The Insane Biology of: The Sperm Whale

like giant Stone monoliths PODS of sperm whales sleep vertically in the water column a totally otherworldly presence their massive bodies floating in suspended Grace our oceans are filled with nearly a hundred species of cetacean warm-blooded air-breathing mammals like bottlenose dolphins and orcas and humpback whales but sperm whales are among the strangest of this group sperm whales are the largest toothed predators in the world they live in tight social groups and are one of the most widely distributed marine mammals on the planet they live anywhere there is deep water from the poles to the equator they Venture deeper than almost any other mammal plunging into the dark abyss in search of their Elusive and giant squid prey they dive so deep their lungs collapse and yet they can stay underwater for nearly two hours as they hunt travel and raise their young sperm whales can be heard communicating with other members of their group and they can hear each other hundreds or even thousands of miles away because sperm whales are louder than any other animal their clicks are so loud that they can easily blow out a human eardrum some say they could even vibrate a human body to death free divers who interact with these whales are completely at their Mercy hoping and praying they don't get annihilated by sound and their clicks aren't just loud they're incredibly complex leading some scientists to believe sperm whales could have a language more sophisticated than our own sperm whales have haunted our imaginations for Generations spurring nightmares and sailors of centuries past with their Impressions immortalized in literature by Hermann Melville's Moby Dick a creature feared revered and long misunderstood sperm whales have luckily survived centuries of intensive and brutal hunting and now they're slowly beginning to reveal the secrets of their Mysterious World 1200 meters below the surface absolutely no sunlight penetrates this zone of the ocean is completely bathed in darkness here pressure is 120 times that of the surface a pressure is so high it would kill most creatures but this is also where a primordial battle takes place a battle between sperm whales and their giant squid prey no person or camera has ever witnessed such a hunt but sperm whales are commonly found with circular scars from a giant Squid's serrated suckers on the end of its tentacles the indigestible beaks and other body parts of the giant squid also turn up in the stomachs of sperm whales to reach this darkest of hunting grounds the sperm whale fills its lungs with one final breath and begins to plunge their bodies are well adapted to this extreme environment where they spend about 90 percent of their time it's not only giant squid that bring them to such great depths they also eat deep sea sharks octopuses and cuttlefish the stomach of one sperm whale was even found to contain a species of dogfish that lives three kilometers down on the ocean floor making sperm whales one of the deepest divers of the animal kingdom but getting their massive bodies so deep is a complicated process especially since they're naturally buoyant to deal with this sperm whales have evolved something completely bizarre a mysterious substance the one that gives sperm whales their name spermicidi oil which fills much of the head cavity is normally warm and liquid but when the whales dive it's thought that the cool water solidifies it allowing it to act almost like a diving wage to pull the whales down this helps explain how they can physically get down there but how can they survive it as they descend the pressure becomes so high the whale's lungs begin to collapse at this point the rib cage hinges closed around their collapsing lungs squeezing most of the air into their trachea so that there's less gas exchange in the lungs protecting the whales from nitrogen buildup to compensate for not getting enough oxygen from their lungs whales have a much higher concentration of oxygen containing molecules hemoglobin and myoglobin then land dwelling mammals having about twice as much hemoglobin as humans and 10 times as much myoglobin means that the whales are essentially equipped with a built-in oxygen tank even when they're not breathing for more than an hour but that's not the only thing helping them stay supplied with oxygen they also have clumps of blood vessels near their brains called retia mirabelia these vascular Nets help regulate blood pressure and seem to keep the brain well supplied with oxygen meanwhile the heart rate slows in a process called bradycardia slowing all other physiological processes so the body doesn't consume as much oxygen that lower heart rate also limits gas transport around the whale's body and this is critical because of a problem known as decompression sickness aka the bends when humans descend while scuba diving nitrogen from the air dissolves into our tissues if we then Ascend to the surface too quickly this dissolved in nitrogen will expand into bubbles in our tissue a situation that for us can be extremely dangerous or even fatal for a long time scientists thought whales must be immune to getting the bends because of their physiology their trachea is solidified by extra rings of cartilage so that when air is compressed there when they dive nitrogen is stored rather than dissolved into the whale's tissues surely that meant whales couldn't suffer from decompression sickness but a sad situation in 2002 proved that to be untrue after a Navy sonar exercise 14 beaked whales died after beaching themselves in the Canary Islands autopsies revealed that they all had gas bubbles in their tissues whales it turns out are indeed susceptible to this Insidious killer if they're forced to ascend too quickly but scientists are still investigating what might Force whales to make a rapid Ascent besides painful noises they might also be chased up by Predators or have some other Behavior we don't understand or can easily observe this inability to easily monitor what sperm whales are doing at such great depths is one reason that they're so mysterious even something as basic as their hunting methods is Up For Debate it's not clear how the whales catch their prey sperm whales have teeth but only on their lower jaw which means they're not well suited to latching onto something and though some species of whale have teeth only in the males for fighting and display purposes sperm whale males and females both have teeth in one rare video a sperm whale is seen removing fish from long line fishing gear by shaking the line with its teeth but not touching the fish with its teeth these kitchen knife-sized Chompers aren't really used for chomping so what are they for it's a question that's been particularly intriguing to Dr Joy reidenberg a comparative anatomist and professor at the icann school of medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City we do know from tracking devices that they dive down and kind of hang out in one area for a while and then come back up so the assumption is that they're rely on weight Predator that they're not a Pursuit predator and if that's the case that they go down and they hang out somewhere one of my favorite theories is that they open their mouth and they might have some bioluminescent bacteria on their teeth or something that their teeth glows and maybe attracts the squid to the mouth and then they just suck it into their mouth so the teeth may be lures we also know that they sometimes rake the sea floor and use their teeth in that way they that if they just stick their mouth into the sand and swim forward it's kind of like a plow that plow is going to disturb things in the sediment those little animals that didn't think animals like crabs and shrimps and stuff May jump up and get sucked into the whale's mask sperm whales have even been found Tangled in the transatlantic cables lying on the ocean floor either because they were stirring up sediment or maybe because they were attracted by the electrical signals it's hard to know for sure what sperm whales are doing in the deep but during the limited amount of time they spend closer to the surface a few things become very clear namely that they have very large brains and very complex social behaviors sperm whales have the largest brains of any living animal and possibly of any animal to exist on Earth ever at any point in time their gray matter can be seven to nine kilograms in weight about six times larger than a human brain researchers originally thought toothed whales have such large brains because of their echolocation after all the non-echolocating blue whale is larger than the sperm whale but its brain isn't as big but more recent research in the fossil records shows that large brains came before the anatomy that allowed for underwater echolocation the scientists instead suggest that large brains and citations are closely linked to their social behavior and sperm whales are indeed highly social they live in matrilineal Clans with calves suckling for up to 13 years and all calves have a primary babysitter apart from their mother so that the mother can continue diving to hunt all the members of a group of sperm whales will assist with raising young but adult males generally leave their families to live more solitary lives it was thought for years that these adult males were some of the loneliest creatures on the planet but more recent research has found that many male sperm whales actually spend a lot of time with male friends whether it's migrating feeding or sadly even stranding together these social groups are tied together by sound loud intricate and robust vocalizations but how exactly do they make such complex sounds it all comes down to their massive noses Dr Joy reidenberg has been fascinated by sperm whale vocalizations for her entire career and she believes that of all whales it's the sperm whale who has the most impressive vocalizations about one third of the sperm whale's body length is its nose so it is the largest nose in the animal kingdom and that nose is a sound producer and a big portion of that nose is what made sperm whales so valued by Whalers that waxy spermicidi it was used in candles and ointments and wailing in pursuit of it almost completely wiped sperm whales off the face of the planet Whalers called it spermicidi because they thought it was sperm it was not and honestly pretty weird that they thought it was as mentioned before spermicidi is crucial in their buoyancy control and in their communication and the purpose for that oil is to take the vibrations that are generated at the very front of the sperm whale's head in that boxy shape where air is brought to the very front it goes through a pair of large looking lips that are inside the nose that click kind of like a pair of castanets and as they click they vibrate the tissue that is the lip and that lip is attached to the spermicity organ and it sends a vibrational wave propagating through the spermicity organ until it reaches the back of the head where that click is then reflected off of an air sac that's on the front of the skull from there the sound is reflected through a series of what might be considered condensing filters where the sound is modified to be either a sharp beam or a low quiet Rumble and this part of the whale has another stupid name and that particular organ is called the junk because it was not useful compared to the spermicity oils but in fact it's probably the most functional part of the whole head because that's where the sound is modified in some ways somehow modulates the sound and that final sound can be incredibly loud a sperm whale can click about 236 decibels for reference human eardrums burst at 150 decibels our pain threshold is about 110 decibels things like live rock music or jet engines heard from a hundred feet away our normal conversations are only about 60 decibels sound travels differently in water than in air so the decibel measurements aren't exactly comparable but this is still insanely loud it is by far the loudest noise any animal can make does that mean a sperm whale vocalization could kill a human in the water Dr reidenberg says there have been no documented cases of this happening but that doesn't mean it's totally impossible luckily for us we're not the sperm whale's favorite prey if we were giant squid those Sonic blasts might well cause some serious damage and the Sonic Blast is just one of the many types of Extremely Loud Noises a sperm whale can make the big males have this sound that's called the clang which is a very very loud very intense uh you know sound it's probably advertising that hey I'm in the neighborhood come on ladies here I am and then all the ladies come around and gather around the uh the big male that has swung through the neighborhood um because it then becomes an orgy for the whales and yet males are hardly the only ones making such loud calls sperm whales have many patterns of clicks that make up their complex language the most common are clicks used for long-range echolocation like sonar and then there's close range Creeks for when prey capture is eminent and finally codas are distinct patterns of clicks most often heard when whales are socializing and these vocalizations are of particular interest to scientists sperm whale codas sort of sound like Morse code and the patterns of the clicks are distinct among social groups with each Clan having its own specific repertoire of codus these codas are the social glue that holds the Clans together females use codas more than males which makes sense when you think about how they raise their young no it's probably social communication it's probably communication with the calves it's Communications with each other they might simply be advertising how deep they've gone so that the Catholic can't follow them knows where the mother is at all times even though the monks farther away from the calf the depth that the whale goes to will distort the sound so by the time the calf hears it it has some information about that Distortion it tells it how deep the mother has Dove and that would give it some idea of anticipating when the mother is coming back up again and more than just signaling each other's location researchers believe distinct code or repertoires represent their own unique cultures just as groups of people from different sides of the world will speak eat and dress differently clans of sperm whales from different areas will behave differently too and the more researchers investigate these codas the more they realize just how much information could be packed into these patterns of sound so much information that researchers are starting to realize that sperm whale language is perhaps as complex as our own the first major hint that codas are not just instinctual and arbitrary noises is the fact that calves can take up to two years to produce recognizable codas and before that they Babble just like human babies and recently researchers realized that not only do Clans use different codas but the codas differ slightly among individuals this could be a way for each individual to have a unique identifier AKA a name the whales aren't just making noise they are literally talking when a group of researchers looked at the historic recordings of whaling in the 19th century they found that successful Harpoon strikes dropped by more than 50 percent after the first few years of hunting that dramatic of a change can't be attributed solely to the skill of the Whalers instead researchers think the sperm whales were sharing strategies with one another about how to evade capture sperm whale codas may be the closest thing to our language we have ever discovered and this raises an interesting question can we translate this language into hours in a future video we will discuss the ongoing effort to create the first interspecies Rosetta Stone using machine learning what's already clear to us is that sperm whales have the loudest voices in the animal kingdom and they seem to be using them to say quite a lot of different things understanding whales is an Endeavor that will take generations and an Endeavor that will require utter dedication from scientists who will stop at nothing to collect the data that they need but working with such large animals in the field comes with its own immense challenges it's sometimes messy most of the time when I dissect the whale I feel like I'm doing it from the inside out I get in the whale and basically pushing things out and sometimes harrowing I just was so happy not to be dead stories like these are sometimes hard to believe but they are the reality for scientists who spend their lives around these spectacular animals and these stories are the basis for our new nebula plus series field notes I often talk about the science of incredible animals on this channel and now we will get to hear from the experts behind the science the people who spend months years or decades in the field the people who know these animals better than anyone else on the planet and have some of the most shocking funny and wild stories I have ever heard nebula is our streaming platform where we can release new original content without worrying about the YouTube algorithm and if you're looking for something else to watch right now you can watch our last video about the surprising reasons bioluminescence barely exists on land or you can watch real engineering's latest video about the explosive way that seat belts work

Channel: Real Science

Views: 1,750,369

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Id: Hve8_iSDD-o

Length: 20min 2sec (1202 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 10 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/GeneSequence]

Awesome, I was hoping she planned to do one on sperm whales.

[u/438Hung]

Brilliant video