As part of the Climate Desk partnership, this article was originally published by the Guardian and is being reprinted here.
According to new research, the mysterious whale-feeding behavior that scientists have only just been able to document dates back two millennia in books about sea creatures.
The first time Bryde’s whales were spotted waiting for fish to swim into their mouths at the surface of the water was in the Gulf of Thailand in 2011. Scientists called the peculiar method, which was at the time unheard of in modern science, tread-water feeding. Around the same time, researchers discovered something they called “trap-feeding” in humpback whales off Canada’s Vancouver Island.
The whale engages in these actions while standing vertically in the water, only its jaw and snout protruding above the surface. Scientists think that the fact that fish naturally shoals towards the whales’ mouths, which appear to provide refuge, is crucial to the technique’s effectiveness.
Researchers from Flinders University now think they have found several references to the behavior in historical documents, the earliest of which may be found in the Greek manuscript PhysiologustheNaturalist, which was created in Alexandria between 150 and 200 CE.
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Almost a year after seeing a film of a whale tread-water eating, John McCarthy, a maritime archaeologist at Flinders University in Adelaide, South Australia, and the study’s primary author, made the discovery while reading Norse mythology. He saw that descriptions of a marine creature known as the hafgufa seemed to capture the feeding pattern. In reality, McCarthy claimed, it was a coincidence.
The most thorough depiction can be found in Konungs skuggsj, The King’s Mirror, an Old Norse work from the middle of the thirteenth century. The passage says that when a large fish goes to feed, it maintains its mouth open for a brief period of time, no wider or narrower than a large sound or fjord. Unaware and unperceptive, the fish rush in large numbers.
When the hafgufa’s stomach and mouth are full, it closes its mouth, trapping and concealing all the creatures that had come in search of food.
According to McCarthy, The King’s Mirror served as an educational work for teaching young people about the world. Although they exaggerate the magnitude, the description is not fantastical or contains any supernatural overtones. He went on to say that it’s possible that at the time, people didn’t fully understand the differences between fish and marine mammals.
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The correlations here are significantly more obvious and persistent than any prior proposals, the researchers concluded, despite the fact that definitive proof for the myths’ origins is incredibly uncommon and frequently impossible. And the relative rarity of this feeding approach or, conversely, the fact that the strategy was not being used could both account for the paucity of scientific observations previous to the last two decades.
It is fascinating that this form of eating was documented thousands of years ago but classified as a novel approach in recent years, according to Olaf Meynecke, a research fellow at Griffith University’s coastal and marine research center. It demonstrates how people have long been fascinated by such intriguing eating habits.
Meynecke noted that the trap feeding had been witnessed in individual whales and was not a group feeding activity. He concluded that it was extremely likely to only be successful in the presence of other predators. This feeding behavior makes the most sense when there are smaller schooling fish left over after a feeding frenzy since it [has a] low energy cost for the whale.
