Tales of Whales: Animal Minds Visited, Revisited & Beyond
January 26, 2022 7:46 AM   Subscribe

Next thing I know I have this 50 ton whale coming right at me, and I'm thinking "Oh my God. Stop, I just saved you." Yeah, she's rising up towards me. And I'm just thinking this is going to hurt, and, uh, when she was only inches away from my chest... She stopped. And pushed me on the chest backwards, and then released me, and then kind of pushed again, and then release, and pushed again, and again. And then she swam up right next to me, puts her head up above the water so that her eye was above the water, and then came up and looked directly at me... for what felt like 30 seconds, she just stared...

James Moskito's account

...The pupil didn't move around. She wasn't looking for anything else. She was just looking at me. You're in the presence of something that great. It makes you feel small. It, it really was a, a very emotional feeling. You know I wasn't quite sure what to make of it. But then she went off to the next diver. And did the same thing. Coming up right next to him. Looking at him really good, you know inches away, eyeballing him. She swam around every diver...

Animal Minds Revisited

A transcript for Animal Minds can be found here.

Previously

See also the world's largest, smartest and loudest toothed predators. They can click at a volume of 230 decibels, louder than a jet aircraft on takeoff. Loud enough to see inside you, loud enough to turn you into a bag of broken bone and blood jelly just by clicking at you if they so chose. But they don't despite all we've done to them... Go figure.

How Sperm Whales Outsmarted Their Hunters

Whale Culture: Hal Whitehead at TEDxHalifax 2012

Deep dive: what we are learning from the language of whales | James Nestor | TEDxMarin 2017

Sperm Whale Communication: What we know so far / Understanding Whale Communication: First steps 2020

An ambitious project is attempting to interpret sperm whale clicks with artificial intelligence, then talk back to them

Could we talk with whales?

Sperm Whale Language? Researchers Are Using Artificial Intelligence to Find Out

Feel the Force of Sperm Whales Ultrasound

Sleeping Sperm Whales

The findings showed that sperm whales around the world practice this vertical sleeping posture — sleeping on one breath from 6 to 24 minutes at a time -- infrequently spending only about 7 percent of their time asleep, which is less than any other mammal spends, according to the study.

Stereotypical resting behavior of the sperm whale

The Lost Culture of Whales | Shane Gero | TEDxOttawa

And to conclude, here is Radiolab: The World's Smartest Animal. It recounts a judged by experts contest to determine which animal is the smartest. So just to recap, the contenders were the crow, the slime mold, the sperm whale, the chicken, the raccoon, and the marsupials. And the winner according to the audience was, well, you guessed it.
posted by y2karl (14 comments total) 62 users marked this as a favorite
 
EPIC! Thank You! (No work will be getting done today.)
posted by probably not that Karen Blair at 8:32 AM on January 26, 2022 [1 favorite]




Sperm whales are the very best animals on the planet and it’s glorious to have a post I can point people to when they doubt me. Thank you!
posted by shesdeadimalive at 9:10 AM on January 26, 2022 [1 favorite]


Sometimes I wonder if the whales are reassessing us. What do they remember?
posted by keep_evolving at 9:15 AM on January 26, 2022


What a fascinating set of links.

I heard a story (probably fifteen years ago? no idea where) about a dolphin trainer who was working with two animals on synchronized tricks. There was a routine, but the animals were able to switch up the order of events within the routine based on verbal cues: now do the tail-walk, now jump through your hoops, and so on.

At the end of the routine, the trainer liked to say “surprise me.” The two dolphins would apparently go underwater for a moment, then surface and do a trick from their routine. Still synchronized, with both animals together, but not the same trick from surprise to surprise.

If the way that whales exchange cultural information isn’t a syntactical language, it is something equally interesting.
posted by fantabulous timewaster at 10:34 AM on January 26, 2022 [8 favorites]


James Bartley (1870–1909) was probably not swallowed by a sperm whale. (It’s a whale of a tale, though.)

A sperm whale did ram and sink the whaleship Essex in 1820, inspiring Herman Melville’s novel Moby-Dick (1851) and Nathaniel Philbrick’s non-fiction book In the Heart of the Sea (2000).
posted by cenoxo at 1:05 PM on January 26, 2022 [1 favorite]


I heard a story (probably fifteen years ago? no idea where) about a dolphin trainer who was working with two animals on synchronized tricks. There was a routine, but the animals were able to switch up the order of events within the routine based on verbal cues: now do the tail-walk, now jump through your hoops, and so on.

At the end of the routine, the trainer liked to say “surprise me.” The two dolphins would apparently go underwater for a moment, then surface and do a trick from their routine. Still synchronized, with both animals together, but not the same trick from surprise to surprise.


I recall a similar anecdote about a marine park (turn, spit, curse) where there were two dolphins, each with their own repertoire of tricks. During one show the trainers noticed that they were both running a little sub-par: the one whose trick was bringing up three rings for the bottom of the pool on their nose came up with only two, the other one -- who did the tail walk -- only got about half as far, etc.

After the show they discovered that the night before a new handler had mixed the dolphins up and put them each in the other's enclosure by mistake. No one had noticed before the show and so the dolphins had each been called on to perform the other's repertoire. Solely through their observations of what the other had been doing, each dolphin made a fair effort at it.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 1:25 PM on January 26, 2022 [7 favorites]


Oh thank goodness! Digit, the calf mentioned in the Shane Gero Tedx survived and eventually got free somehow. It doesn't end the problem of sea creatures getting tangled in trash, but it's something.
posted by surlyben at 2:21 PM on January 26, 2022


Great post!

I was wondering if anyone else has had pet dogs or birds that come stare at the speakers when say npr does a piece containing whale sounds?

We have a tame bluebird and several dogs who get very still and quiet in front of the stereo when this happens.
posted by Mr. Yuck at 4:28 PM on January 26, 2022


Try this and find out: Underwater Whale Sounds - Full 60 Minute Ambient Soundscape (YT). One of our three cats’ ears perked up and quietly stared at my iPad.
posted by cenoxo at 6:15 PM on January 26, 2022 [2 favorites]


I noticed this with my cats over the years when I played the Songs of the Humpback Whale lp. Especially the tracks with solo whales to which I jocularly referred at the time as the Daddy Whale in the Bathroom with those gargantuan sounding groans and moans. Which to my ears sounded as if they were made by something the size of a house.

I have always wondered if this was an actual physical auditory perception -- that it sounded like it was made by huge animal because it actually was made by animals of enormous size and this perception was something fellow mammals like cats and dogs could sense.

I know that over the years my always indoors cats instinctually reacted to birds singing, cats meowing and dogs barking on records -- not unlike seeing themselves in the mirror for the first time -- as sounds made by fellow animals, so why not singing humpback whales? And wondered to if their instinctual perceptions included that the sounds were made by something enormous. I can see this as being wired in genetically through the process of natural selection for all creatures great and small.
posted by y2karl at 8:02 PM on January 26, 2022 [4 favorites]


Cat and Dolphins playing together (YT) – Theater of the Sea, a marine animal park in Islamorada, Florida in 1997. The dolphins are Shiloh and Thunder and the cat is Arthur.
posted by cenoxo at 2:40 AM on January 27, 2022 [2 favorites]


Tory Island Dog & Dolphin (YT), Mar 5, 2013 – Declan McGuinness: “I first learned of these animals while watching the BBC's Countryfile programme, so I set off for Tory Island, Donegal - not expecting them to oblige us. However, they turned up on cue - this is my video from July 2008.”
posted by cenoxo at 3:04 AM on January 27, 2022 [2 favorites]




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