Only the male whales sing, but no one knows exactly why. Mating calls? Communications? Art and entertainment? Whatever the reason, the ocean is echoing and re-echoing with the song of the whales.

At one point during his almost-year with My Octopus Teacher, Craig Foster tried an experiment. Octopuses, he read, are actually nocturnal. He had been doing his dives during the day, but he ventured into the kelp forest at night. It was a different world, and one of the things that made it truly magical were the resounding echoes of whale song through the darkened forest.

Humpback whales are world travelers. They feed for half of the year in the cold, nutrient-rich waters around the poles, scooping up tons upon tons of krill and tiny fish. Then for half the year they migrate to warmer waters to breed and give birth to their calves.

Foster’s kelp forest is located on the western cape of South Africa, the Cape of Storms. It’s a major feeding ground for humpback whales. At just about the time Foster was studying his octopus, something was happening that modern science had not seen before.

Whales were gathering en masse in those waters. Humpbacks are not gregarious by nature. Mostly they travel alone, or with just one or two companions. A “supergroup” may consist of around a dozen whales. These were super-mega-maxi-groups, as many as 200 strong. And they were gathering in summer, when they would normally have migrated to the antarctic to feed.

These supergroups were spotted off the coast of South Africa at intervals through the 2010s. They were hunting and feeding, which was not normal for that location or that time of year. Researchers were baffled as to why.

There were several possibilities. Unusually high numbers of prey species in those waters. Unusually high number of whales putting pressure on their usual feeding grounds and pushing them out to these areas. Or maybe this is how and where they used to hunt before they were driven almost to extinction. It’s not anomalous behavior. It’s behavior that had been disrupted by human interference.

That was good news, and a bright spot in the annals of the earth’s species. But there’s a darker side to it. In recent years, humpback numbers have dropped in certain areas, notably the northern Pacific. They’re what’s known as a bellwether species, an indicator of the effects of ecological shifts. And it seems they’re losing ground again, not to hunters but to something more insidious and inherently more dangerous: human-caused climate change.

What will happen to them, whether or how they’ll survive the warming oceans, we don’t know. Will they make it to the twenty-third century after all? Only time will tell.[end-mark]

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Column SFF Bestiary

The One With the Whales — Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home

As light as the tone of the film is, it’s deeply poignant at its heart.

By Judith Tarr

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Published on June 2, 2025

Credit: Paramount

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Credit: Paramount

You know the meme that goes around the internets, that asks for a list of five movies that you’ve seen at least five times? Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home is always on mine, and I can’t even tell you how many times I’ve seen it. Many multiples of five, that’s all I can say. In my personal canon, it’s The One With the Whales.

It’s the conclusion of an arc that includes the death and resurrection of Spock and the destruction of the latest incarnation of the Enterprise. The gang is back together, and they’re headed home to face the consequences of some highly controversial, dare I say criminal, life choices. Their transport is a captured Klingon warship that has been christened, with profound irony, the HMS Bounty.

As Star Trek stories go, it’s just about perfect. It’s got the light touch, the easy give-and-take of old friends and crewmembers, the Treknobabble, and one of my favorite Star Trek tropes: Earth is about to be destroyed, and only our heroes can save it—by traveling back in time to the (then) present day.

Even better, it has a space whale. It’s a probe so alien no one in the Trekiverse has ever seen one like it, and its arrival shuts down every form of human tech and starts to vaporize the planet.

It doesn’t seem to know or care what it’s doing. It’s only there to find some of its old contacts, which, Spock deduces, happen to be extinct: humpback whales. The language it’s calling in is whale song.

As light as the tone of the film is, it’s deeply poignant at its heart. The death of a species is a tragedy. Humans caused this one, and they’re paying for it with the destruction of their home planet.

Unless, of course, our old friends can rig the rackety old Bounty to break the bounds of space and time, find a humpback, and bring it back to tell the probe to back off. They find their way to Earth in 1986, give or take, and just happen discover a pair of humpbacks in captivity in an aquarium in Alameda, outside of San Francisco (the only captive humpbacks in the world—the logistics of which are daunting, beginning with the need to feed them two tons of shrimp per day).

What a happy coincidence. Just like the one that provides a nuclear vessel (or as Mr. Chekov calls it, a nuclear wessel) with just the right components to repair their time-travel-damaged dilithium crystals. And the one that lets Mr. Scott “invent” just the right kind of lightweight but super-strong material for the tank that will transport the whales back to the twenty-third century. And the one that promises a whole new world, and a whole new lease on life for the species, when and if the whales make it to the future.

We don’t ask too many questions. Like how we hope the tank is open on top, because whales have to breathe air. Or whether “inventing” transparent aluminum changes the future—and let’s not even ask how they manage to get whale-sized panels manufactured and transported in well under twenty-four hours. Just sit back and enjoy the ride.

The humpbacks seem to. The aquarium has named them George and Gracie, after classic comedy duo George Burns and Gracie Allen. They do bear a certain resemblance to George, who in 1986 had become an icon of film and television. It’s cutesy, but it’s the kind of thing a zoo will do to make its animals more appealing to the public. (Fiona the hippo, anyone?)

In true Trek fashion, the film has a serious message about the ways in which humans destroy their environment. Spock identifies the late twentieth century by the levels of pollution in the atmosphere. Whales are not yet extinct, but cetacean biologist Dr. Gillian Taylor (Catherine Hicks) has a great deal to say about the threats to their existence.

We meet her as she leads a guided tour of the Maritime Cetacean Institute (as played by the Monterey Bay Aquarium), delivering a concise and informative spiel to a gaggle of appropriately concerned visitors. (The nun in the front is particularly noticeable, as are the three ladies of a certain age.) She touches on the main points: A whale is not a fish but a mammal. Most whales are not at all aggressive; many don’t even have teeth. Instead they have “a soft, gum-like tissue that strains vast amounts of tiny shrimp for food.”

The principal enemy of the whale is man. We’re treated to a film clip showing in grim detail the butchering of a whale. Commercial whaling, she says, has driven the blue whale to the brink of extinction. The humpback, once numbered in the hundreds of thousands, by 1986 has been reduced to under 10,000 individuals. Nearly all of the whales caught are not yet mature, and many of the females are pregnant, which is a double loss to the species.

Gillian’s love for the whales radiates off the screen. Her passion and Spock’s ability to communicate telepathically with alien species help us understand the otherwise inscrutable stars of the show. We can deduce that Spock has explained the situation to the whales, and they’ve agreed to travel to the future and save the world—and their species.

Whatever George (since it’s only the males who sing) says to the probe, it must be something like, We were lost, humans found us, they brought us back, please don’t destroy the planet. We need a place to live and raise our baby.

The probe—what it is, who sent it, why it’s so destructive until the whales call it off—remains a mystery. The story is about the good, the bad, and the ugly sides of human nature, and the ways in which even the worst of humanity can achieve redemption. It may take the near-destruction of the planet, but we do eventually try to fix what we’ve broken.

The whales are as alien to us as anything from space. And yet they’ve been around far longer than humans. Earth was theirs before it was ours. We owe it to them to let them be, to stop killing them. Or something truly alien may just come along and do its best to stop us.[end-mark]

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Column SFF Bestiary

Falling in Love With the Wild: My Octopus Teacher

This award-winning film explores the profound connection between human and octopus.

By Judith Tarr

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Published on May 27, 2025

Credit: Netflix

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Credit: Netflix

Filmmaker Craig Foster’s 2020 documentary, My Octopus Teacher, won an Academy Award in its category for Foster and directors Pippa Erlich and James Reed. I can see why. It’s beautifully filmed, touchingly narrated, with a clear message about humans, animals, and how they’re all tied together on this planet we share.

It’s the diary of an obsession. Foster comes to it in a state of severe burnout, under serious personal stress. He’s come to his childhood home to find himself again. What he finds is much larger than that.

Books and films about the octopus often stress how difficult it is to study the animal in its native environment. To really do it right, you have to travel to obscure parts of the world and spend significant amounts of time under the sea.

Foster has the resources and the will, and the luck to have been raised on the Western Cape of South Africa, also called the Cape of Storms. It’s a wild environment, with cold and turbulent seas crashing into a rocky shore, and along that shore, a shallow kelp forest full of sea life.

He lives near one such forest, some two hundred square meters of magical underwater world. He trains himself to tolerate the cold, and makes the choice not to wear a wet suit or a scuba tank.

Swimming with a pair of trunks and a snorkel means he can only stay down for ten or fifteen minutes before he has to come up for air. It also means he can engage directly with what he finds, including, one life-changing day, a strange globular agglomeration of shells.

He’s never seen anything like it. When he researches it later, he doesn’t find anything in the literature. Inside the shells, wrapped in them, then bursting out as he watches, is an octopus.

She’s a common octopus, Octopus vulgaris, but to him there’s nothing common or ordinary about her. She fascinates him from the first moment. He falls in love. And he decides to come back every day to visit her and observe her and interact with her.

He goes back for a total of 324 days. That, he calculates, is about eighty percent of her life. Her whole life span is about a year. He knows how short her life will be, and how, barring accident or predation, it will end. As he says, it’s the octopus way. Live fast, die young.

She makes every day count. She has her den, from which she ventures to hunt for food—and, at least once that he observes, to play. The den is surrounded, to his fascination and horror, by holes and crevices full of small aggressive sharks, striped hunters called pyjama sharks, with poor eyesight but a keen sense of smell. They’re particularly partial to a nice dinner of octopus.

She’s a predator herself, completely self-taught, and she learns from her mistakes. He watches her go after lobsters (which I’ve read are quite intelligent). At first she’s unable to catch them, then she figures out how to use her whole body to envelop one, trap it and eat it.

At one terrible point, a shark catches her and rips off an arm. She escapes, but she’s severely weakened. Foster is devastated. He’s sure she won’t make it. But after a week he sees a tiny, perfect arm growing from the wound. It takes a hundred days, but at the end, she’s a fully eight-armed octopus again, just as good as new.

The next time a shark hunts her down, she has a whole set of strategies for escaping it. She conceals herself in the forest of kelp, spreads her scent over the plants so that the shark goes after them instead of her. Then, to Foster’s amazement, she fashions a ball of shells with herself inside. It’s exactly the same structure he found on the first day, and now he understands what it is. It’s a defensive maneuver.

The shark attacks it, lashes it around and around in a death roll (yes, Jules Verne, you got it right after all). Foster has to head for the surface to breathe, but when he comes back down, the ball of shells is on the shark’s back, and the octopus is riding it into a dense part of the forest, where she lets go and leaves the shark baffled and without its dinner.

That for Foster is proof (one of many) of her intelligence, and her ability to use it to protect herself as well as to hunt and feed. She learns; she strategizes. The heart of it, he says, is the sheer number and variety of her prey. She has to learn how each different creature can be caught. Even stationary mollusks require a strategy, a means to penetrate their hard shells and extract the creature inside.

At first, he tries to be just an observer, leaves his camera near her den to record her, but even on that first day he can’t resist making contact. Over time she learns to trust him, to accept his presence and to investigate him and his equipment with evident curiosity. On day 52 he drops a lens and startles her badly, shattering that trust; she flees.

He’s sure he’s lost her forever. But Foster keeps looking, uses techniques he learned while filming a documentary on the San people of the Kalahari Desert, and teaches himself to track her. After a week he finds her—and somehow she’s back. She trusts him again, or still.

From then until the end of her life, he observes her and marvels at her and, every so often, shares a moment with her. She’ll wrap around his hand, or he’ll cradle her to his chest. He can’t do it for very long before he has to breathe, which means he has to be very careful and very gentle in disengaging from her suckers.

He knows when the end is coming, when he finds her together with a large male octopus. That’s the moment her dying begins.

We never find out what happens to the male—he’s not really relevant. She’s what matters. She’s the center of this world, the reason Foster comes down every day, maps out every inch, studies every form of life, observes how it all fits together.

It’s a revelation. The kelp forest, and by extension the whole of the sea itself, is a single organism, a huge creature “thousands of times more awake and intelligent than I am. This is like a giant underwater brain operating over millions of years.” The octopus is his point of contact with it, and he perceives the whole of it as it relates to her.

What strikes me through all of his obsession and his deep love for this creature is that he never names her. Foster doesn’t try to humanize her, or claim her by hanging a human word on her. He sees her through the lens of his own needs and preoccupations, but he never loses sight of the fact that she is a distinct and individual creature, very different from him.

He can’t ever truly understand what it’s like to be her. Some lines, he says, we can’t cross. But she’s not completely alien, either. She’s as much a part of this world as he is.

And that’s the lesson. We’re all interconnected. We’re all equally vulnerable. “What she taught me was to feel that you’re part of this place, not a visitor.” You belong to it. Just as it belongs to you.[end-mark]

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Column SFF Bestiary

Everything You Always Wanted to Know About the Octopus

We may never truly or completely understand the octopus — and that’s what makes it so fascinating.

By Judith Tarr

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Published on May 19, 2025

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Kathleen Harmon Courage’s 2013 book, Octopus!, subtitled The Most Mysterious Creature in the Sea, is no relation to the 2025 documentary of the same name. It touches on some of the same themes, but it goes in a somewhat different direction. As a work of prose nonfiction, it can delve deeper into the facts and the science, and it does exactly that. It’s extensively researched and compulsively readable.

Courage begins with an expedition to one of the hubs of octopus fishing in the world, Vigo in Galicia, Spain. She calls it “the epicenter of octopuses.” It’s not only a major fishery in its own right but also a major processing center for octopus fisheries elsewhere—and a center for the scientific study of cephalopods. There is, she makes sure to tell us (with photo), a statue of Jules Verne there, though the cephalopods in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas are squid.

She focuses on the octopus as food for humans, in its historical context and as it’s happening around about the year 2012. We’re treated to a recipe for the local delicacy, Pulpo a Feira, a festival dish of octopus, potatoes, paprika, and salt. It’s delicious, she says.

No qualms here about eating a sentient creature. We’ll see more recipes and more discussion of the culinary uses of the octopus as she travels around the coasts of Europe and the Americas, with references to Japanese and Korean specialties. She’s particularly fascinated by Korean-style octopus, Sannakji, aka “live” octopus, as prepared by Sik Gaek restaurant in New York. It’s an illustration of a point, that the octopus has a notable amount of brain power in each of its arms as well as in its main brain.

Sannakji consists of freshly killed octopus arms cut up a la sashimi, on lettuce with sliced raw garlic, green onions, jalapenos, and a couple of dipping sauces. Eating it involves wrestling with the actively wiggling segments and the very sticky suckers. Again, she says, it’s delicious. She obsesses over it for days after.

She is in fact obsessed with the octopus in all of its manifestations. She hunts it, eats it, talks to people who study it both for its own sake, as biologists, and for its uses to the military and to the science of robotics. The octopus for her is more than a scientific curiosity. She’s particularly interested in what it can do for humans.

Humans have a tendency to make everything about them. We see it in the documentary, too. The marine biologist gets an octopus tattoo and makes an octopus quilt. The writer sees in the female octopus’ breeding cycle a reflection of their relationship with their own mother.

Courage wants to learn everything she can about this fascinating and mysterious creature. Mysterious for many reasons. Its weird anatomy and physiology by human standards. Its short life and, in human terms, tragic reproductive cycle. And above all, the difficulty of studying it.

It’s not just that an animal with blue blood, three hearts, eight semi-autonomous arms lined with suckers that can each act individually and smell and taste, a superpower-level gift of disguise, and no apparent social life or parental nurture, is pretty much the opposite of everything a human is. We can’t truly imagine how it lives in its world or how it thinks. We also face serious challenges in getting it to cooperate.

First we have to find it, and then we have to identify that we find. That means mounting lengthy and expensive expeditions to the oceans of the world. Once we get there, we have to track down an animal that can disguise itself as anything from a rock to a sea snake. That hides in spaces inaccessible to humans, though we might find evidence of it in the “garden” of its cast-off prey. That may look completely different in its larval form, and that may be so sexually dimorphic that, as with the blanket octopus, the female is huge and blanket-like and the male is a tiny little nubbin of a thing that doesn’t even look like the same species.

Once we find it, we have to keep it. An octopus can not only ooze through minuscule gaps in any trap we may build, its arms are strong enough to lift a locked lid or pull the trap apart. (Though that being said, Galician fishermen catch octopuses in baited creels that rely on the animal’s tropism toward dark enclosed spaces. Once they’re in, as long as they have something to eat, they’re not interested in leaving—no need to block their exit.) It can easily escape an aquarium and either go hunting in another nearby or find its way outside. This often is fatal for the octopus, since they can’t survive out of water for very long. But that doesn’t stop them from trying.

Once that obstacle has been overcome, we still have to deal with the fact that the octopus is a fantastically uncooperative research subject. Anything you put on it, it can and will pull off. It’s extremely difficult to immobilize without killing it. Everything is wiggly and wriggly and at the same time, as far as we can tell, insatiably curious. It wants to check you out. And pull you apart. And eat you.

It’s also very difficult to breed in captivity. You can get a male and a female together and she may produce eggs, but once those eggs hatch, they need far more space than a lab or even a commercial farming operation can offer. The hatchlings need live food, which will as likely be each other as whatever you try to feed them, and they grow at a phenomenal rate. The only really effective way to obtain them is to capture them in the wild. Which circles back around to the problem of how to find and keep them (either for research or for eating).

It also presents a problem for taxonomy—for identifying and studying the many species of octopus. Not only the difficulty of finding students willing or able to devote time to classifying the hundreds of known species, but also the nature of the animal itself.

Big-time understatement there.

Still, in Courage’s view, octopuses are worth it for what they can do for us. She lists some of the options. Engineering and robotics—a whole new concept of the robot, soft rather than hard, infinitely flexible, with semi-autonomous limbs. Pharmacology, especially the composition of its venom and its possible use in painkillers. Neurochemistry. Design and control of an artificial brain. The art and science of disguise, from color-changing fabrics to cloaking devices. Explorations of cognition, the nature of consciousness, the range of perception in an animal that lives in a truly alien environment by human standards.

We may never truly or completely understand the octopus. And that’s what makes it so fascinating. She describes it at both the beginning and the end of the book, in the words of filmmaker Jean Painlevé, as “a joyous confusion of the mysterious, the unknown, and the miraculous.”[end-mark]

The post Everything You Always Wanted to Know About the Octopus appeared first on Reactor.