Modern science is not only useful for achieving new advances, it is also useful for clarifying the mysteries of the past. A decade ago, in 2011, a group of scientists recorded for the first time a feeding strategy used by whales around the world.
It was already known that cetaceans pounce on their prey to eat. But the new finding revealed that these huge animals were also capable of coming up to the surface of the water, with their large jaws open at a right angle, waiting for schools of fish to swim towards their mouths.
A video of this strategy was captured in 2021 and went viral on social media. Humans, however, had embodied this tactic in their illustrations for more than 2,000 years. The problem is that our ancestors had no idea what they were looking at and linked it to mythology.
A group of Australian researchers have now found the evidence linking the two events and believe that the ancient description of this whale practice contributed to creating the myths about medieval sea monsters, especially those that appear in Norse literature.
The cetacean strategy also seems to be very effective because the fish believe they have found a safe place to take refuge from predators, without realizing that they are swimming towards danger. It is not known why this technique has only recently been identified, but scientists speculate that it may be the result of changing environmental conditions or that the whales are being watched more closely than ever by drones and other modern technologies.
Dr John McCarthy, a maritime archaeologist at Flinders University, first noticed intriguing parallels between marine biology and historical literature while reading about Scandinavian sea monsters. “The more we looked at it, the more interesting the connections became,” he notes.
“I was particularly struck that the Nordic description of the hafgufa was very similar to the behavior shown in videos of whales feeding, but at first I thought it was just an interesting coincidence. Once I began to analyze it in detail and discuss it with colleagues specializing in medieval literature, we realized that the oldest versions of these myths do not describe sea monsters at all, but are explicit in describing a type of whale,” McCarthy explains. .
The earliest Norse manuscripts describing the creature known as a hafgufa (meaning “ocean steam”) date from the 13th century. The texts tell of a fish-like ocean monster as large as an island that appeared rarely and shared the Greenland Sea with another mythical beast, the Lyngbakr.
Bishop Gunnerus of Trondheim even believed that the hafgufa was the Kraken itself, another colossal sea creature from Norse mythology commonly described as an octopus, giant squid, or jellyfish that rises from the depths of the ocean to attack ships and devour sailors.
These mythological beings continued to form part of Icelandic legends until the 18th century. However, it seems that the Nordic manuscripts were inspired by medieval bestiaries, a type of text popular in the Middle Ages that described a large number of real and fantastic animals.
These bestiaries often include a description of a monster very similar to the ‘hafgufa’, usually referred to as the ‘aspidochelone’. Sometimes the passages that accompanied the drawings explained that this beast emits a special perfume or aroma that helps to attract the fish towards their immobile mouths.
Although some whales produce ambergris, which is an ingredient in perfume, this is not the case with fin whales such as the humpback. So the researchers suggest that the scent element may have been inspired by the expulsion of filtered prey by the whales, to help draw more prey into their mouths.
“It’s exciting because the question of how long whales have used this technique is key to understanding a variety of behavioral and even evolutionary questions. Marine biologists had assumed there was no way to recover this data but, using medieval manuscripts, we have been able to answer some of their questions,” added study co-author Dr. Erin Sebo.
“The most fantastic accounts of this sea monster are relatively recent, from the 17th and 18th centuries, and there has been much speculation as to whether they could have been caused by natural phenomena, optical illusions or underwater volcanoes. But in fact, the behavior described in medieval texts, which seemed so improbable, is simply a behavior of the whales that we had not observed”, he concludes.