What a sperm whale’s birth tells us about whale culture

[AUDIO LOGO] FLORA LICHTMAN: Hey. It’s Flora Lichtman, and you’re listening to Science Friday.

[WATER TRICKLING]

[WHALES VOCALIZING]

You are hearing the miracle of life, sperm whale style.

[WHALES VOCALIZING, CLICKING]

You may have seen this on the news or social media. Scientists captured the moment of a sperm whale’s birth off the coast of Dominica. But what was most surprising is that 10 other sperm whales came to help out with the delivery. And not all of them were related to the mom. This is a splashy finding, but it also gets to deep biological questions, like, how much do we understand whale culture, and how should we think about altruism in the animal kingdom?

Joining me now is Dr. Shane Gero, a whale biologist at Carleton University in Canada and at the research group, Project CETI. He’s an author on the new research. Shane, welcome to Science Friday.

SHANE GERO: Thank you for having me.

FLORA LICHTMAN: OK. Well, first of all, this is the required question after a birth. How is baby?

SHANE GERO: Baby is doing really well. We saw them last in the fall. So we’re hoping to see her– I actually go back to Dominica next week. And I hope to see her again then.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Were you watching this birth live?

SHANE GERO: Yeah. I was out on a boat. Over the last 20 years, I’ve spent thousands of hours in the company of sperm whale families. And I know this one maybe more than many, unit A. We didn’t know that it was going to happen. It surprised us in the moment.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Yeah. What did you see? Set the scene for us.

SHANE GERO: It was a pretty calm day. It took us a couple of hours to find the animals because they were pretty quiet. But when we came up on the family, they were all resting sort of quietly at the surface, which isn’t really what happens when sperm whale families meet up. It’s usually very social, and there’s lots of sounds and touching and rolling around on each other. But–

FLORA LICHTMAN: Just like my family reunions, yeah.

SHANE GERO: Yeah, exactly. It’s a ruckus event when you get all the family together. This was not that. So I knew something was up. But I had never seen a birth. In fact, very few whale births have been seen in the wild in the last 100 years.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Wow. OK. So what did you see? So you see them. They’re bobbing around at the surface quietly. And then what happens?

SHANE GERO: Yeah. They all sort of suddenly got very active. And then we saw a big gush of blood. In fact, initially, when it happened, I had thought that some predators had attacked. But then this little baby sperm whale head popped out of the water. And it was just this sort of tiny, floppy, sort of limp baby that was suddenly getting pushed around and lifted up out of the water by all of its family.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Wow. OK. So you said that the family was there. Who was actually nearby? And what are their relation to each other?

SHANE GERO: So sperm whale families are matrilineal, which means it’s grandmothers, mothers, and daughters that will live together for life. And the young males will actually leave the family in their early teens. And this family is family unit A. And it’s made up of actually two family lines. So there’s Lady Oracle and all of her descendants and Fruit Salad and all of her descendants that live together.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Wait, one of them is named Lady Oracle, and the other is named Fruit Salad?

SHANE GERO: Yeah. Well, I mean, look, these weren’t nicknames that we gave, thinking that they would be on Science Friday. These are names that initially, when we were meeting dozens of new whales at the beginning of the project, that allowed us to remember them. So Fruit Salad seems like a very odd one. But literally, it started because I would turn to my teammates and say, oh, that’s the one that we saw this morning when we were eating fruit salad. And then it became, you know, the fruit salad whale. And then it just became a name that stuck.

FLORA LICHTMAN: I feel like Fruit Salad may have a bone to pick with that name. But OK, keep going.

SHANE GERO: Well, but it’s the one that brings so much joy to everyone because no one expects a whale to be called Fruit Salad. But these names make a really important distinction, which is that if Fruit Salad dies, she can’t be replaced by anyone in her family. She’s a unique individual and part of her family and her community. And so I think it’s important that we refer to them as names, even if some of them from some of the early ones are silly.

FLORA LICHTMAN: OK. So Fruit Salad and Lady Oracle are the two matriarchs of this group, but they’re not related.

SHANE GERO: That’s right. These are two unrelated families that have chosen to live together. And that’s been this fundamental question about sperm whales for decades– how does this cooperative society evolve, where animals who are unrelated to one another seem to help one another? Because natural selection sort of teaches us that being selfish is usually a pretty good payoff.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Right, right. I remember that from college biology.

SHANE GERO: That’s right. I feel like we learn that pretty quickly on the schoolyard, right? And yet, humans live in this really complicated, cooperative society. Even at a time when we seem to not be getting along very well, there are many things we do every day that rely on agreed-upon rules, like what side of the street you drive on, or that money is worth something and it can be exchanged for goods and services. So how does that happen in sperm whale life? What is the sort of fitness currency that the whales exchange reliably to trust one another and live together?

And what we saw in this birth is twofold. One was that these animals, unrelated and related, seem to be attending to the birth and doing behaviors like diving underneath mom and looking at her genital area and then assisting during the birth, that there’s a lot of physical interaction with the mom during labor.

FLORA LICHTMAN: What do they do? I mean, how are they helping?

SHANE GERO: Yeah. Well, so that’s really hard to quantify. But what seems to be happening is there’s certainly a lot of attendance to mom’s genital area and clearly inspecting where the baby should be coming from. But then secondly, the grandmother and Rounder, the mom who had the newborn, and her current baby were sort of interacting at the surface a lot and were present at that final moment, where she rolled over and Lady Oracle, who’s Rounder’s mom, rolled on top of her, and then the baby was born.

And we show, using these amazing computer vision tools, that all the animals are paying attention to the mom until the newborn is born. And then they all orient their attention towards the newborn.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Tale as old as time.

SHANE GERO: That’s right. Yeah. [LAUGHS] Thank you for all your hard work, Mom. But look at this amazing, cute baby.

[LAUGHTER]

FLORA LICHTMAN: Well, do they help the newborn? What services do they provide once the baby’s born?

SHANE GERO: Yeah. Well, we knew from earlier work that babies are negatively buoyant, meaning they have to work to stay at the surface. When they dive, they actually kind of sink, and then they work really hard to get back up to the surface. And so the adults actually dove under and lifted the calf up and supported it on their backs and their heads for minutes after birth.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Wow, and not just and not just the Lady Oracle line of direct relations.

SHANE GERO: Yeah. Well that’s it, right? Genetics can’t explain it alone. They sort of took turns, in terms of Fruit Salad’s family and Lady Oracle and Rounder, who’s the mom, her family supporting the calf. Everyone participated. In fact, one of the surprises of the whole day was that Allan, who is also Lady Oracle’s son, which is Rounder’s brother, also showed up, even though he had already split from his family, as a young male does. So him being there was a surprise as a whole, let alone all of the amazing details of the interactions between the females that were caring for Mom and then baby.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Wow. I mean, have we seen this before with other species, besides us?

SHANE GERO: Well, so this kind of attendance to the mom and birth assistance was thought for a long time to be uniquely human. And then it was shown recently in bonobos, but there’s very little evidence of this kind of communal birth support outside of primates. So it’s a huge deal to show that, let alone to show that it’s unrelated animals that are doing the helping.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Yeah. Does this study challenge the idea that animals are in it to win it just for themselves and their kin? Big picture, what do you think it tells us?

SHANE GERO: Yeah. Well, I think what it shows is that the rich complexity of nonhuman animal society is very real. The unique part of this study is we really show the behaviors that can kind of be exchanged. I’m going to help you today by lifting up your baby, knowing that maybe as far as six years from now, when I have my baby, you will be there to support me and my calf. And so that level of exchange that happens, especially across a huge delay, suggests that there’s all sorts of amazing cognitive sort of processes going on.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Memory, deep memory, yeah.

SHANE GERO: Yes, absolutely. You need to remember who helped you and when to remember who you should help and how.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Do we know if this happens in other family groups? Like, could this be a cultural practice of this group alone?

SHANE GERO: Oh, that’s such a fantastic question. So what we do know is that sperm whales live in these matrilineal families of grandmothers, mothers, and daughters. But then all of those families that share a distinct set of codas, these calls that they have, we call a clan. And that clan is distinguished by a different dialect of codas. But clans also have different movement patterns, different habitat use, different social behavior, and a myriad of things we don’t understand yet.

So to ask, Is birthing a cultural behavior that’s different with the sperm whales that are in the Eastern Caribbean clan versus an Azorean clan versus the Sri Lankan clan? is a fantastic question. Because we know, in human societies, the richness of our lives can’t be explained just by genetics. A lot of that is contained in our culture, how we learn to do things. And that seems very true in many, many animals, including the sperm whale. So how much a birth celebration changes based on the clan of sperm whales you’re working with is a question we’ll have to wait until the next baby is born, when researchers happen to be there.

FLORA LICHTMAN: OK, not to be all anthrocentric, but has studying sperm whales changed the way you think about us, about people?

SHANE GERO: Ah, I mean, fundamentally. Look, I have kids, and we moved our family back to Ottawa in an era where I was moving all over the world as an academic because the grandparents are here. And I think the whales would be proud of us to have made that decision.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Your very own Fruit Salad and Lady Oracle.

SHANE GERO: That’s right. [LAUGHS] And I’m sure my mom would be very proud to be called Fruit Salad because she knows how awesome a whale she is. But, yeah, no. Fundamentally, these animals are different from us. They’re the size of a school bus, and they live in part of the world that we find difficult to explore, even with our best submarines. But when we find similarities, like love your mom, take care of your newborns, spend time with your siblings because eventually, they move away, these are things that fundamentally ring true to humans and I think speak to what really matters about why we’re all here, whale or otherwise.

FLORA LICHTMAN: That’s the perfect place to land. Dr. Shane Gero is a whale biologist at Carleton University and Project CETI. He’s also the founder of The Dominica Sperm Whale Project. Shane, thanks for joining me today.

SHANE GERO: Thank you so much for having me.

FLORA LICHTMAN: This episode was produced by Rasha Aridi. You know what also takes a village? Raising a podcast. And if you want to help, if you want to be the Fruit Salad or Lady Oracle to this show, please recommend us to the nerdy people in your life who you think would want to hear about sperm whale births. And you can also rate us and review us wherever you listen. It really helps. Thanks for listening. I’m Flora Lichtman.

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