The Incredible Social Life of Sperm Whales | The secret of the abyss

Welcome to Savannah Pulse, where we dive deep into the wonders of wildlife and their extraordinary lives. In today's episode, we explore the incredible social lives of the sperm whale, the ocean's most enigmatic and sociable giants. From their complex communication cliques to their deep familial bonds, join us as we uncover the hidden world of these remarkable creatures beneath the waves. As if they were enormous stone monoliths, pods of sperm whales slumber vertically in the water column, creating a completely unearthly appearance with their massive bodies lying in suspended grace. Our seas are home to approximately 100 species of cetaceans which are warm-blooded animals that breathe air. Sperm whales can be heard communicating with other members of their group and can hear each other hundreds or even thousands of miles away because sperm whales are louder than any other mammal. They live anywhere on the planet where there is deep water, from the poles to the equator. They dive deeper than almost any other mammal, plunging into the dark abyss in search of their elusive and giant squid prey. They dive so deep that their lungs collapse, but they are able to stay underwater for nearly two hours. They hunt, travel and raise their young. Sperm whales can be heard communicating with each other. Animal, their cliques are so loud that they can easily blow out a human eardrum, and some say that they could even vibrate a human body to death. Free divers who interact with these whales are completely at their mercy, hoping and praying that they don't get annihilated by sound. Their cliques aren't just loud, they're incredibly complex, leading some scientists to believe that sperm whales could have a language that is more sophisticated than our own. In addition, sperm whales have haunted our imaginations for generations, causing sailors of centuries past to have nightmares about them. With their impressions immortalized in Cher fiction by Herman Melville's Moby Dick, sperm whales have fortunately survived centuries of intense and violent killing, and now they are slowly beginning to unveil the secrets of their mysterious world. Sperm whales are a creature that has been admired and feared for a long time. 1,200 meters below the surface, there is no sunlight that can enter this region of the ocean, which is totally surrounded by darkness. The pressure in this region is 120 times more than the pressure at the surface, and it is so great that it would kill the majority of the organisms that live there. However, this is also the location where a primordial conflict is taking 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% of the time, it is not only giant squid that bring them to such great depths. They also consume deep sea sharks, octopuses, and cuttlefish. The stomach of one sperm whale was even discovered to contain a species of dogfish that lives three kilometers down on the ocean floor. This makes sperm whales one of the deepest divers in the animal kingdom. However, getting their massive bodies to such depths is a complicated process, especially considering that they are naturally buoyant. In order to deal with this, sperm whales have evolved something completely bizarre. Material that is a mystery spermicide oil, which fills a significant portion of the head cavity, is normally warm and liquid. However, when whales dive, it is believed that the cool water causes it to solidify, allowing it to act almost like a diving wage to pull the whales down. This helps explain how they are able to physically get down there, but it also raises the question of how they are able to survive it. As they descend, the pressure becomes so high that the whales lungs begin to collapse. At this point, the rib cage hinges into place around their collapsing lungs, shielding the whales from nitrogen accumulation by forcing the majority of the air into their trachea, which reduces the amount of gas exchange that occurs in the lungs. This is done to compensate for the fact that the whales are not receiving enough oxygen from their Due to the fact that whales have a significantly higher concentration of oxygen-containing molecules, such as hemoglobin and myoglobin, compared to land-dwelling mammals, which have approximately twice as much hemoglobin as humans and ten times as much myoglobin, whales are equipped with an oxygen tank that is built in, even when they are not breathing for longer periods of time. They contain clusters of blood arteries near their brains, called retia mirabellia, which helps them stay supplied with oxygen for more than an hour. However, this is not the only mechanism that helps them stay given oxygen. In the meantime, the heart rate slows down, a process known as bradycardia, which slows down all other physiological processes so that the body doesn't consume as much oxygen. This lower heart rate also limits gas transport around the whale's body, which is critical because of a number of factors. These vascular nets help regulate blood pressure and appear to keep the brain well supplied with oxygen. When humans descend, while scuba diving, nitrogen from the air dissolves into our tissues. If we then ascend to the surface too quickly, this nitrogen that has been dissolved in our tissues will expand into bubbles in our tissue, a situation that for us can be extremely dangerous or even fatal for a long time. This condition is known as decompression sickness, also known as the bends. As a result of their physiology, scientists believed that whales were resistant to experiencing the bends. This is because their trachea is cemented by additional rings of cartilage, which means that when air is squeezed there when they dive, nitrogen causes the bends to occur, is stored rather than dissolved into the tissues of the whale. Surely that meant whales could not suffer from decompression sickness. However, a tragic event that occurred in 2002 proved that this was not the case. Following a Navy sonar exercise, 14 beaked whales died after beaching themselves in the Canary Islands. Autopsies revealed that all of the whales had gas bubbles in their tissues. It turns out that whales are certainly susceptible to this sneaky killer if they are pushed to rise too rapidly. However, scientists are currently exploring what would compel whales to undertake a rapid ascent, in addition to the fact that they are sensitive to this killer. Sounds that are excruciating. They may also be pursued by predators or exhibit some other behavior that we do not comprehend or can easily watch. The fact that we are unable to easily monitor what sperm whales are doing at such deep depths is one of the reasons why they are so enigmatic, especially when it comes to something as fundamental as their hunting strategies. It is unclear how whales are able to capture their prey, which is a contentious issue. Sperm whales have teeth, but they are only located on their lower jaws, which means that they are not very good at latching onto things. That being said, there are certain kinds of whales that only have teeth in the males for whatever reason. Competition, and for the purpose of presentation, sperm whales, both men and females, have teeth. In a video that is extremely unusual, a sperm whale can be seen extracting fish from longline fishing gear by shaking the line with its teeth. However, the whale does not contact the fish with its teeth. These teeth are about the size of a kitchen knife. It is a subject that has been particularly fascinating to Dr. Joy Reidenberg, a comparative anatomist and professor at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City. Chompers are not actually utilized for chewing, so what are they for? This is a question that has been particularly intriguing to Dr. Reidenberg. We do know from monitoring 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 a rely-on-wait predator, that they're not a pursue 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 maybe lose. We also know that they sometimes rake the seafloor and use their teeth in that way, 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, because of the electrical impulses, they were drawn to the area. It is difficult to tell for certain what sperm whales are doing at the depths of the ocean, but during the short period of time that they spend closer to the surface, a few facts become very evident. These include the fact that they have very large brains and very complex social activities. In terms of brain size, sperm whales have the biggest brains of any living mammal and potentially of any species that has ever existed on Earth at any point in time. Their grey matter may weigh anywhere from seven to nine kilos, which is approximately six times larger than the average 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 behaviour 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. These social groupings are bound together by sound, loud, complicated and strong vocalisations. But how exactly do they generate such complex sounds? It all comes down to their enormous nostrils. Eating, or unfortunately, even stranding together, are examples of social groups that are connected together by sound. For the entirety of her professional life, Dr Joy Reitenberg has been preoccupied with the vocalisations of sperm whales. She is of the opinion that among all whales, the sperm whale is the one that possesses the most remarkable vocalisations. It is estimated that the nose of a sperm whale accounts for around one third of its overall length, making it the longest nose in the animal kingdom. And that nose is a sound producer, and a significant portion of that nose is what made sperm whales so valuable to whalers. That waxy spermicidae was used in candles and ointments, and the whalers whaling in pursuit of it almost completely wiped out sperm whales from the face of the planet. Whalers call it spermicidae because they thought it was sperm, but it was not, and it was pretty strange that they thought it was. As was mentioned earlier, spermicidae is essential to the whale's ability to control their buoyancy and communicate with one another. The purpose of that oil is to absorb the vibrations that are transmitted by the whales, are generated at the very front of the sperm whale's head in that boxy shape, where air is brought to the very front, that 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 spermicidae organ. And it sends a vibrational wave propagating through the spermicidae organ until it reaches the back of the head, where that click is then reflected off of an air sac that is on the front of the skull. From there, the sperm whale is able to produce sperm eggs. 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 spermicidae 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, for your reference, around 236 decibels. Our pain threshold is around 110 dB, and our eardrums rupture at a volume of 150 decibels. Things like as live rock music or jet engines may be heard from 100 feet away, but the decibel level of our typical talks is just about 60 hundred. Due to the fact that sound travels differently in water compared to air, the decibel values are not quite similar, yet this is still extraordinarily loud. It is by far the loudest noise that any animal is capable of producing. Does this imply that a sperm whale's vocalization might potentially kill a human in the water? Dr. Reidenberg claims that there have been no deaths. 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, 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 large male that has swung through the area due of the fact that it then becomes an orgy for the whales, despite the fact that males are not the only ones making such loud sounds. There are many different patterns of clicks that make up the complex language of sperm whales. The most common clicks are those that are used for long-range echolocation, such as sonar. Then there are close-range creaks, which are used when the capture of prey is imminent. Finally, codas are distinct click patterns that are most frequently heard when whales are socializing. These vocalizations are of a different kind. Scientists are particularly interested in this. There is a similarity between the sound of sperm whale codas and that of morse code, and the patterns of the clicks vary from social group to social group. Each clan has its own unique repertoire of codas, and these codas serve as the social glue that holds the clans together. Females use codas more than males, which makes sense, when you consider how they raise their young. There is a high probability that it is social communication, that it is communication with the calves, that it is communication with each other, and that it is just 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 distinct cultural traditions, 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 sounds is the fact that it can take calves up to two years to produce recognizable codas, and before that they babble just like human babies. Recently researchers have 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, also known as a name. Whales aren't just making noise, they are literally talking.