Whales have midwives. That’s incredible!
Some cool details
Scientists want to know how whales cooperate and socialize in the wild, but it’s tough to study this in animals that spend most of their time underwater. There are just a handful of sperm whale birth records from the past 60 years, and all are anecdotal accounts or from whaling boats.
Several years ago, researchers were studying whale communication on a boat off the Caribbean island of Dominica when they noticed something odd. Eleven whales — most of them female — surfaced, their heads facing one another, and started thrashing and diving above and below the water. The scientists immediately took out drones and microphones to capture the event.
The full delivery took about 30 minutes. For hours afterward, pairs of whales held the baby above the water until it was able to swim.
After observing the birth, the scientists created software to analyze exactly what was going on. They chronicled the sights and sounds in two studies published Thursday in the journals Scientific Reports and Science.
What struck the researchers was how many mother, sister and daughter whales united to support the new calf, even ones that weren’t related. Sperm whales live in close-knit, female-led societies, and the new observations show how those dynamics persist in the animals’ most significant and vulnerable moments.
Women supporting women.
“This was just really a special event,” said study co-author David Gruber with the Cetacean Translation Initiative, or Project CETI.
Edit: Anyway, for anyone who wants to just get to the meat and potatoes of this, here are the corresponding journal papers:
- Scientific Reports (open-access)
- Science (open-access)
