Whaling, bycatch, noise, pollution and climate change. An honest look at the pressures bearing down on cetaceans, and what has already been lost.
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For a thousand years, whales were not animals but a resource: oil for our lamps, bone for our corsets, meat for our tables. The hunt that followed would push the largest creatures ever to live to the very edge of extinction. This is the story of how it happened.
Every year, around 300,000 whales and dolphins die tangled in fishing gear meant for other animals. No one set out to kill them — and that may be exactly what makes it so hard to stop. This is the quiet catastrophe of bycatch.
For a whale, the ocean is a world of sound, not sight. So what happens when we fill that world with noise it was never built to hear?
Some of the ocean's pollution you can see — a swirl of plastic debris spread over an area three times the size of France. Some of it you cannot: chemicals banned decades ago, still hiding in the blubber of whales. Both are now among the greatest threats cetaceans face.
More than 90% of the heat we have added to the planet has been absorbed not by the air, but by the ocean. Whales live inside that changing world — and for some, it is warming so fast that the ice, the food and the silence they depend on are all vanishing at once.
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Start module 5