Sperm Whales and Desert Shrubs

Saving the whales

My drawing of a female jojoba bush. The nuts (seeds) have been shed.

            There is a great deal of heroic romance associated with the 19th century whaling industry, with men risking their lives in small boats to kill huge whales with lances in order to render them into oil.  We even associate great literature with whaling, e.g. Moby Dick, although I have yet to meet someone who has read this novel to the end. No matter.  The main prey of this industry was the sperm whale, specifically, the very odd fatty organ that gave its head its huge, square look. In the darkness of the ocean deep, this organ focuses the emitted sonar sounds the whale uses to find and hunt its prey of deep sea squid.  Nineteenth century whalers gave little thought to what the function of this strange organ might be, they cared only that it consisted of an extremely high quality "sperm oil" which they could extract and sell as an odorless, clean-burning lamp fuel, a non-gumming lubricant whose viscosity was remarkably temperature-independent and a base for high-quality cosmetics (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sperm_oil).

Nineteenth century whaling was an adventurous, dangerous, and heedlessly destructive industry, dramatized in this print.

            Poor whales....  by 1850, the USA was importing 5 million gallons of sperm oil annually and the whale population was taking a nose-dive. Since 1900, over 3.25 million whales have been killed, with sperm whales making up 760,000 of these. You would think that the more "sensitive" 20th century would have put a stop to this carnage, but whaling peaked in the 1960s when 30 million pounds of sperm oil was imported annually for use in many products, especially automotive transmission fluid, until the Endangered Species Act (1971) put a stop to the import of sperm whale and all other whale products.  Transmission failures jumped eight-fold in four years (how sad…).

            At about the same time, it turns out that the carnage of sperm whales was probably unnecessary--- the oil pressed from the seeds of a native southwestern shrub, jojoba, possessed many of the properties for which sperm oil was prized (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jojoba_oil). When refined, it is a colorless and odorless fluid with a viscosity that changes little with temperature, making it an excellent lubricant for fine watches and machinery that experiences a range of temperatures.  Moreover, it does not get rancid quickly, and is used in various cosmetic products that can then boast of being "natural."  

Neither sperm oil nor jojoba oil is, technically speaking, an oil.  Rather, both are actually liquid waxes. Waxes are esters of fatty alcohols and fatty acids (both molecules with a long carbon backbone), making waxes very long, linear molecules, while fats and (ordinary) oils like olive, corn, safflower and peanut, are esters of three fatty acid molecules and a glycerol (a three-carbon alcohol) to form so-called triglycerides.  When the fatty acids contain several carbon-carbon double bonds, the triglycerides are liquid oils, and when they lack these, they are solid fats, suitable for boiling with collard greens.  Triglycerides are the stuff of beer bellies, flabby thighs and all things obese, and are what makes pork barbecue taste so good and satisfying.  Sadly, although jojoba oil is edible (sort of), it is not digestible, and causes diarrhea.

After the Endangered Species Act put the crimp on putting sperm whale oil into the transmission of your Nash or Hudson to make it shift smoothly in both hot and cold weather, the 1980s saw a gold rush to farm jojoba in the southwestern USA and elsewhere.  Reasoning that as a native shrub of the Southwestern deserts, the crop must be well-suited to arid lands, needing little irrigation and thriving on poor soils, and this belief lead to the expectation that there was gold in them thar abundant harvests of nuts that were about 50% oil, year after year. 

But there were complexities. Jojoba is wind-pollinated and has male and female plants, but because only females produce the valued nuts, farmers needed to plant 80 to 90% females. Ten percent males was plenty to fertilize all those females, but if the farmer started plants from seed, the sexes were 50:50, leaving the farmer to pull up all those excess males. Farmers soon developed starting their farms from rooted cuttings to gain control over the sex (and genetics) of the plants. Females and more productive variants were favored for cuttings, producing many improved varieties.

Jojoba is wind pollinated. Male flower showing stamens (left); female flower showing the three stigmata (right).

About 45,000 acres were planted with jojoba in the southwestern USA, but this optimism seems to have been based on little knowledge of deserts and their denizens. All desert creatures have to deal with very high variability, and a good, bumper year may be followed by many mediocre to bleak years. So even on its own and not under the care of anxious farmer Joe, Jojoba the Bush out in the low Colorado Desert may produce a generous crop of nuts in a year in which, just by chance, abundant rains in the right season coincide with a frost free winter followed by a less than lethally hot summer, but this abundance is likely to be followed by a long series of bleak years. In the desert, no creature puts all its eggs in one basket.

So to get a consistent crop, water was needed after all, and of course, being a native, jojoba had its share of pests that mined the nuts, ate the leaves and generally got a share of the plant’s production. Thus, hopeful farmers and venture capitalists gradually gave up jojoba farming until only a handful were still operating in 2020. Part of this decline was driven by foreign competition, for jojoba farming has been introduced in many arid areas around the world, some with adequate water, a more favorable climate, and cheaper labor. These farms also benefited from the experience of the American farmers.

As a result, jojoba farms have appeared in Argentina, Israel, Peru, Australia, Egypt, Tunisia, India, and even in China, all countries with sufficient water and suitable climate and soil. With development of better varieties, more adaptive methods, and willing markets, some of these producers annually harvested 3000 pounds of seed per acre, about three times the production of North American farms in a good year. Because all jojoba plants in the world originate from those in the Southwestern USA, it is likely that through emigration, they left most of their pests behind, partly accounting for the greater success in foreign lands, much like many immigrants.

A jojoba farm. Because the bushes are wind pollinated and are either male or female, but only female bushes bear nuts, making a ratio of eight to ten females per male ideal for production.

             Jojoba oil has replaced most of the uses of sperm whale oil. In truth, long before the farming of jojoba, the use of whale oil was in decline, displaced by the much cheaper kerosene and other petroleum products.  Still, I wonder if jojoba had come on the market in the 19th century, whaling would have been a much smaller and less destructive enterprise.  Maybe Moby Dick would not have been written, and people wouldn't have to lie about having read the entire book.