Environment: A Whale of a Failure

Whales are gentle, playful creatures with enormous brains and extraordinary hearing. According to Cetologist Roger S. Payne of the New York Zoological Society, whales communicate with one another by "singing" at deep submarine frequencies, sounding like sitar concertos. Other scientists are trying to discover how whales can dive to 7,000 ft., where the pressure would compress a human lungful of air to a thin fluid, and then resurface with no ill effects. But for all their mystery, whales have interested men mainly because they have oil within their hulks. In the past decade alone, 607,000 have been slaughtered, mostly by the...