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Good afternoon, and welcome to Globe Climate, a newsletter about climate change, environment and resources in Canada.
For today’s deeper dive section, we look at how a Canadian whale scientist found love and hope – and a lesson for humanity – among the most mysterious creatures on the planet.
Now, let’s catch you up on other news.
Noteworthy reporting this week:
- Emissions: Ottawa and Alberta agree on methane-emissions reduction plan
- Oil and gas: LNG Canada to take lead role on potential Coastal GasLink expansion
- Electric vehicles: Battle over Ottawa’s new vehicle regulations heats up
- Human rights: UN committee criticizes Canada for not filling corporate human rights abuses watchdog role
- Fire: First Nations group in Northern Ontario demands better fire service after child’s death
- Fisheries: Split quota continues between Indigenous, commercial harvesters for contentious baby eel fishery
A deeper dive
Members of a sperm whale family swim together as part of a culturally distinct clan in the Caribbean Sea.Brian J. Skerry/National Geographic/Supplied
A miracle at sea
For this week’s deeper dive, a glimpse into the unique nature of whales, based on the feature written by Erin Anderssen.
The first peer-reviewed papers about the birth of a sperm whale were published last week in the journals Science and Scientific Reports, providing evidence, the authors say, of sperm whales, both related and not, attending to the mother and baby, much like how humans come together for childbirth.
Shane Gero’s biology team was on the water that day with Harvard robotics engineers and MIT computer scientists, all members of Project CETI, a non-profit interdisciplinary research group trying to decipher sperm whale communication.
Our happiness reporter, Erin Anderssen, wrote about the paper and Dr. Gero’s findings.
As captured on drone video, the baby slides into the sea, a delicate, glistening bean already weighing 1,000 kilograms and stretching roughly four metres. It’s limp in the water, too weak to swim. And its tail is too soft and droopy to assist.
Female sperm whales hold the newborn calf above water until it is able to swim on its own.Supplied
But family help arrives. In groups of three and four, aunts and cousins cluster around, squeezing the newborn between their bodies, lifting it out of the water, touching it with their heads. Their actions support the slippery baby at the surface as it gains strength. It looks a lot like the scene in a hospital maternity room when everyone wants to hold the new arrival.
Dr. Gero has travelled with the whales, and calls them by name. For two decades, the whales have been telling him a deep and complex tale of love and community.
Project CETI’s annual budget is in the millions; studying whales is complicated and expensive. Finding them requires patience. But over many decades of increasingly high-tech and ever-patient whale-watching, we have acquired a limited view into their lives.
The Globe and Mail
Over the years, Dr. Gero has seen more babies vanish than he can count. In 2016, he co-authored a paper estimating that one in three whale calves didn’t make it to their first birthday. After that, the scientists stopped naming newborns in their first years of life.
Young whales die from natural causes, but also human hazards such as pollution and fishing-line entanglement. Scientists believe that the sperm whale’s communal society evolved to protect their offspring in their early, vulnerable years.
They can recognize a fellow clanmate by their clan codas, the clicking pattern whales use to communicate – similar to how a Canadian in a foreign country may recognize another Canadian. This requires higher-level cognition and an awareness of cultural membership.
And what appears to matter to sperm whales, he says, is connection and community. If whales were human, we’d call that love.
What else you missed
- Pipeline leak in Sarnia located nine days after reports of sheen on Ontario river
- In Canada’s far north, some fret Carney’s military plan could overshadow health, education needs
- Toronto architects spotlight sustainable properties
- Seattle Kraken ownership group assumes majority ownership of Climate Pledge Arena
- Ancient dog DNA reveals new secrets about our furry companions’ origins
Opinion and analysis
I loved having a bird feeder. So did our local squirrels
The birds came as promised. Purple finches. A dark-eyed junco on the snow. My vocabulary grew. My delight multiplied. I bought a cellphone lens to capture proof of arrival: a red-breasted grosbeak!
— Akiko Ode Currie, First Person contributor
Business and investing
Companies in carbon-intensive industries pay higher interest rates on their bonds, study shows
Carbon-intensive industries pay significantly higher interest rates on their bonds than sectors with comparably lower emissions, a new study from York University’s Schulich School of Business has found.
The study, which was partly funded by the climate advocacy group Investors for Paris Compliance (I4PC), also found that once other factors such as credit ratings and bond maturity were controlled for, rates were not notably different among individual companies within carbon-intensive industries such as energy.
Photo of the week
Hmong volunteer firefighter Mongkol Yingyotmongkolsaen uses a drone to monitor fires in the Doi Suthep-Pui National Park area of Chiang Mai. In the dry-season heat of northern Thailand, Hmong villagers zip through forested slopes, blasting dry leaves with leaf blowers and cutting through brush with machetes, while others scan for smoke on live feeds from their phones.LILLIAN SUWANRUMPHA/AFP/Getty Images
Guides and Explainers
- We’ve rounded up our reporters’ content to help you learn about what a carbon tax is, what happened at COP30 and just generally how Canada will change because of climate change.
- We have ideas to make your travelling more sustainable, your lifestyle at home more ecofriendly, and to talk to your kids about climate change.
- In a series of essays from Globe writers exploring the role the it has played in Canada’s history, A Nation’s Paper also highlights the journey of the newspaper’s green evolution.
Catch up on Globe Climate
- How far do deer go in a year?
- Ottawa insists it’s holding the environmental line
- Water and oil in the Middle East
- Winds of change