Books: Mighty Mystery

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THE YEAR OF THE WHALE by Victor B. Scheffer. 213 pages. Scribner. $6.95.

When the Psalmist sang "O Lord, how manifold are thy works!" (104:24], he saved for his climactic example the whale—nature's piece de resistance and everybody's favorite metaphor. But the whale, alas, is referred to more often than studied. A century ago, Herman Melville could say of the sperm whale, "His is an unwritten life." Then he proceeded to write it, of course.

What Moby Dick did not reveal, The Year of the Whale does—and on terms that can stand the comparison. Victor B. Scheffer is a biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, but his facts tick off the tongue of a poet. The result is a brilliant and affectionate one-mammal bestiary.

Question of Sex. The sperm whale is a saga of the awesome statistic. Dr. Scheffer begins the year in "a quiet month in autumn in the northeastern Pacific," with his calf whale backing into the world tail first—14 feet long, weighing a ton, ready to swim. Nursing for two years on mother's milk, the little leviathan will gain seven pounds a day. Sexual maturity will arrive at the age of nine, but he will not reach full growth until he is 30 to 45. Then he may be as much as 60 feet long and 60 tons in weight. He will be able to cruise at six knots; in a panic he can do 20. When he is hungry, he will dive for as long as 1¼ hours at a time, eat up to two tons of whatever seafood is available every 24 hours.

But behind all these gigantic dimensions lies an immeasurable mystery. Why, for instance, does a Moby Dick attack a ship? Perhaps because the bull whale sees it as a "ship-animal," a sexual rival for his cows, Dr. Scheffer speculates. Yet he is not too sure.

He is positive that whales communicate by ultrasonic signals that sound rather like "a kitchen faucet with a leaky gasket." Indeed, hearing is the whale's indispensable sense: his eyesight is on the way to becoming obsolete, and he has no sense of smell. But Dr. Scheffer cannot explain what part of the whale produces that sound, or how. He knows that the whale is capable of "caregiving behavior" to the wounded within the "family" of 30 or so in which whales travel. Still, in the end, he is not certain how social or even how intelligent the whale is.

In Dr. Scheffer's vision, the whale, for all his mammoth visibility, becomes the ultimate enigma in the enigma of the sea: "A hundred chemicals and a million living sparks and a billion bits of drift, no two alike ... an endless, moving, thin, transparent soup; a cosmic stock forever old and ever new."

Biological Predestiny. Men are killing off sperm whales at the rate of 25,000 a year, perhaps one-tenth of the total stock, and Dr. Scheffer is indignant at the profligacy and lack of "humaneness" with which this is done. But it is the whale's biological predestiny that saddens him most. Nature seems to have no future plans for the whale —an animal with beguiling potential yet lacking the indispensable potential to evolve beyond itself.