We promised we would tell you how gray whales mate.
It starts with this picture.
Well, that’s not how *it* starts, that’s actually pretty far along in the process, but that image is how we came to know of it. One of my friends went to what must be a fancy high school in Fort Wayne, because they had a marine biology course, and that picture was in the class’s textbook. I found it again this morning on The Internet. (Side note: Do lots of high schoolers still say they want to be marine biologists when they grow up? I feel like that was the in-between go-to for a lot of folks between saying “I’m gonna be a football player!” and saying “I’m going to work a steady white-collar job with tolerable work/life balance.”)
At the time my friend was in high school, there was some understanding of how gray whales mate, but theories were more conflicting, as evidenced by what we can see in the caption below that drawing. Everyone agreed that three whales were involved in the process, but the purpose of the third—always an extra male—was unclear. To hear my friend tell it, circa 2013, “They think he’s there to bump the other two together, ‘cause it’s hard to copulate in the water column!” Others now opine that the third male is simply trying to mate with the female himself and being rejected. The second explanation, of course, is way less funny, and from what I’ve gathered by googling this every few years, that’s the one that’s widely thought to be true. Whales, sad to say, don’t make their mating decisions based on what would make me laugh at the age of 18 (and 28).
Under either explanation, though, you probably don’t want to be the third whale. Which is why my friend made those shirts that said Don’t Be the Third Whale with an adaptation of that cartoon above. Which is why I was wearing that shirt the day I was photographed leaning out the window of a party bus across the highway from a Dairy Queen outside Minneapolis. Which is what brought this all back up in the first place.
P.S. I was also told this happened because there are twice as many gray whale males as females, but I’m not seeing that written anywhere, which is severely hampering my ability to make a Purdue joke.
