The Whale

Snap Judgment

On the volcanic island of La Palma, biologists investigate a massive mystery when a sperm whale strands on a remote beach, prompting a race

Key takeaways

• Whale strandings are often treated like crime scenes due to their potential legal and environmental implications.
• The absence of external injuries on the stranded sperm whale ruled out ship strikes, suggesting internal causes or natural death.

Main topics

• Whale stranding investigations
• Volcanic destruction on La Palma

Notable quotes

"Have a pod of whales breach next to your boat from all sides. Feel the weight, the power of an alien intelligence, giant beyond imagining... and then, just short of contact, watch them decide enough and dive back into their own universe."

Conclusion

The episode captures two powerful stories of nature's grandeur and human response—on La Palma,

Transcript preview

Speaker 4 (0:02) Snap Studios. If you ever want to remind yourself of how small we are, how limited, go out. Find someone who knows things to take you on their boat into the ocean. Then cut off the engine for a while. Just be. Wait, wait, bow around the infinite blue. And then, this is important, very important. Get cosmically lucky. Speaker 4 (0:41) Have a pod of whales breach next to your boat from all sides. Feel the weight, the power of an alien intelligence, giant beyond imagining, twisting, turning, almost as if to get a better look at you. And then, just short of contact, watch them decide enough and dive back into their own universe. I don't know how it changed me. I just know I'm not the same. And today, We're going back to the water. Snap Judgment proudly presents The Whale. My name is Gunn Washington. Remember, it is so much better to be lucky than to be smart when you're listening to Snap Judgment. For today's story, we take you to La Palma, a small Spanish island in the Canary Islands archipelago. This is a place where most of the time, life moves slowly. People farm their land. They stop to have coffee with their neighbors. You know, it's the kind of place where not much happens, except that in recent years, La Palma has made international news twice, and both times because of the forces of nature. Today, we want to tell you the story about something incredible that came from the sea. Before that, there was something that came from the land. Producer Eric Yanez brings us a story. Snap Judgment. Speaker 3 (2:53) It's September 2021, and a volcano has erupted on La Palma. Speaker 8 (3:05) First, Speaker 3 (3:11) they saw the smoke. And then, an explosion rocked the island. Speaker 1 (3:22) This Speaker 3 (3:23) enormous tongue of lava. This massive black wall. Speaker 8 (3:33) And underneath Speaker 3 (3:37) that wall, this crackling sound of lava moving. Speaker 3 (3:47) And from that moment on, everything was the volcano. Speaker 1 (4:03) There was Speaker 5 (4:04) a reporter speaking live on television, and suddenly, just two or three kilometers behind him, the first explosions appeared. Speaker 1 (4:19) And then we Speaker 5 (4:24) heard what sounded like thunder and saw a dark cloud burst out of the earth. Speaker 3 (4:31) That's Dr. Antonio Fernandez. He's a scientist and a wildlife veterinarian, and as someone born on the island, he knows that volcanoes are just part of the land's history. Speaker 1 (4:47) La Speaker 5 (4:47) Palma is a volcanic island. In the last 75 years, there have been three eruptions. It's a place where you learn to live with the forces of nature. But this volcano was different. It struck the island at its core. Speaker 3 (5:08) For three months, everyone watched as lava moved across the island. It wiped out entire neighborhoods, churches, schools, cemeteries. Nearly 7,000 people were forced to evacuate and relocate to nearby towns. You see, this wasn't one of the island's existing volcanoes erupting. It was a new one, literally forming right under people's feet. The first craters opened just a few kilometers from where people lived. This new volcano didn't even have a name. Only later did it become known as Tajo Gaite. Speaker 1 (5:54) I Speaker 5 (5:55) call it the island's scar. Speaker 1 (5:58) It's Speaker 5 (5:58) a turning point in the life of the island. Speaker 1 (6:01) All I wish for La Speaker 5 (6:03) Palma and its people is that the volcano gives back what it took from them, and then some. Speaker 3 (6:21) It had been two years after the Tajo Gaita explosion. La Palma was still recovering from the destruction. And this is when something else happened. Something completely different. And once again, La Palma was in the headlines. But this time, it wasn't because of something that emerged from the land. It was because of something that came from the sea. Speaker 7 (6:49) We were in the lab in the university as any other day. You know, just a normal random day of PhD students running around the lab nonstop. Speaker 3 (7:01) That's Paula Alonso. She's also a wildlife veterinarian. Speaker 7 (7:05) And suddenly we got a call. There's a sperm whale. It just stranded on La Palma, which is one of the most remote islands here in the Canary Archipelago, in the most remote beach ever. Speaker 3 (7:24) Paula was working at the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, about 150 miles away, on a neighboring island. Speaker 7 (7:33) And we started receiving a lot of calls, right? Because, like, boats were seeing it, people were seeing it, police were seeing it. Speaker 3 (7:42) Across the world, there's something called a stranding network. Teams of veterinarians and scientists who respond when whales or dolphins wash ashore. Paula is part of one of those teams. Speaker 7 (7:55) We have to go now. Speaker 7 (7:58) If the animal is alive, it's very, very important to get there as soon as possible so the animal can be well taken care of, whether it is possible putting it back on the sea, and if it's not possible, maybe performing a humanitarian euthanasia, which is ending its suffering. And if the animal is dead, time is also very important because it limits the amount of information you're going to be able to gather because the corpse decomposes. So time is running against you. Speaker 3 (8:28) This is a big deal. Because in the Canary Islands, many whales wash ashore after being struck by ships. And there's growing pressure on the government to do something about it. To regulate ship traffic and prevent these collisions. It's becoming a whole political issue. And people are watching closely. Speaker 3 (8:53) So every stranded whale has to be treated like a crime scene. Investigated, documented, reported. So it's crucial to get there. Fast. Speaker 7 (9:06) Go, go, go, go. Grab the things, grab the suitcases. Okay, who's on duty, who's on call? It doesn't matter because we're all going. I think that day we were about 10 to 15 people, maybe. Speaker 7 (9:21) We get in the plane. We're all very excited, but very focused, very professional. We carry very big luggages and suitcases with big knives, whaling even instruments. And of course, then a lot of clothes to change because when you do a whale, you really have to change even your underwear. You will end up smelling like whale for days. Speaker 3 (9:47) Paula and the team fly on a small plane to La Palma and head to Playa de Nogales, a black sand beach tucked beneath steep cliffs on the island's northern coast. Speaker 7 (10:02) I can remember all the team wearing caps and kind of cowboy hats. It's very, very sunny, very warm. Speaker 7 (10:16) It was silent. It was absolutely silent. There's no one there and only the sound of the waves coming and crashing. Speaker 3 (10:29) When they reached the top of the cliffs overlooking the beach, they still didn't know what they were walking into. Speaker 7 (10:37) And we come down the cliff, almost running to get to the whale. Speaker 3 (10:44) There it was, a sperm whale, about the length of a bus, lying at the shoreline. A young male with his lower jaw slightly open. A big row of teeth that resembles a sublite. It was already dead. Not moving. Not breathing. Speaker 7 (11:04) And it was huge. It was huge and it was in this beautiful remote wild beach. So the scenery was amazing just seeing this giant creature of nature in this remote location. Speaker 7 (11:19) Whales, when they die, the process of decomposition of the body starts going on. We have a lot of bacteria inside of our intestine and our guts, and these bacteria start to ferment and produce gas, and they start bloating the animal. So if enough time passes, it can sometimes happen that the animal can actually explode. Speaker 3 (11:41) You've probably seen the videos. A dead whale on the beach, suddenly bursting open. Blood and guts raining on bystanders. And while disgusting, that wasn't the team's main concern. Speaker 7 (11:55) My biggest fear at that point was really the tides coming in because the animal was just right in the limit of the tide. We had maybe only five hours and this is nothing to perform a necropsy on a whale on the beach. Speaker 3 (12:10) Luckily, the person in charge of the necropsy that day was Antonio Fernandez. You met him before. Speaker 1 (12:22) You Speaker 5 (12:23) know, I've been doing autopsies for 42 years now. As Speaker 1 (12:26) I tell my Speaker 5 (12:27) students, from a whale to a cockroach, I think I've done almost all of them. Speaker 3 (12:34) And almost immediately, Antonio noticed something really important. This whale had swum its way to the beach. Speaker 1 (12:49) If Speaker 5 (12:49) the whale had died out at sea, the currents would have carried the body south. Speaker 1 (12:56) But Speaker 5 (12:56) there were no external signs of any kind. If it had been struck by a ship, we would have seen an injury. There was none. Speaker 3 (13:09) So the main question was answered almost immediately. This wasn't a ship strike. The whale had come to the shore already dying from something else entirely. So now the team's job is to go inside the whale and look for answers. Speaker 7 (13:27) And then we just get hands on the whale. Speaker 7 (13:31) We're removing from the neck until the fluke, until the tail. Layer by layer from the skin on. And the skin can be very, very, very, very thick. So even to remove the skin can take us up to three hours. Speaker 1 (13:48) We Speaker 5 (13:49) open the whole abdomen, cut through the skin, go through all the muscles to reach the bones. Speaker 7 (13:54) When you open up a whale, there's a lot of fat coming out, liquids coming out, everything's slippery. It really smells. It really smells. And it's not nice. It smells like... Speaker 7 (14:21) It Speaker 3 (14:23) is