How automatic transmission almost made sperm whales extinct

http://shkrobius.livejournal.com/347646.html

by mike_esspe • 15 years ago

269 96 15 years ago

shkrobius.livejournal.com

pbhjpbhj• 15 years ago

Conclusion:

"The reason why so many whales were killed in the 20th century was the distant ramifications of replacement of whale oil by petroleum. It took another 100 years to find solutions to these ramifications, and only then it became possible to save the whales. Ecological activism did not play significant role in all of these developments; neither did the numerous well-meaning international treaties, moratoriums, and other chest beating displays."

"A chemist who saved the whales has not merited a Wikipedia entry. His name was P. S. Landis and he was a researcher at Mobile Oil."

A really interesting piece IMO.

tedunangst5• 15 years ago

A bizarre conclusion IMO. "Only in the 1980s, a chemical solution to this problem was found." At that point, the whales had already been saved. The chemist may have saved automatic transmissions, but the whales were already good by that point.

tyng2• 15 years ago

Someone should create a wikipedia entry for P. S. Landis as "inventor and the man who saved Sperm Whales"

ohyes• 15 years ago

'Delayed extinction of.'

Sperm whales are not 'saved' yet.

rdl• 15 years ago

He also was involved in creating Mobil 1 synthetic oil, which is one of the better synthetic motor oils out there.

You could make the argument that better motor oil allows cars to stay on the road longer, reducing demand for energy/materials to make new cars, or increasing the number of affordable, reliable used cars for less wealthy (or more frugal) people to drive. Plus, some improved fuel economy (due to engine being in better repair longer), so less CO2 emissions.

_THE_PLAGUE2• 15 years ago

Whaling needs to be brought back. Sperm whales are prevalent once again, so controlled harvesting of them should be possible just like hunting deer or anything else. This creates jobs, and contributes to finding renewable energy sources. Furthermore, because without whaling sperm whales have no predators they are getting abundant and taking up too much of the marine ecosystem's food supply. We need to limit their numbers for our own survival. Jobs. Energy. Marine food supply. For all these reasons we need to restore whaling, and we need to do it now.

tyng2• 15 years ago

So you think human should be playing God?

_THE_PLAGUE2• 15 years ago

It is not playing God to hunt to get the resources we need, like, say, hunting buffalo for their meat and fur. That is just survival. We need the whale oil, so hunting them is no more playing God than is hunting buffalo. I do not see a problem here.

JoachimSchipper2• 15 years ago

Actually, sperm whales are still considered endangered, e.g. by http://ecos.fws.gov/speciesProfile/profile/speciesProfile.ac.... If you have any reliable sources that we "need to limit [sperm whales'] numbers for our own survival", please cite them.

jonhendry• 15 years ago

a) they're still endangered. b) we don't need the oil.

eCa• 15 years ago

What is your position on population control of humans?

VMG• 15 years ago

Sadly science can't beat the stupidity of Traditional Chinese Medicine: http://www.worldwildlife.org/what/globalmarkets/wildlifetrad...

srean• 15 years ago

Sperm whales are incredibly interesting animals. Amongst their multiple records is their ability to dive deep, fast and long.

They are the deepest diving warm blooded animal, they go close to 25 times deeper than their other equally famous and endangered cousin the blue whale. To give an idea of how deep they dive, here is an infographic http://i.imgur.com/ESp2j.jpg The jpg needs to be magnified to get the perspective. From the biological point view what is interesting is not only how they manage to hold their breath for so long but also how they manage to avoid/survive the bends (decompression sickness).

plq• 15 years ago

What is the gibberish between 31.000 and 36.000 feet supposed to mean? Just an oversight?

JonnieCache2• 15 years ago

It's the invented script from the Cthulhu mythos by the gothic horror writer HP Lovecraft. Cthulhu slept at the bottom of the sea, before being awakened by man or something. I don't know, I haven't read it. That's what the big scary monster thing to the left of the script is.

It's a big part of geek culture, it made its way into D&D, and via that into everything else.

rsanchez12• 15 years ago

That's a very interesting infographic. Is the pixel at 15,000ft supposed to be a scale representation of the Alvin?

And, Cthulu? WTF?

jamesbkel• 15 years ago

A quick addition to the awesomeness of sperm whales: part of the reason they dive so deep/long is to hunt giant squid. While a sperm whale vs. giant squid battle has never been observed, there are multiple counts of sperm whales with scars that are from squids and in some cases almost certainly from giant squid.

JonnieCache2• 15 years ago

They find giant squid beaks inside sperm whale stomachs too.

stephth• 15 years ago

Add to the list the story where a large sperm whale managed to sink a whaleship that was attacking multiple of its kin [1] (story which later inspired Moby-Dick).

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essex_(whaleship)#Whale_attack

Someone• 15 years ago

They do dive deep, but there are various animals that I find more surprising. For example, Wikipedia claims 500m+ for emperor pinguins and 600m for elephant seals.

Also, IIRC, it is fairly hard to get the bends without using scuba gear (not that that says much, but I do not think free divers consider it a grey risk)

aidenn02• 15 years ago

Good infographic, but it misses the actual deepest dive by a warm blooded animal at over 35,000 feet: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bathyscaphe_Trieste

blhack2• 15 years ago

*Freedive

dfc• 15 years ago

So that nobody wastes their time. The wikipedia link is to a submarine that made the deepest dive with humans aboard.

I think most people understood "the deepest dive" to mean unaided / freedive.

blhack2• 15 years ago

My dive-master friend has told me that the bends isn't an issue if you're holding your breath. The bends is a result of the air mixture that you're breathing with a SCUBA.

This is why freedivers can dive down to 100meters, and then come back up quickly without dieing.

aidenn02• 15 years ago

This is not true. DCS has been found in cases of free-divers who perform repeated deep dives. The primary gas that causes DCS is nitrogen, which exists in large quantities in the air you are breathing now. The reason you don't often see DCS in free divers is that it takes time for the high-pressure nitrogen to dissolve in the blood and enter tissue.

dhughes• 15 years ago

I've also read when free-divers are down in such high pressure the plasma of their blood is squeezed out and fills their sinuses. In a way it helps protect them since the large open areas are now filled with fluid.

bfrs• 15 years ago

Is that Cthulhu [1] hiding at the bottom?

[1] http://www.southparkstudios.com/guide/episodes/s14e13-coon-v...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cthulu

rsanchez12• 15 years ago

It boggles the mind why the car companies lobbied to keep whale hunting when their numbers were already so low. They wanted a few more years of automatic transmission working at then-current levels, and then what? The same mass transmission failures that happened, only without anymore whales left. Poachers are similarly mind boggling. Instead of leaving a viable population to harvest more animal parts (not saying it's OK, just for the sake of argument), they hunt down every last animal then move on to other animals.

Oh, and if automatic transmission had never been invented, maybe people would actually know how to drive.

bdunbar4• 15 years ago

Poachers are similarly mind boggling. Instead of leaving a viable population to harvest more animal parts ... they hunt down every last animal then move on to other animals.

Poaching makes sense to the poacher.

Take a guy I might or might not be related to. When he was growing up his family was dirt-poor and rural. Taking game out of season meant the difference between eating and starvation.

Hard on the deer, if you have a lot of people like that, granted. But laws and conservation and 'think about next year' don't mean much when your family needs to eat today.

borism3• 15 years ago

yeah, two guys all of us might or may not be related to...

one have domesticated deer, offered good conditions for it to breed (protected it from other predators including hunters like himself) and then he and his children prospered off their cattle...

the other one just hunted his food to extinction...

guess who's children have survived to tell the story?

streptomycin• 15 years ago

> It boggles the mind why the car companies lobbied to keep whale hunting when their numbers were already so low. They wanted a few more years of automatic transmission working at then-current levels, and then what? The same mass transmission failures that happened, only without anymore whales left.

Tragedy of the commons.

RyanMcGreal• 15 years ago

Tragedy of the unregulated commons.

gcb• 15 years ago

The scariest part of the history is that people had no idea they were buying dead whales.

Just like today even in food its optional to have a list of ingredients... So it seems we haven't improved much in this regard.

rayiner2• 15 years ago

Classic tragedy of the commons situation.

DanielBMarkham• 15 years ago

I expect we'll see a similar process with using animals for food. As our scientific knowledge increases, and as our needs increase, synthetic meats will become more and more attractive, eventually leaving us all meat-eaters who do not harvest animals.

Complex systems remind me of a theater set up for a complex play. Hundreds of ropes hang down from the ceiling. Somebody is always pleading us with us to pull rope A to make B happen.

Very rarely does pulling rope A actually make B happen (and nothing else) But we still like thinking things are simple like that.

Lagged2Death4• 15 years ago

One could even argue that it's already happened. Modern breeds of food animals are more or less "synthetic meats." They're much more efficient at converting feed into flesh than any natural animal is, and they'd have no chance of surviving in the wild.

borism3• 15 years ago

I sure hope that's not what OP meant...

timwiseman• 15 years ago

I think in the long term, you are right. But according to the ArsTechnica summary at http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2011/11/why-meat-from-a-... that may be quite a long term.

cq• 15 years ago

Sad how there's no discussion of the economy that enables stuff like this to happen. "Why were people so cruel and evil?" is a stupid question; it's not about cruelty or being "evil". It's about money. Don't expect people to be moral in this economic system. Morality is a weakness in a capitalist society, and you'll go out of business if you bring morality into a competitive business ecosystem. This is why we need to change the rules of our economic system, if you care about morality.

Moreover, sure P. S. Landis "saved the whales", but he didn't do it to save the whales, he did it to generate an enormous amount of profit for Mobile Oil, and was paid for it handsomely.

philwelch4• 15 years ago

Can you name an economic system that doesn't have similar flaws? Economic systems only usable by hunter-gatherers don't count, unless your real argument is with civilization rather than capitalism.

nickpinkston• 15 years ago

Distributism has some interesting properties of socialism / capitalism, but would still have killed the whales probably... "The Venus Project" guys believe they can do this, but it just seems like a human enslavement program masked as human empowerment.

dexen3• 15 years ago

Let me reverse that question for you:

Can you name an ecosystem (as in, natural system) that doesn't have similar flaws?

A predator predates on its prey as long as feasible. When prey is overhunted, some of the predator population dies out (negative feedback, if you will), or the predator adopts (behavior or genome) to use alternative food sources, or to better utilize the resource. Nothing new to see here, move along ;-)

Not that I approve of predatory use of natural resources; we humans sure should know better. Just please don't make it sound unnatural.

microarchitect4• 15 years ago

You ask this question as if it were a rhetorical question.

Is there any reason to believe that such an economic system that also combines much of "good" properties of capitalism cannot exist?

Disciplines like game theory and mechanism design have made tremendous advances over the last few decades. Surely we can put these ideas to work in designing better political and economic systems.

dexen3• 15 years ago

> Moreover, sure P. S. Landis "saved the whales", but he didn't do it to save the whales, he did it to generate an enormous amount of profit for Mobile Oil, and was paid for it handsomely.

OP mentioned that with different intent: in conservation of nature, we can get better results quicker by focusing on improving technology & organization than by merely loudly protesting current uses of natural resources. Alas, it's better to align incentives with conservation of nature than to try to conserve it against 'em.

To the wit,

> Ecological activism did not play significant role in all of these developments (...)

> It was not their attention grabbing activities that stopped killing whales, but the unsung efforts of chemists finding a synthetic replacement to sperm oil.

> Suddenly, the car companies did not need to lobby [for whale hunting] any more.

and in comments below the article:

> But demanding to stop something without suggesting such better alternatives is waste of time. I'd even say that it is immoral. I see many people believing otherwise.

tedunangst5• 15 years ago

It was not their attention grabbing activities that stopped killing whales, but the unsung efforts of chemists finding a synthetic replacement to sperm oil.

I don't see how a synthetic oil developed in the 1980s could be responsible for a law signed in 1973, and I'm pretty sure it was the law (regardless of where the law came from (the future??)) that directly stopped the killing.

In this case, I'd say the passage of the law led to greater interest in synthetic oil. Conservation led to improving technology, not the other way around.

guard-of-terra2• 15 years ago

This is humiliating to us as a race of sentient species.

If we still badly need sperm oil, why don't we work to inject the relevant genes into some bacteria and get our oil in any quantities we want to? Or reproduce the process in any other way (synthesis, cell culture).

tedunangst5• 15 years ago

Sure, I'll just hop into my time machine and teach the scientists from the 70s all about gene splicing...

guard-of-terra2• 15 years ago

We still need those kinds of lubricants, they're just aren't available now except for emergency cases.

JoachimSchipper2• 15 years ago

Interesting, but gives too little credit to the anti-whaling campaigns: it certainly was no accident that whaling was forbidden as soon as that became economically feasible.

sliverstorm4• 15 years ago

The stipulation is that whaling was forbidden as soon as nobody needed whale oil.

tedunangst5• 15 years ago

Which is a crock of shit considering there's an entire decade that occurred after the whaling ban and before the introduction of synthetic oil.

joejohnson• 15 years ago

tl;dr

The reason why so many whales were killed in the 20th century was the distant ramifications of replacement of whale oil by petroleum. It took another 100 years to find solutions to these ramifications, and only then it became possible to save the whales. Ecological activism did not play significant role in all of these developments; neither did the numerous well-meaning international treaties, moratoriums, and other chest beating displays.

feralchimp• 15 years ago

In case you didn't, spare a few minutes and read through the comments on the original article. Excellent stuff in there, particularly from the OP.

sliverstorm4• 15 years ago

That's a sharp irony, to think the anti-whaling community of the 60's and 70's was driving around with whale oil in their cars! I wonder if they had any idea?

Tichy• 15 years ago

I wonder how much driving they did, though. Personally, I have always avoided cars and environmental impact is one of the major reasons.

Of course I still benefit from cars, I am aware of that (goods get transported by cars, which I then consume). Just saying that some environmentalists actually also avoid driving.

sliverstorm4• 15 years ago

Are anti-whale hunters actually environmentalists though? I mean, is opposing the hunting of whales an environmental thing? I always figured they were more of the animal rights category, and while some people might be both, animal rights != environmentalism.

owensmartin• 15 years ago

Great piece of history. I think the author's conclusions are flawed though. He writes:

> Ecological activism did not play significant role in all of these developments; neither did the numerous well-meaning international treaties, moratoriums, and other chest beating displays.

That may be true for the whales themselves, but there were indeed regulations passed on automobiles in the 1970s due to the oil shock:

> In the 1970s, the car companies were required to develop engines working at higher temperatures to comply with lower emissions and improved efficiency and that changed the regime for the tranny fluids. Suddenly, the car companies did not need to lobby any more.

So it was government action regarding auto emissions that wound up propagating into saving the whales. Perhaps that was not among the intended consequences, but we also can't claim that the change was simply due to "market forces."

1010010111• 15 years ago

The automatic transmission does not cause a species' extinction. People's actions cause extinctions. The title is perhaps revealing about how we think and how we rationalise or justify our actions.

tomkinstinch• 15 years ago

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, candles made from spermaceti were used as standard photometric illuminants. They burned more brightly than even today’s paraffin candles, and could be made in a reproducible way [1].

NASA used spermaceti as a binder for joining iron particles to acetate for longer-lasting data storage tapes [2], and one author indicates that it was used more recently as a lubricant on the Voyager probe and the Hubble Space Telescope[3].

It's a sad story about our (over) exploitation of the seas, but very interesting history.

I wonder if any research has been done on producing cetyl palmitate via recombinant DNA synthesis. Imagine having a vat of E. coli or yeast producing it.

As the article mentions, jojoba oil is a decent substitute. I use jojoba around the house to fix squeaky hinges, etc.

1. http://books.google.com/books?id=DI4AAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA183&#...

2. http://www.sciencemag.org/content/327/5971/1322.full

3. http://books.google.com/books?id=y2zXTivayCQC&pg=PA344#v...

ScottBurson• 15 years ago

by the 1950s automatics were the preferred transmission

Feh. Never owned one of the contraptions, myself.

shoesfullofdust• 15 years ago

Nixon's bold stance(?!) predates P.S. Lang's invention of a synthetic replacement by a number of years.

http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=3731

Of course, he could never use the term "sperm whale". But this is what led to the Endangered Species Act that granted the whales a reprieve. Lang's invention was only a reaction to this. It's still a good read.

jdietrich• 15 years ago

Whale-oil related trivia: A huge number of recordings have been lost due to the whale oil ban. Magnetic audio tape was made using whale oil as a binder, to help adhere the magnetisable oxide particles to the tape. The first non-whale binders turned out to have very poor long-term durability, causing the oxide to fall off in clumps. Most archivists 'bake' these tapes at low temperatures, to improve the oxide adhesion for just long enough to make a copy.

How automatic transmission almost made sperm whales extinct

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