Todd McLeish - Narwhals: Arctic Whales in a Melting World

I THINK I WAS NINE WHEN I FIRST BECAME ENAMORED OF THE narwhal, the mysterious sea creature that most people, even today, aren't sure is actually real. Their confusion arises from the whale's connection to the mythical unicorn, whose horn, modeled after the narwhal's tusk, was reputed to have healing properties. But I knew back then that narwhals were real. And I knew that the truth about the ice whale was even better than the myth with which it had become entangled.

When I stumbled across the narwhal in the pages of the World Book Encyclopedia, I was struck by the odd combination of tusk and ice and whale, making the narwhal far more intriguing than the local frogs and turtles this Rhode Island grade-schooler sought out every day. When I discovered a long spiral tusk in a Vancouver curio shop two decades laterlabeled with a price tag of $10,000my interest was rekindled, though I assumed I would never actually see one alive in the wild. Reports of the threats narwhals face from the melting of their icy world, along with conflicting and inaccurate information online and in other venues, prompted me to undertake a series of journeys far above the Arctic Circle to find the truth and reveal the narwhal's unique life cycle and remarkable physical feats.

Narwhals have been surrounded by mystery, mythology, and awe for centuries. They've been celebrated as sea unicorns, held up as proof of the existence of a land-based unicorn, and cherished for their high-quality oils. They've been a vital source of meat in the diet of Arctic natives and important to them as a cultural icon. Today they are surrounded, as well, by great concern for the potential harm that could come to them from retreating sea ice, increased shipping and oil exploration, and changes in environmental conditions caused by a warmingplanet. For a mammal that is so uniquely adapted to thriving in the numbing waters of the Arctic, warming is a significant threat, especially at the rate that it is taking place today.

Yet it is the narwhal's tusk that is clearly its most distinctive feature: it is the most remarkable tooth in nature, and the trait that has generated the most interest and attention since the earliest days of its discovery. It's the source of its taxonomic name, Monodon monoceros, meaning one tooth, one horn, but its common name comes from its grayish coloration. The Old Norse prefix Nar means corpse, and hval means whale, so the narwhal is the corpse whale, because its skin color makes it resemble a floating corpse. Despite the origin of its name, Nobel Prize-winning Chilean poet Pablo Neruda wrote that narwhal is the most beautiful of undersea names, the name of a sea goblet that sings, the name of a crystal spur.

To me, however, it is not just the narwhal's name and tusk that make it distinctive and notable. For narwhals live in a world few can even imagine, where darkness and icy conditions are insurmountable barriers to all but a few predators, some of which may venture north during the warmest months to partake of the region's food-rich waters but then quickly depart for warmer climes at the onset of fall like so many human snowbirds. Their food source is often found more than a mile deep, where few mammals can survive. It's the physiological adaptations to cold and deep divingand to darkness, too, forcing them to rely much more on their hearing and acoustics than on sightthat put the narwhal on the top of my list of most revered animals.