Richard Collins: No animals eligible for Oscars even if they are the real stars
Free Willy: Keiko as Willy with Jason James Richter as Jesse. Image: Cinetext Collection/Sportsphoto/Allstar
, Patrick Carey’s evocation of Irish Nature, was nominated for Best Documentary Short at the 43rd Academy Awards ceremony in 1971 [link to film below]. However, despite their enormous contribution to cinema, animals wild or tame are not eligible for Oscars.
Keiko, the orca, might have been honoured for his 1993 performance in . The little mongooses in the BBC’s TV offering should have taken a statuette home in 1994. Fungie, with his friendly antics in Dingle Bay, surely deserved a ‘life-time achievement’ award.
A distant relative of Fungie would have been the animal favourite this year; the humpback whale has seldom been out of the wildlife headlines recently. Consummate media performers, humpbacks excel as dancers singers and stuntmen.
There are two cetacean ‘suborders’ — the ‘toothed’ whales and the ‘baleen’ ones. The 77 species of the toothed group include some of the greatest animal performers. The common dolphin rides the bow-waves of boats, delighting cruise-ship passengers with their dare-devil antics. Its bottle-nosed cousin, of Fungie fame, also loves showing off.
But not all toothed whales behave themselves. The largest of the dolphins, the orca, took to attacking yachts off the Iberian Peninsula recently. Nor is whale bolshevism a new phenomenon. The giant whale in Herman Melville’s was of the toothed persuasion. Although fictional, the tale was inspired by reports of a sperm whale ramming and sinking a whaling ship, the Essex, in 1820. The species kills and eats giant squid. If Jonah were swallowed, the culprit would have been a sperm whale.
Oddly, the humpback is not a toothed whale. It belongs to the ‘baleen’ suborder, the 16 species of which tend to be laid-back and retiring. A ‘baleen’ is the huge sieve in the mouth of these giant beasts, with which they trap krill plankton and small fish.
The humpback’s breaching display must be the most spectacular of any wild creature. Rising vertically into the air, a 17metre-long giant, weighing 35 tonnes, will fall back to the sea surface with a loud splash. It also slaps the water surface with its huge tail; using sound to communicate seems to be a humpback ‘thing’. The highly complex song may take up to half an hour to sing.
Scientists find humpback whale song has striking similarities to human languages, implying it is 'culturally transmitted' between generations https://t.co/F8E3Y7Zt3r
— DIVE Magazine (@DiveMagazine) February 20, 2025
Researchers from St Andrews University, in a paper just published, show that humpback song is composed of word-like elements, resembling human sentences. ‘Cultural transmission’ appears to be taking place.
There have also been reports of an epic migration by a humpback. Whales normally migrate, in a north-south direction, from well-oxygenated food-rich sub-polar waters — too cold for new-born babies — to warmer ones, where they give birth and mate. The record-breaking whale, tagged in the Pacific off Ecuador, visited the Atlantic and Indian oceans. It was recorded off Zanzibar 13,000km away.
A humpback whale briefly swallowed a kayaker off Chilean Patagonia before quickly releasing him unharmed. pic.twitter.com/DnbbT4Di7I
— The Associated Press (@AP) February 13, 2025
But a dramatic report from the Magellan Strait surely clinches the humpback’s claim to an Oscar. A kayaker blundered, Jonah-style, into the mouth of a feeding humpback, which promptly spat him out. The youth was shaken but none the worst for his experience. Some people remarked that he had been ‘swallowed’. He wasn’t. A humpback’s oesophagus is far too narrow to pass an object as big as a person.
- Watch Oisín here
