Sarah Lazarus

Saturday February 3, 2007
The Guardian

Troubled Waters, by Sarah Lazarus (Natural History Museum, £12.99)
Despite the so-obvious-it-hurts title, Sarah Lazarus's work on "The Changing Fortunes of Whales and Dolphins" is actually deeply interesting and refreshing. Where a more commercial publisher might have pressured the author to personalise the book by relating her intense childhood emotional bond with a goldfish or inventing saccharine passages of dolphin's-point-of-view narration, she instead has the confidence just to tell us lots of fascinating facts about whales and dolphins and to summarise the history and arguments behind whaling or marine zoos with economical skill.

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Cetaceans (the general term for whales and dolphins) are of course a great source of "Did you know?" info-nuggets (did you know a blue whale eats about 40 million prawn-type creatures called krill every day in the summer?). I was also struck by the fact that whalers call killing their prey with exploding harpoons "harvesting", as though the mammals were mere wheat; and by a truly disturbing explanation of how human noise pollution - from cargo ships, oceanographic surveys and naval sensor technology - is literally killing cetaceans by destroying their hearing, the most sophisticated sonar systems known to man. If the dolphins are ever going to leave, as they did in Douglas Adams's Hitchhiker's Guide series, now would seem a good time.… (més)