The Eye of the Whale

There is a photograph, taken by Rachel Moore, that shows a whale's eye in close-up—so close you can make out the faint blue ring circling the pupil, a band of colour that seems to catch the light coming off the water's surface. It is the kind of image that makes you pause, because a whale's eye is not a thing most of us ever see. We know the tail, the spout, the great grey arc of a back breaking the surface. The eye stays underwater, watching.

And it does watch. A whale's eye sits on the side of its head, which means it cannot see directly ahead—the classic arrangement of prey animals, though a whale is nobody's prey. Each eye works largely on its own, taking in a separate slice of the world. The lens is nearly spherical, closer to a fish's than to ours, an adaptation to focusing light that has passed through water rather than air. To keep the salt from scouring the surface, the eye produces a thick, oily tear film, a kind of natural goggle secreted continuously.

Whales evolved from land mammals that walked back into the sea some fifty million years ago, and the eye carries that history. It still has the basic mammalian layout—retina, cornea, optic nerve—reworked for a life spent in blue dimness. Below a few hundred metres, colour drains out of the water entirely, and many whales have lost the genes for colour vision along with it. They see in shades of grey, tuned to movement and contrast rather than hue.

What draws people to Moore's photograph, I think, is the sense of being looked back at. Sperm whales have the largest brains of any animal that has ever lived, around eight kilograms. Whether that translates to anything we would recognise as thought is a question no photograph can answer. But the eye is expressive in a way that feels legible: dark, wet, deliberate.

There is an old whalers' notion, recorded in the nineteenth century, that a whale watches the boat approaching and understands what is coming. It was probably wishful cruelty, a way of imagining consent. Still, looking at that blue ring and the pupil at its centre, it is hard not to grant the animal the benefit of the doubt.