These whales are right at the heart of my book, because their names derive directly from the names of individual people. Because they are neither the biggest, the smallest, the most charismatic, or in any other way superlative animals, they seldom appear in the natural history documentaries or the museum dioramas. As a result, few people outside the world of marine biology have ever even heard of them. This means that renaming them will be a great deal easier than it might be for other animals such as the celebrated humpback whale or the infamous sperm whale.
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| Whaling station in Durban, South Africa, 1947 |
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| Bryde's whale breaching |
There is so little known about them that it is difficult to say exactly how many species there are, or whether Bryde's and Eden's are separate species at all. Bryde’s whales were named after Johan Bryde, the Norwegian consul to South Africa in 1908. Bryde was a businessman and ship owner, but also a professional whaler and he set up the first whaling station in South Africa in Durban, and thus contributed to the death of thousands of whales. History must judge such individuals in the context of their times, but the fact remains that this man made a lot of money from the slaughter of these animals and it seems inappropriate that they should still bear his name.
Eden’s whale is named after Sir Ashley Eden, chief commissioner of Burma in the 1870s, by the zoologist John Anderson, the first curator of the Indian Museum in Kolkata. Eden somehow helped to attain the type specimen of this whale for the museum. While Eden clearly had less of a negative impact on these animals than did Bryde, it seems a bit of a stretch to continue to call these animals by his name: only a very few people, historians of the Raj and the like, are likely to have heard of him.
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| Omura's whale |
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| Rare picture of a breaching omura's whale |
Omura’s whales are named after Japanese cetologist 大村秀雄 (Hideo Omura). He was a researcher who published many articles and certainly contributed greatly to our understanding of whales. The problem for me lies in the fact that he was closely associated with Nihon Keiki Keikyushu – The Japan Cetacean Research Institute, which has defied international pleas to end its whaling operation. Japan is among the last nations who refuse to stop whaling. They claim their operations are for research purposes, but there are few outside Japan who accept this. I’ll leave it to the reader to do further research on this matter, but for my part I’d like to find a new name for this species too.
So, to say something about these whales besides their current etymology: They are rorquals. Bryde/Eden are bigger than Omura, the longest measured being a female at 50.9 feet. The longest Omura was just 37.7 feet. Omuras are asymmetrical in colouring, like the fin whale. One interesting peculiarity of omuras is that they seem to prefer shallower, warmer waters. There are several differences in the skeletons of the various species, but this may be a bit technical for our purposes. Bryde/Eden are notable for being especially elongated, their greatest height being only 1/7 of their total length, compared to 1/5.5 for sei whales for example. They occasionally produce strong, low-pitched, human like sounds. The omura whale was only named in 2003 when Japanese scientists performed genetic testing on them. Though they appear very similar to Bryde’s/Eden’s whales, it is thought that they are more closely related to the blue whale. Here is a slightly melodramatic video of some bryde’s whales and another about omura’s whales, which I hope will help to inspire some new names.
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| Bryde's/Eden's Whale |
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