The Insane Biology of: The Sperm Whale

Be sure to check out the Field Notes episode that goes along with this video on Nebula! In this episode we talk to the experts about what its like to study - and dissect - such massive creatures, and what its like to be crushed by one while kayaking. Watch it by signing up to the bundle deal at curiositystream.com/realscience

The idea of a sperm whale, that is potentially sentient, diving down and just sonic blasting the shit out a giant squid is epic.

Imagine you're swimming and some whale yells "YO GARY" to get a buddy's attention and you just get shredded

Deepest diver, loudest screams, biggest brains, biggest toothed predator and idk how many other records broken! Truly an amazing creature

The bit about whales possibly learning and conveying strategies for evading whalers is extremely interesting. I also wonder if the intelligence of the sperm whale and the intelligence of the squid came as a result of an arms race with each other. If so, sperm whale intelligence appear to have evolved more in the direction of human intelligence; where we evolved abilities to communicate and organize and take advantage of collective intelligence. By contrast the squid, who's a solitary animal, evolved incredible spatial intelligence and abilities to solve complex cognitively demanding tasks.

I hope when, if, we decipher their language the first thing we should communicate is how profoundly sorry we are for almost bringing about their extermination.

I don't know why, but the idea of making a Rosetta Stone for the sperm whale's language really hits me in the feels. For so long, humans have been wondering if we are alone in the universe and spent so much time looking into space to try and find neighbors, when in reality we should have been looking into the oceans. Sperm whales and orca both have complex languages, and I wouldn't be one bit surprised if we found out one or both are sapient, and sentient, creatures. I honestly can't wait for this teased video.

Imagine you open your eyes and you realize you're a sperm whale, surrounded by your pod. You look around to see nothing else except the ocean. Your pod tells you that its time to go deep into the dark abyss to hunt. Your heart starts beating faster and faster as you dive deep and the only comfort you have is your pod of whales. Its gets darker and darker and you lose sight of them but you're still able to communicate. You gain immense respect for whales but also wish you can return to being a human, as the cold dark Abyss terrifies you. You wake up and let out a sigh of relief. Your mom comes in the room but her head is a whale, so you go back to sleep.

Just found this channel and I am blown away, I love the narrators voice and the explanation of everything, the editing and diagrams all perfect. Wish they had vids like this when I was in school. Liked and subscribed!

Can you imagine if one day we actually manage to understand their language and communicate with these magnificent creatures?

Humans wanting to communicate with aliens always struck me as odd when we can't communicate with other Earth animals...

Being able to communicate with your baby at a long distance seems so useful! I sure wished my mom had skills like that when I was babysitting my sister xD that way she could calm her down while she's fetching groceries.

The mathematics of multi-path sonar are incredibly complex. How these animals can determine the direction of a whale cry, over bundreds of miles distance, has always been fascinating to me. Sonar waves can bounce not only off the ocean floor (obviously) but also the ocean surface and even get trapped in "water tunnels" created by differing water temperatures and salinity. The maths to calculate these things, for example on nuclear-powered subs, are some of our most highly-classified military secrets. So how do these whales do it? Are they effectively solving complex trigonometric equations in their head?

The fact that this channel not only has actual captions but also cites sources is awesome. You're setting a good example.

I love this channel, ever since you started, the production value and research is second to none. Keep it up.

This was an AMAZING show!! So informative & enjoyable. Please, please, please keep up the good work!

At the 6:40 mark when it talked about whales basically only getting the benz/decompression sickness due to loud noises makes me think they are fully aware of how long they need to go down and come up but us humans being assholes accidently forced them up with sonar and noticed oh hey they can die from surfacing too quickly too...

Been addicted to and binge watching "the insane biology of" series, amazing documentary, editing and script. Keep up the incredible work! 💯 Support from Australia.

I love that you did an episode on sperm whales, they're such intriguing animals! The idea that they spend most of their lives in the pitch-black deep ocean hunting illusive giant squids has always been quite haunting to me, considering they are mammals like us

I used to work on a fishing boat in an area that had sperm whales. Tourist boats that went out to see the whales always came over to our boat when were were dropping (or pulling up ) our nets (set at 400 fathoms).I used to wonder why they did that - until I heard a recording of a sperm whale search/hunting clicks. Our net roller had a lump of weld on it and it clicked every time it went around - at the same spacing as the whale recording. We thought it was hilarious - the tourist operators never did work it out. I think the whales had a good laugh about it as well- as they were pretty chill around our boat.