The Story
“Whales in the Temple”
https://hakaimagazine.com/features/whales-in-the-temple/
by Anne Pinto-Rodrigues
Hakai, September 7, 2022
The Pitch
Vietnam is the only (known) country in the world with the unique tradition of building temples dedicated to dead marine mammals. Local fishermen believe that a stranded marine mammal has ‘chosen’ a specific location as its final resting place, and building a whale temple close to its place of stranding / death will bring good fortune to the entire community. The fishermen will either take the dead animal to an existing whale temple or build a new one specially for it. While the temples are known as ‘whale temples’, the skeletons (or bones) inside belong to a wide range of marine mammals, from whales and dolphins, to dugongs and seals.
Three different folklore stories (one dating as far back as the 9th century) are credited as the origin of Vietnam’s whale temple practice. While not all whale temples have been mapped so far, an estimated 1,000 such temples are believed to exist along the country’s 3000+km coast. Each whale temple is unique in construction and contents, and provides researchers an invaluable opportunity to understand what marine mammals exist (or once existed) in Vietnam’s waters as well as the encounter frequency between humans and these animals. These temples are also helping shape conservation programs as some of them have become focal points for awareness campaigns aimed at fishermen.
A related paper ‘Whale temples are unique repositories for understanding marine mammal diversity in Central Vietnam’ was published on November 15th. American and Vietnamese researchers visited 18 different whale temples in Central Vietnam and recorded 140 skulls / skeletons belonging to 15 different species. The most common species found in the temples visited were the Indo-Pacific finless porpoise, followed by the Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphin, and the Indo-Pacific humpback dolphin. However, some species found frequently in these temples like the sperm whale and the long-beaked dolphin are not seen in Vietnam’s waters any more.
Currently, Vietnam’s marine mammals are quite poorly studied and protected. In such a scenario, whale temples are a great resource to study the country’s current and past marine mammal diversity, to establish their relationship with other Southeast Asian and East Asian populations, and for the creation of targeted conservation programs. Furthermore, very few people outside Vietnam (and even within Vietnam) knew about the whale temples till these researchers began work on them.
Would this story be of interest to Hakai? For this piece, I plan to interview the Vietnamese researchers involved.