Taking a pod: Scientists see sperm whales interacting with the birth of a newborn | CNN

When a marine biologist, Shane Gero, saw a stream of blood spread across the water where a group of sperm whales had gathered in the Caribbean, he feared the worst—being injured by one of the whales, perhaps due to a predator attack. But then he saw something unexpected and unusual above the water: the head of a newborn sperm whale.

The whale’s life was endless. Instead, a new life was beginning. On July 8, 2023, Gero and a team of scientists aboard two boats of Project CETI, or Cetacean Translation Initiative, a non-profit organization for the study of whale communications, reported something that few people have ever seen – the live birth of a whale in the wild.

“At first I thought something bad was going to happen, until we saw a small head appear and then floppy flukes,” said Gero, a CETI biologist, referring to the whale’s tail. Then we knew that it was really a happy event.

It was also a social event, with other whales in the group first surround the mother in labor and pull the baby out of the water while it is still breathing. The evidence from this remarkable observation contributes to the scientific understanding of cooperation among sperm whales. Gero said, the findings also provide an important lesson for another life form: humans.

“In a cooperative society, if we are going to be successful, we need to work together, instead of always finding reasons to explain how we are different,” said Gero. “It’s a good message to get rid of an animal that’s so different from us.”

On that July day, CETI’s team of scientists and technicians – including drone operators, programmers and acoustics experts – were out on the open sea in the waters off the Commonwealth of Dominica. The team was looking forward to a typical day of field work observing a group of known female sperm whales. to CETI researchers as Class A and had been studied for years. But Gero quickly realized that something was wrong. The whales were huddled close to the surface.

“These families often spread out for miles as they dive and forage,” Gero, a scientist based at Carleton University in Canada, told CNN. To have the whole family close but not active is a rare thing.”

Another whale that Gero had been watching since she was a calf, known to researchers as “Rounder,” was already giving birth. Rounder is thought to be at least 19 years old and before she gave birth to another calf, named “Accra,” in 2017. Scientists followed the progress of Rounder’s birth by noting the appearance of the new calf, the behavior of the whales visiting it, and the appearance and amount of blood and feces in the water. The team started the birth at 11:12 am local time, and the birth was completed at 11:45 am.

“Because of the protocol we run every day on the water, we had drones in the air and the records were running even before we knew it was a birth,” Gero said. Acoustic recordings and images revealed previously unknown behaviors and vocalizations in groups of sperm whales after reincarnation, providing unprecedented insight into their interactions.

“Prior to this analysis, our understanding was based on a very small number of observations,” said Giovanni Petri, network science leader at Project CETI and professor at Northeastern University’s Network Science Institute in London. “The actual circumstances of the birth — who does what, in what order, how the group coordinates, whether it’s unrelated people — was really unknown,” Petri said in an email.

CETI researchers documented the event in two papers, both published on March 26. In the journal Science, the authors of the study described and analyzed the birth using drone images that they interpreted with machine learning to identify the whales’ identity, situations and interactions. A larger scientific team has published a more detailed, minute-by-minute account of the birth and results in the journal Scientific Reports. This is the first study to document whale birth observations that combines audio and video from the event with decades of data on social interactions in sperm whales.

“The Project CETI team, consisting of more than 50 scientists across eight different disciplines, worked together to publish these studies,” said David Gruber, founder and president of CETI and corresponding author of both papers. Together, the sperm whale birth analysis and data collection represent “the pinnacle of the complexity of sperm whale communication,” he said.

In general, reproductive prospects for wild cetaceans — a group that includes whales, dolphins and porpoises — are extremely rare, representing only 10% of the species, Gruber noted in an email.

He said: “The last scientific record of sperm whale births was in 1986, which only included postnatal data. What makes this study even more unique is that we have complete knowledge of each whale and its family relationships.”

The group of sperm whales known as Unit A consists of 11 individuals: eight adults and three calves. When the scientists first saw the newborn, it was still inside the Rounder, but a few minutes later it emerged beside the mother’s head. The other whales in Unit A suddenly became very active. They scooped up the newborn and squeezed it, wrapping it between their heads and bodies.

The whales then took turns lifting the baby up, revealing the still-attached umbilical cord. The scientists soon realized that the rope was broken; about three minutes after birth the baby was first trying to swim, although the lifting behavior continued for several hours. The four whales in the group gave a lot of attention to the newborn, taking turns lifting. One of the most obedient whales, a young one named “Ariel,” was not directly related to the mother, showing that even non-relatives were active participants in the birth.

The whales also had a lot to say this time, generating 31,364 clicks in just over four hours. Codas, or groups of clicks, were longer at birth and became shorter after the newborn was born, the authors wrote in Scientific Reports.

The most common type of coda has been associated with the identification of whales from this eastern Caribbean. The alternating codas, which were recorded that day, are associated with social relationships in sperm whales. Hearing codas during a highly social event seems to support this explanation, the authors wrote.

“This is one of the first detailed, quantitative reports of the birth of a sperm whale in the wild – a life stage that we will not see in this species,” said Mauricio Cantor, a behavioral ecologist and assistant professor at the Marine Mammal Institute at Oregon State University who was not involved in the study.

“What stands out is how coordinated the process is. In sperm whales, it’s now very clear that birth is not a mother-calf event — it’s a team effort,” Cantor explained in an email. “Many women, including non-relatives, actively coordinate to support the newborn, keep it afloat and help in the first period of life.”

A young man named “Allan” also lived nearby. This behavior, too, was unusual, as adolescent males are often pushed out of adult female groups. Allan was no longer a true member of Unit A. But he remained close during the birth even if others ignored him, providing some surprising insights into the complexity of relationships between sperm whales, said Christine Clarke, a doctoral student who studies sperm whales with the Whitehead Lab at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

“To the best of my knowledge, Allan is only the second young man reported to have moved on from his community center, which all young men eventually do,” Clarke, who was not involved in the investigation, said in an email. “It was almost like watching an opera to learn how this family reunion went, and Allan was given the coldest of views even though he was there taking part in the great entertainment.”

Whale encounters in the open ocean cannot be planned or organized, so it is uncertain when CETI expeditions will see Rounder and her calf again. But each observation contributes to the growing body of knowledge about the life and behavior of sperm whales.

“As a team, we were very privileged to watch this moment,” Gruber added. “We hope people also take away the knowledge that this is western science complementing Indigenous knowledge, as people have seen and connected with whales for thousands of years.”

Mindy Weisberger is a science writer and content producer whose work has appeared in Live Science, Scientific American and How It Works magazine. He is the author of “Rise of the Zombie Bugs: The Amazing Science of Parasitic Mind-Control” (Hopkins Press)

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