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

Ten whales helped a mama sperm whale give birth—giving us a glimpse into whale culture and why animals help each other out.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Ira Flatow?

  Science Friday is supported by MathWorks, creator of MATLAB and Simulink software for technical computing and model-based design. MathWorks, accelerating the pace of discovery in engineering and science. Learn more at mathworks.com.

• 0:19Flora Lichtman?

  Hey, it's Flora Lichtman, and you're listening to Science Friday.

• 0:27Flora Lichtman?

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

• 0:36Flora Lichtman?

  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 Garo, a whale biologist at Carleton University in Canada and at the research group Project SETI. He's an author on the new research. Shane, welcome to Science Friday.

• 1:18Speaker 02

  Thank you for having me.

• 1:20Flora Lichtman?

  Okay, well, first of all, this is the required question after a birth. How is baby?

• 1:26Speaker 02

  Baby's 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.

• 1:37Flora Lichtman?

  Were you watching this birth live?

• 1:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, I was out on a boat. You know, 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 was, it surprised us in the moment.

• 1:57Flora Lichtman?

  Yeah. What did you see? Sort of set the scene for us.

• 2:00Speaker 02

  It was a pretty calm day. You know, 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.

• 2:21Flora Lichtman?

  Just like my family reunions. Yeah.

• 2:23Speaker 02

  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, you know, very few whale births have been seen in the wild in the last hundred years.

• 2:39Flora Lichtman?

  Wow. Okay. So what did you see? So you see them, they're bobbing around at the surface quietly. And then what happens?

• 2:45Speaker 02

  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, you know, this little baby sperm whale had 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.

• 3:13Flora Lichtman?

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

• 3:22Speaker 02

  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.

• 3:44Flora Lichtman?

  One of them is named Lady Oracle and the other is named Fruit Salad?

• 3:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, I mean, look, these weren't nicknames that we gave thinking that they would be on Science Friday. I mean, these are names that initially, when we were meeting, you know, dozens of new whales at the beginning of the project, that allowed us to remember them. So like Fruit Salad seems like a very odd one. But literally it started because, you know, 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.

• 4:16Flora Lichtman?

  I feel like fruit salad may have a bone to pick with that name, but okay, keep going.

• 4:20Speaker 02

  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 you know, these names make a really important distinction, which is that if fruit salad dies, she can't be replaced by anyone in her family. You know, 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, you know, from some of the early ones are are sort of silly.

• 4:48Flora Lichtman?

  Okay, so fruit salad and lady oracle are the two matriarchs of this group, but they're not related.

• 4:53Speaker 02

  That's right. These are two unrelated families that have chosen to live together. And that's sort of been this fundamental question about sperm whales for decades. You know, 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.

• 5:16Flora Lichtman?

  Right, right. I remember that from college biology.

• 5:20Speaker 02

  That's right. I feel like we learned that pretty quickly on the schoolyard, right? And yet, and yet humans live in this really complicated cooperative society. Even at a time where we seem to not be getting along very well, there are many things we do every day that rely on sort of 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.

• 5:45Flora Lichtman?

  Right.

• 5:45Speaker 02

  So how does that happen in sperm whale life? What is the sort of fitness currency, you know, that the whales exchange reliably to trust one another and live together? And what we saw in this birth is is twofold, you know, one was that these animals, unrelated and related, seem to be attending to the birth and, you know, doing behaviors like diving underneath mom and looking at her general area, and then assisting during the birth, right? That there's a lot of physical interaction with the mom during labor.

• 6:17Flora Lichtman?

  What do they do? I mean, how are they helping?

• 6:20Speaker 02

  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 sort of inspecting where the baby should be coming from, right? 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 we're present at that sort of 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, right? And we show, you know, 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.

• 7:01Flora Lichtman?

  Tale as old as time.

• 7:04Speaker 02

  That's right, yeah. Thank you for all your hard work, mom, but look at this amazing cute baby.

• 7:10Flora Lichtman?

  Well, what do they help the newborn? What services do they provide once the baby's born?

• 7:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, we knew from earlier work that babies are negatively buoyant, meaning like 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, you know, for minutes after birth.

• 7:39Flora Lichtman?

  Wow, and not just, and not just the Lady Oracle line of direct relations?

• 7:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, that's it, right? Genetics can't explain it alone, right? They sort of took turns in terms of, you know, 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 Alan, who is also Lady Oracle's son, which is Rounder's brother, also showed up, even though he had already sort of 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.

• 8:23Flora Lichtman?

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

• 8:29Speaker 02

  Well, so this kind of attendance to the mom and birth assistants is, you know, 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 sort 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.

• 8:53Flora Lichtman?

  Yeah, I mean, does this study challenge the idea that animals are in it to win it just for themselves and their kin? I mean, big picture, what do you think it tells us?

• 9:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, I think what it shows is that the rich complexity of sort of non-human animal society is very real. The unique part of this study is we really show the behaviors that can kind of be exchanged. You know, 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, right? 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.

• 9:37Flora Lichtman?

  Memory, deep memory. Yeah.

• 9:40Speaker 02

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

• 9:46Flora Lichtman?

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

• 9:52Speaker 02

  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, right? 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

• 10:36Speaker 02

  in human societies, the richness of our Our lives can't be explained just by genetics, right? 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.

• 11:02Flora Lichtman?

  Okay, not to be all anthropocentric, but has studying sperm whales changed the way you think about us, about people?

• 11:10Speaker 02

  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, right?

• 11:27Flora Lichtman?

  Your very own fruit salad and lady oracle.

• 11:29Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 11:32Speaker 02

  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, I mean fundamentally, you know, these animals are different from us. You know, 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, you know, 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.

• 12:14Flora Lichtman?

  That's the perfect place to land. Dr. Shane Garro is a whale biologist at Carleton University and Project SETI. He's also the founder of the Dominica Sperm Whale Project. Shane, thanks for joining me today.

• 12:26Speaker 02

  Thank you so much for having me.

• 12:28Flora 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.