Now one set of organisms gain ascendancy, as with the coral polyps that build the reef, then others take over, and it may be those organisms that destroy. The flip-flop mechanism of dominance is neither good nor bad in itself but simply the way things are. What whales make of the encounter is unknown. It is humans who say the whales are curious. People value the whale experi- ence.
Whales turn up to see people.
They don't like people diving down or swimming toward them. They like humans to behave in a controlled and more predictable way. This way the whales control the approach to the swimmers. Something odd is hap- pening interesting, yet not threatening, and they want to know more about what's going on. A similar experience of animal curiosity is reported by dugong researchers in Shark Bay in Western Australia.