The title sounds like a Craigslist advertisement, but the topic is a fascinating one, currently detailed in an article in the New York Times magazine and featured on either PBS or BBC this week. Whales are actively seeking to make contact with humans; no one knows why. The whales involved are grey whales - the behemoths of the sea. Mother whales are actively shepherding their children up to boats, and the youngsters are rising out of the water to view the humans in the boats.
Eighteen feet of boat on open seas is in almost any circumstance a tenuous alignment. But to suddenly find yourself in that same small vessel above a fleet, 40-foot-long midsea mastodon — one whose fluke alone could, with a cursory flip, send you and your boat soaring skyward — is to know the pure, wonderfully edgeless fear of complete acquiescence...More at the link. Image credit Ivan Chermayeff.
And then, within moments, the mother was surfacing again off to our stern and doubling back in our direction, but this time with her newborn male in tow... The baby gray glided up to the boat’s edge, and then the whole of his long, hornbill-shaped head was rising up out of the water directly beside me, a huge, ovoid eye slowly opening to take me in. I’d never felt so beheld in my life...
...there’s something very potent occurring here from a behavioral and a biological perspective. I mean, I’d put my career on the line and challenge anybody to say that these whales are not actively soliciting and engaging in a form of communication with humans, both through eye contact and tactile interaction and perhaps acoustically in ways that we have not yet determined. I find the reality of it far more enthralling than all our past whale mythology.”