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Dolphins don’t breathe automatically—they choose to, each time. Gumbs writes, “What if the most important thing you do is breathe?” (p. 3), and I realized how rarely I treat my breath like it matters. For those of us who grew up bracing ourselves, remembering to breathe is resistance.

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The 36 dolphin species share more than a few characteristics. Among them, the aquatic mammals look like they’re smiling, and they seem to love to play.

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Humpbacks travel vast oceans but still find each other. That loose, non-possessive togetherness speaks to me more than tight-knit cliques ever have. Gumbs doesn’t define belonging through control, but through presence, rhythm, and echo. Maybe some of us were meant to find each other across waves.

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Before a moratorium on commercial whaling in 1985, all populations of humpback whales were greatly reduced, some by more than 95 percent. The species is increasing in abundance in much of its range, but faces threats from entanglement in fishing gear, vessel strikes, vessel-based harassment, underwater noise, and habitat impacts.

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Sea otters don’t just survive—they pass down the how. That’s what Gumbs means when she says practice is “ancestral and emergent” (p. 17). I thought survival was luck or instinct, but maybe it’s muscle memory—rehearsed care. That reminds me of how my grandmother used her hands: not graceful, but perfect.

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Try looking up a marine animal, research topic, or information about life in the ocean.

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An orca once carried her dead baby for 17 days. That is grief as action, not silence. Gumbs doesn’t clean grief up—she lets it swim alongside love, because they’re made of the same salt. This story broke me and held me at the same time.

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Southern Resident whale continues to carry her dead calf, highlighting orca grief process

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Whales listen in a way that shapes the entire ocean around them. Sound is their vision, their map, their language. Gumbs urges us to listen with our skin, with our silences, not just with ears. I’m trying to hear the things no one says aloud.

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How do Whales Hear Their Songs and Other Sounds if They Don’t Have Ears?

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How do whales hear sound? Echolocation and other underwater adaptations help them, but humans may be interrupting their whale songs.

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Elephant seals always return to the same stretch of beach, as if the ocean keeps their home address. That’s a kind of remembering I understand in my bones. Gumbs makes remembering not just a mental act, but something cellular and sacred. Sometimes I don’t remember with words—I just ache in the direction of somewhere.

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Every year in May, female elephant seals leave the beaches in California where they gave birth, nursed young, and molted, to embark on a seven-month foraging migration across the North Pacific Ocean. There is danger in the open ocean, however, and the seals must avoid becoming prey themselves as they hunt fish and squid to regain the weight they lost during months on the beach with only one short foraging trip between nursing and molting.

A new study led by scientists at UC Santa Cruz shows that the elephant seals take more risks early in the migration when their stores of body fat are lowest, and change their activity patterns strategically as their body condition improves. With more fat on their bodies, the seals increasingly prioritize safety over feeding.

The study, published March 17 in Science Advances, is the first to continuously measure changes in behavior relative to body fat, resolving a decades-old question about how wild animals balance risks and rewards.

"Theory predicts that fat animals take fewer risks, but it's very difficult to measure body condition continuously in wild animals," said first author Roxanne Beltran, assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at UC Santa Cruz. "Our results show that fat seals prioritize safety, and skinny seals prioritize feeding."
6,000-mile migration
The researchers outfitted 71 adult female northern elephant seals with satellite tags and time-depth recorders, which allowed them to track the seals' movements and diving patterns. The migration covers about 6,000 miles (10,000 kilometers) across the North Pacific Ocean. Throughout this journey, the elephant seals travel in an uninterrupted series of dives, averaging 23 minutes per dive with just 2 minutes at the surface to breathe between dives.

For elephant seals, the surface waters are a dangerous place where they are most vulnerable to attacks by sharks and killer whales, so they minimize the time spent at the surface. Sharks and killer whales are visual predators, so elephant seals are safer at night and in the depths where light doesn't penetrate. The result is what Beltran and her coauthors call "lightscapes of fear" that shape animal behavior in the open ocean.

"We don't know a lot about predator-prey dynamics in the open ocean because there are so few sightings of attacks, but we regularly observe elephant seals on the beach with shark bites," Beltran said.

Tracking data reveal several different types of dives, including foraging dives, when the seals swim down and pursue prey at depth; transit dives with no feeding activity; and rest dives, when they drift passively at the bottom of the dive and are presumably sleeping.

The drift dives enabled the researchers to calculate how much body fat the seals had based on their buoyancy in the water.

"It gives us a nearly continuous record of how fat they are, which is unparalleled for any wild animal other than elephant seals," Beltran said. "At the beginning of the migration, they are really skinny and they sink through the water column. As the feeding migration progresses, they slowly gain weight and their buoyancy becomes less negative until, at some point, they switch to positive buoyancy and stay positive for the rest of the trip."
Nighttime feeding
Elephant seals do most of their feeding at night, when their prey are closer to the surface. Their rest dives tend to be in the early morning around sunrise, after a long night of foraging.

The timing of those rest dives changes, however, as the seals' body condition improves. Seals in poor body condition started their drift dives just after sunrise, whereas seals in good condition started their drift dives just before sunrise. As a result, the proportion of rest occurring during daylight decreased from 80 to 30 percent.

During drift dives, when they are presumably sleeping, the seals are especially vulnerable, making it safer to rest at night, before sunrise. But that means giving up some prime foraging time. Elephant seals feed during the day, too, but they have to dive deeper and their foraging is less efficient. With the best foraging and the safest resting times occurring at night, the seals have to choose between competing priorities.

As their body condition improved throughout the migration, drift dives occurred progressively earlier with respect to sunrise, indicating a shift in their priorities from feeding to safety. Seals in good body condition also started their drifts at greater depths. This makes sense considering that a fat seal drifts upward toward the sunlit surface.

"Light is a fundamental environmental constraint that these animals are using strategically to maximize rewards and minimize risks," Beltran said. "In the ocean, light is an interesting way to look at risk-reward tradeoffs because it integrates time and space, especially for a migratory species that travels across time zones and latitudes with constantly changing day lengths."

This study was a collaborative effort based on data acquired through the long-running UCSC elephant seal research program led by coauthor Daniel Costa, distinguished professor of ecology and evolutionary biology and director of UCSC's Institute of Marine Sciences. For over three decades, UCSC researchers have been tagging and studying elephant seals at Año Nuevo Reserve, managed by the UC Natural Reserve System.

In addition to Beltran and Costa, the coauthors include Jessica Kendall-Bar and Patrick Robinson at UC Santa Cruz; Enrico Pirotta at Washington State University; Taiki Adachi at University of St. Andrews (Scotland); Yasuhiko Naito and Akinori Takahashi at the National Institute of Polar Research (Japan); Jolien Cremers at University of Copenhagen; and Daniel Crocker at Sonoma State University. This research was supported by the National Science Foundation and the Office of Naval Research.

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For migrating elephant seals, 'lightscapes of fear' shape feeding, resting strategies

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A new tracking study shows how elephant seals balance predator avoidance and the need to feed, shifting strategies as their body condition improves during a 7-month foraging migration.

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Narwhals navigate tight underwater mazes of shifting ice without maps. They don’t crash. Gumbs reminds us that surviving systems not made for us requires sharp intuition. That kind of knowing can’t be taught—it grows from not having the luxury to fail.

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Narwhal whales spent much of their life among sea ice. Waiting for frozen sea ice to break up into pack ice and becoming open water is part of their annual migrations.

But sea ice is more than an intricate maze keeping narwhal from their summer territories. It can also provide protection and a safe place as they travel through unfamiliar waters.

Come find out the ways that narwhals use sea ice throughout the year.

Deep-Sea Diving Through Winter

Narwhal spend their whole lives in Arctic waters around Canada, Greenland and Russia. About 75% of the world's population spend their winter within Baffin Bay, Davis Strait, and the Labrador Sea. This population waits until the sea ice begins to recede migrates into the Canadian Arctic.

Their winter homes can be almost entirely frozen over with some having only 10% open water. They will dive great distances to feed on halibut, cod, shrimp, and squid.

Narwhal are famous for how deep they can dive making some of the deepest recorded dives of any marine mammal. They will dive about 800 metres (2,620 feet) about 15 times a day looking for food.

The deepest they can reach is 1,500 metres (4,920) feet and can last 25 minutes underwater before surfacing for air.

Finding a breathing hole is vital to their survival and they can travel a distance of 1,450 metres (4,760 feet) between breathing holes to search for food.

Why They Live Among The Ice

There are two good reasons that narwhal whales live in such a frozen world. The first is that there are few predators in these places, and the second is that it is a place to hide from the few predators around.

The main predators to the narwhal are orca whales, polar bears, and human hunters. All three of these have one thing in common, they cannot reach a narwhal hiding right under the ice.

Narwhals do not have a dorsal fin running along their back, which means they can hide right up against the ice. Whereas, orcas are well known for their large dorsal fins. This makes the frozen sea ice a haven from the killer whales.

Human hunters will hunt whales from a boat or wait from the edge of the ice so as long as the narwhal retreats to under the ice they are safe.

Similarly, the best hope that a polar bear has of catching a whale is by waiting at the floe edge. This rarely succeeds since narwhal can dive deep and wait below the ice.

The incredible feats that have to go through just to survive deter a lot of animals from living in the Arctic waters.

However, when it comes to the food that the narwhals are looking for there is little competition. As long as they can dive deep enough there is an abundance of fish and crustaceans that can live below the ice.

Changing Ice Means Time To Migrate

As you can imagine, even narwhal excitedly wait for the ice to begin receding so they can go to slightly warmer water. So, when they notice the first signs of spring it is a happy time.

Their reliance on large amounts of sea ice for protection becomes a reliance on knowing how to navigate the cracks in the ice.

In fact, it is believed that one of the reasons narwhals rub their tusks against each other is to pass on information. This might be one leader of a pod telling another which way is a dead-end or where the oxygen levels are higher in the water.

The spring is a very social time for narwhals who may have to wait for days or weeks for a crack to form. Multiple pods can come to splash and search for openings together.

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By: Mathew Whitelaw

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A Narwhal's Many Uses For Sea Ice - Arctic Kingdom

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Narwhal whales spent much of their life among sea ice. Waiting for frozen sea ice to break up into pack ice and becoming open water is part of their annual migrations. But sea ice is more than an intricate maze keeping narwhal from their summer territories.

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Seal mothers stay close no matter how chaotic the waves get. That level of physical presence is so opposite to the cold love I sometimes grew up with. Gumbs redefines “holding” not as strength, but presence through uncertainty. Maybe holding doesn’t mean I have all the answers—just that I won’t leave.

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Sealing the bonds between mother and child

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Observations of mothering seals by scientists at the University of St Andrews has shed new light into the mother-child bond.

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Sperm whales sleep vertically in the deep, gently drifting like columns of trust. Gumbs turns “surrender” into something holy—not defeat, but faith. I’ve only ever known surrender as failure. But now I wonder if there’s power in resting anyway.

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Dolphins cannot sleep in this way; they have to remain conscious, even when they are sleeping. This is because their breathing is not automatic, it is consciously controlled. In other words dolphins have to actively decide when to breathe, and so they must be continually conscious to breathe. If like us, dolphins went into a deep unconscious sleep, they would stop breathing and suffocate or drown.

To get around this, dolphins only allow one half of their brains to sleep at a time; the other half stays alert to enable the dolphin to continue breathing and look out for dangers in the environment. Dolphins only close one eye when they sleep; the left eye will be closed when the right half of the brain sleeps, and vice versa. This type of sleep is known as unihemispheric sleep as only one brain hemisphere sleeps at a time. Dolphins alternate which half of the brain is sleeping periodically so that they can get the rest they need without ever losing consciousness.

When sleeping, dolphins often rest motionless at the surface of the water, breathing regularly or they may swim very slowly and steadily, close to the surface. In shallow water, dolphins sometimes sleep on the seabed rising regularly to the surface to breath.

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How do dolphins sleep? - Whale & Dolphin Conservation USA

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Dolphins sleep in a very different way to the way we humans do. Humans have prolonged periods of unconscious sleep and we are not aware of our surroundings for periods of time while sleeping. Humans have a breathing reflex and when we sleep or become unconscious, we continue to breathe automatically.

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Whale songs migrate like gossip—each new version traveling thousands of miles. Gumbs says, “To sing is to survive.” (p. 58) That stuck with me, because I’ve always hummed when I’m scared. Maybe I was singing for my own survival and didn’t even know it.

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How a Marine Biologist Remixed Whalesong

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Sara Niksic, a lover of whales and electronic music, has merged her passions.

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Some dolphins just vanish when they’ve had enough of human attention. That kind of refusal isn’t fear—it’s clarity. Gumbs reminds us refusal is not the same as absence; it is a form of choosing. I think I’m finally learning what I don’t have to explain anymore.

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Verifying you are human. This may take a few seconds.

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Whales breach with a kind of raw joy, exploding out of silence. Gumbs frames emergence as sacred, not tidy. It isn’t always graceful, and it isn’t always timed. I don’t want to emerge perfect—just real.

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Energetic and physical limitations on the breaching performance of large whales

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Muscle power-generating capabilities, and not energetic limitations, limit the breaching abilities of the largest whales.

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When a whale dies, it becomes an ecosystem—life growing from what was lost. That’s the kind of afterlife Gumbs shows us: not departure, but continuation. This shifted how I think about grief and death. We might not be remembered by name, but we will be nourishment for something.

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To what a living world Will demand of you." -Octavia E. Butler
When a whale dies, its massive body sinks. This colossal creature-an enormous, graceful mammoth of the sea-tumbles, sways, and ultimately free-falls to the ocean floor. The whale's descent, spanning the vast gulf between the surface and the abyss, is a kind of miracle, bridging two worlds: the illuminated surface and the shadowy underworld.

There is so much we don't know about the deep ocean, but what we do know is astonishing. The ocean's deepest point extends approximately 36,000 feet below the surface. Beyond 600 feet, light no longer penetrates, making photosynthesis impossible, yet 98% of marine life resides on or near the sea floor. Life at these depths depends almost entirely on "marine snow"-organic matter drifting down from the ocean's upper layers.

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In Death, New Life: The Science And Symbolism of a Whale Fall | Atmos

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When a whale dies, its body creates a new mini ecosystem on the ocean floor-a process full of biological and poetic lessons for those willing to learn them.

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Dolphins literally keep their sick friends afloat. That image cracked my heart open. Gumbs offers support not as saviorism, but as commitment in the middle of vulnerability. I want to be the kind of person who quietly keeps others above water when they’re sinking.

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Dolphins Can Maintain Vigilant Behavior through Echolocation for 15 Days without Interruption or Cognitive Impairment

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In dolphins, natural selection has developed unihemispheric sleep where alternating hemispheres of their brain stay awake. This allows dolphins to maintain consciousness in response to respiratory demands of the ocean. Unihemispheric sleep may also…

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The vaquita is disappearing—and most people will never notice it was here. Gumbs teaches us that disappearance can be strategy, not surrender. That resonates as someone who sometimes had to go quiet to stay safe. There’s a difference between being erased and choosing to vanish on your own terms.

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Conservation groups look for new strategies, tech to halt vaquita decline

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Fewer than 10 vaquitas, the world’s smallest porpoise, survive in the wild today, experts say. Illegal fishing has decimated their population in the Gulf of California, the thin stretch of water between Baja California and mainland Mexico, where they’re endemic. Conservation groups and government agencies have been working on innovative solutions to […]

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Echolocation sends sound into the unknown, waiting for a return. That’s how I feel about writing sometimes. Gumbs sees echo as lineage, vibration, memory. I hope some part of me answers someone else’s call.

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Bottlenose dolphins perceive object features through echolocation - Nature

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Nature - Bottlenose dolphins perceive object features through echolocation

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To surface is to risk being seen. Gumbs doesn’t romanticize it—she knows the danger. But she also knows we can’t live underwater forever. I’m tired of hiding just to breathe.

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Earth’s oceans are growing darker, threatening marine life worldwide: study

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Oceans around the globe have become darker over the last two decades, leaving researchers fearful for their marine inhabitants, according to a new study.

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Currents carry marine life across continents without resistance. Flow isn’t laziness—it’s ancient intelligence. Gumbs helps me see surrender to flow not as giving up, but as honoring what already moves beneath me. What if I stopped swimming upstream just to prove I’m strong?

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‘Currents bring life – and plastics’: animals of Galápagos live amid mounds of waste

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As diplomats search for a deal to curb the world’s growing problem of plastic, piles of bottles, buoys, nets and packaging keep building up in what should be a pristine environment

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Whales and dolphins form friendships that last for life—they grieve, play, and protect. Gumbs insists that love isn’t metaphor—it’s muscle, ritual, and survival. That made me cry a little. Maybe I’ve been searching for a love that remembers how to swim in rough water.

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‘It’s raining fish!’ Scientists aim to protect an underwater mountain in the Atlantic

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A rest stop for highly migratory species, Gorringe Ridge is particularly rich in biodiversity. An expedition to survey the species present will support efforts to obtain protected status.