Look Out on Your Left, Louie!

If you’re looking for life or death drama, Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, the story of obsessed Captain Ahab pursuing a whale until the whale gets the better of him, is a good place to start. But Melville’s fictional classic might be topped by the nonfiction accounts in the logbooks of real nineteenth century whaling captains who wrote about hunting sperm whales in the North Pacific. In the novel, Moby Dick outsmarts the captain at nearly every turn, as if he’d learned the techniques a ship would employ to harpoon him. It seems astounding, but if research based on those logbooks is any indication, Melville might have been onto something.

In March 2021, England’s Royal Society published a paper documenting how biologists and data scientists researched the behavior of sperm whales during the whaling boom of the early 1800s. They were testing a theory advanced by some historians that whales might have learned how to avoid whalers. Researchers