Eye of the Albatross: Views of the Endangered Sea

"Safina is both a storyteller and a scientist, just like Sapolsky, but Safina’s work really pulls at the heart of conservation: what do we know about what we want to protect? And why should we do so? Those questions, to the uninitiated, seem portentous and diffusely broad, but Safina’s books have a way of grounding them in a love for knowing the organism, which in turn teaches us about the bigger picture. Seabirds are predators just like big cats and primates, but unless you live on a coast they tend to be out of sight, out of mind. Superlatives help with any argument, and albatrosses are a good picks for seabird maxima, for so many reasons: not just as largest living flying organism, they also have lives spent soaring across oceans in search of their prey on a single flap, riding wind off the waves—at scales not unlike some whales, although albatrosses must return to land, at some point, to raise their young. Safina picks a smart path in following the life of a very specific Laysan albatross named Amelia. Large albatross species can live decades, and the long temporal and vast geographic scales of her life lets Safina examine, for example, the pervasive fingerprints of human pollution, even in the most remote places on the planet. By individuating the predator, Safina makes these otherwise strange species relatable—almost like characters pulled from fiction—much as Scheffer did with a fictional whale, or Sapolsky did in aggregate with his troop of baboons. Breathing life into other species, in narrative form, is a tricky thing to do without anthropomorphising, and I think Safina does this so well; and again, keeping some of the mystery because other organisms besides us may be ultimately inscrutable, despite our dogged attempts to know them. I think of anthropomorphism as an ugly outgrowth of narcissism coupled with unimaginative thinking—not so much a statement on the subjects as it is about us: when it happens, it betrays a failure of our own observational and critical thinking abilities. Serious thinking about the nature of emotion and behaviour in non-human species goes back to Darwin, who recognised that they were worth attention. And I agree that in recent years we’ve seen a sea-change in how we talk about the inner minds and emotional states of animals, especially predators, be they crows, primates, or whales. What we really want to know is, what’s going on behind all of those remarkable behaviours? Or, as I wrote in my book, borrowing from a conversation that I had with one of my mentors, the neuroscientist Lori Marino, “Who are they?” I think individuating these animals is absolutely the start of figuring them out. We’re not anthropomorphising when we’re learning about Amelia’s fidelity in Safina’s book, or Nebuchadnezzar’s laziness in Sapolsky’s. “I think of anthropomorphism as an ugly outgrowth of narcissism coupled with unimaginative thinking” When you read de Waal or Safina’s books—or if you’ve had the opportunity to have prolonged encounters with super smart species—it’s clear that the empiricists have, at the very least, made the case that there is a mind behind those eyes. And sometimes, for some species, that mind shows what we would call joy, grief, and an understanding of mortality. I think the scientific questions get really interesting, however, when you consider history and context. While it may not be so surprising that other primates share our suite of emotions because of our shared evolutionary history, whales are certainly displaying behaviours unlike their nearest, terrestrial, relatives. Does that have something to do with ocean environments, and their scale or complexity? Comparative biology provides a framework for entangling these issues with predators. It’s an exciting time to be a scientist."