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On the half shell: The New Yorker who became an orca

CHARITY ROBEY
CHARITY ROBEY

When I was a kid my family lived in Florida where aquatic wildlife is commonplace. Our neighbor had two feral alligators in a wading pool in his yard. When we went to a park or the beach we saw bottlenose dolphins, manatees and whales.

My two younger sisters and I especially loved our visits to Weeki Wachee Springs, a roadside attraction that featured live mermaids swimming in clear spring water. Like so many girls, I dreamed of growing a green tail covered with jewel-like scales so I could swim underwater with my long hair streaming behind me.

Now I am an adult with grown sons and no fins, but judging from the thousands who turned out last Saturday for the annual Coney Island Mermaid Parade, I suspect I am not the only person who still daydreams about what life would be like as a marine mammal.

Lately, I relate more to whales. And why not? I am drawn to the sea, love to swim, enjoy eating fish and believe that a little blubber in the right places is acceptable. I eagerly follow all whale-related news.

I was thrilled to hear about the sightings last fall in Greenport Harbor and South Ferry of a Northern Right Whale, an endangered species. I’m told a North Ferry crew member spotted the whale during a morning crossing from Greenport to Shelter Island, and accepted the whale’s resident one-way ferry pass.

A few weeks ago, while sitting on the porch with my husband, I read an article in the New York Times about new research into the behavior of whales that revived and reframed my childhood dream of the life aquatic.

“Postmenopausal female whales play a crucial role in the survival of killer whales. With extensive know­ledge of their environment, female whales lead younger whales to food in time of scarcity.”

Since I myself am a post-menopausal mammal that often leads her family to food, I felt immediate kinship with those female orcas.

In fact, I may have said out loud, “I think I’m an orca.” More than once, because my husband said, “O.K., you’re a New Yorker.”

“Not a New Yorker,” I said, “an orca, a killer whale.”

I imagined myself as a whale matriarch, 6,000 pounds of slippery fun swimming with my pod, leading younger whales to a large school of fish in Gardiners Bay. The article went on to say that the largest male whales stay closest to their mothers, because they need to eat much more than the smaller whales to avoid starvation. That aligns with my mother/son experience.

I was lost in reverie, with a 10,000-pound whale-son on my dorsal fin, and a 9,000-pound son just behind him, counting on me to avoid starvation. They needed me even more than when they were little calves nursing for 5 to10 seconds several times an hour, which, I learned, is how often baby orcas nurse. Showing the kids where to find fish would be easy compared to that.

Menopause? How does a female whale even survive menopause? Raging hot flashes in a three-ton mammal with no sweat glands would be an invitation to a lobster boil. If you held a crustacean to my forehead, it could cook in twenty minutes. And what if I developed bone density problems? It can’t be easy to get high-impact exercise in 400 feet of seawater.

Do I really have what it takes to be a killer whale? Do whales get down time? When does a female orca get to put her fins up? In charge of feeding the pod for decades, would I run out of innovative ways to serve fish?

Like humans, female killer whales stop giving birth by about 40, but can live into their 90s. Researchers posit that “the wisdom of elders” improves the survival rate of offspring and could explain why female killer whales and humans continue to live long after they have stopped reproducing.

At last I have biological justification for my compulsion to offer unwanted advice to my adult children. It turns out the survival of our species may even depend on mothers like me, who say to their offspring, “Are you sure you want to eat that?”

“What’s for dinner?” said my (human) husband. His question broke my reverie and brought me back to my chair on the porch.

“I think we’ll have salmon,” I said, “and I know just where to find it.”