The 2nd edition of La Grande Marée, at the Marine Museum in Paris, invites you to a « whale night », mixing projections, music and literature. A journey where culture, science and adventure meet.
True guardians of the blue planet, whales are much more than charismatic giants: they are the barometer of the state of our marine ecosystems. If their image has radically changed in the minds of the general public over the past fifty years, from a simple industrial resource to that of intelligent beings, they now face unprecedented environmental pressures.
« This love of the general public for whales is quite recent. For years, they were only seen as food reserves and were hunted in a terrifying way for their meat, for their oil and their fanons, « explains Laurence Paoli, author and scientific popularizer (Le Chant perdu des baleines. When noise pollution suffocates the voices of the ocean, ed. Actes Sud, 2025), which will be one of the guests of the La Grande Marée festival organized at the Musée de la Marine in Paris, where the whale will be honored.
An upheaval of the ocean food chain
« In the 1970s, everything changed when we realized, thanks to downgraded recordings from the US Navy, that some whales composed complex and evolving songs. This discovery made it possible to start looking at these animals as beings endowed with intelligence and culture and therefore to create a link with them, « continues Laurence Paoli.THE SCIENCE AND TECH NEWSLETTERRECEIVE
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Thus were born the first movements of protection of these mammals. There are now about 90 species listed, including the famous blue whale, classified as endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).
Whale watching today offers valuable clues about the health of the oceans. A study recently published in Frontiers in Marine Science reveals a significant change in their eating behavior. Over the years, all the species studied abandoned the krill – a small crustacean whose abundance decreases with the warming of the Arctic waters – to turn to a diet richer in fish. This forced adaptation testifies to a profound imbalance at the base of the oceanic food chain, at the top of which the whale reigns.
Whales, weighty climatic allies
These giants are also indispensable allies for humans. They are real natural « carbon pumps« , capable of storing up to 33 tons of carbon dioxide during their life when a tree absorbs only about 20 kilos per year. « Shales play a fundamental role in the ocean. They fertilize it thanks to their feces, which benefit phytoplankton, a producer of 20% of the oxygen in the Earth’s atmosphere. They capture carbon and, when they die, they feed hundreds of species, summarizes Laurence Paoli. These animals are essential to the ocean and ecological balance. «
If chemical and plastic pollution are known threats, whales also have to face another danger, invisible but devastating: noise pollution. Maritime traffic, port construction sites, military exercises are saturating the underwater acoustic space.
Some impulsive noises can cause irreversible damage in animals. Others, continuous, cause chronic stress and mask their songs, preventing them from communicating with each other. « The whales try to fight by singing higher or lower or at different times, » says Laurence Paoli. But in the face of the accumulation of food scarcity and multiple pollution, the situation is becoming critical for these sentinels of the seas.
source : Le point
