sperm whales

Sperm Whale Found Dead in Indonesia Had Plastic Bottles, Bags in Stomach

The 9.5-metre whale was found in waters near Kapota Island, part of the Wakatobi National Park, south east of Sulawesi.

Jakarta: A sperm whale found dead in a national park in Indonesia had nearly six kg of plastic waste, including 115 cups, in its stomach, park officials said on Tuesday.

The 9.5-metre (31.17 ft) whale was found in waters near Kapota Island, part of the Wakatobi National Park, south east of Sulawesi, the park said in a statement.

The park is famous among divers for its large area of reefs and diverse marine life including rays and whales.

The cause of death was not known, but park officials found plastic bottles, bags, sandals, and a sack with more than 1,000 pieces of string in the whale‘s stomach.

In June, the death of a pilot whale in Thailand with 80 pieces of plastic rubbish in its stomach garnered headlines locally, but drew more attention outside the country.

Also Read: More Than Half World’s Killer Whales Are Threatened by Leftover Industrial Chemicals

Five Asian nations – China, Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam and Thailand – account for up to 60% of plastic waste leaking into oceans, said a 2015 report by the environmental campaigner Ocean Conservancy and the McKinsey Center for Business and Environment.

Indonesia, ranked second behind China in the 2015 study of mismanaged plastic waste from populations living near coastal areas in 192 countries, has pledged $1 billion a year to reduce marine plastic debris by 70% by 2025.

Wakatobi park planned to bury the whale carcass at high tide on Tuesday, and the remains would be used for study purposes by the local marine academy.

Whales and Dolphins Could Hold Clues to What Makes Humans So Advanced

Complex behaviour such as regional accents and cultural food preferences in whales and dolphins seems to be linked to brain size.

Michel Humpback Whales. Credit: Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND

Humans are like no other species. We have constructed stratified states, colonised nearly every habitat on Earth and we’re now looking to move to other planets. In fact, we are so advanced that some of our innovations – such as fossil fuel technologies, intensive agriculture and weapons of mass destruction – may ultimately lead to our downfall.

Even our closest relatives, the primates, lack traits such as developed language, cumulative culture, music, symbolism and religion. Yet scientists still haven’t come to a consensus on why, when and how humans evolved these traits. But, luckily, there are non-human animals that have evolved societies and culture to some extent. Our latest study, published in Nature Evolution & Ecology, investigates what cetaceans (whales and dolphins) can teach us about human evolution.

The reason it is so difficult to trace the origins of human traits is that social behaviour does not fossilise. It is therefore very hard to understand when and why cultural behaviour first arose in the human lineage. Material culture such as art, burial items, technologically sophisticated weapons and pottery is very rare in the archaeological record.

Previous research in primates has shown that a large primate brain is associated with larger social groups, cultural and behavioural richness, and learning ability. A larger brain is also tied to energy-rich diets, long life spans, extended juvenile periods and large bodies. But researchers trying to uncover whether each of these different traits are causes or consequences of large brains find themselves at odds with each other – often arguing at cross purposes.

One prevailing explanation is the social brain hypothesis, which argues that our minds and consequently our brains have evolved to solve the problems associated with living in an information rich, challenging and dynamic social environment. This comes with challenges such as competing for and allocating food and resources, coordinating behaviour, resolving conflicts and using information and innovations generated by others in the group.

Primates with large brains tend to be highly social animals. Credit: Wikipedia

However, despite the abundance of evidence for a link between brain size and social skills, the arguments rumble on about the role of social living in cognitive evolution. Alternative theories suggest that primate brains have evolved in response to the complexity of forest environments – either in terms of searching for fruit or visually navigating a three dimensional world.

Under the sea

But it’s not just primates that live in rich social worlds. Insects, birds, elephants, horses and cetaceans do, too.

The latter are especially interesting as, not only do we know that they do interesting things, some live in multi-generational societies and they also have the largest brains in the animal kingdom. In addition, they do not eat fruit, nor do they live in forests. For that reason, we decided to evaluate the evidence for the social or cultural brain in cetaceans.

Another advantage with cetaceans is that research groups around the world have spent decades documenting and uncovering their social worlds. These include signature whistles, which appear to identify individual animals, cooperative hunting, complex songs and vocalisations, social play and social learning. We compiled all this information into a database and evaluated whether a species’ cultural richness is associated with its brain size and the kind of society they live in.

We found that species with larger brains live in more structured societies and have more cultural and learned behaviours. The group of species with the largest relative brain size are the large, whale-like dolphins. These include the false killer whale and pilot whale.

To illustrate the two ends of the spectrum, killer whales have cultural food preferences – where some populations prefer fish and other seals. They also hunt cooperatively and have matriarchs leading the group. Sperm whales have actual dialects, which means that different populations have distinct vocalisations. In contrast, some of the large baleen whales, which have smaller brains, eat krill rather than fish or other mammals, live fairly solitary lives and only come together for breeding seasons and at rich food sources.

The lives of beaked whales are still a big mystery. Credit: Ted Cheeseman/wikipedia, CC BY-SA

We still have much to learn about these amazing creatures. Some of the species were not included in our analysis because we know so little about them. For example, there is a whole group of beaked whales with very large brains. However, because they dive and forage in deep water, sightings are rare and we know almost nothing about their behaviour and social relationships.

Nevertheless, this study certainly supports the idea that the richness of a species’ social world is predicted by their brain size. The fact that we’ve found it in an independent group so different from primates makes it all the more important.

Susanne Shultz is a University Research Fellow in University of Manchester.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Q&A: A Plastic Ocean – Can a Movie Help Us See This Invisible Crisis?

“It’s the images that sell a film, if you don’t have those, you’re dead in the water. So we thought, what about the effects on big charismatic animals, the baleen whales that feed on plankton?”

It’s the images that sell a film, if you don’t have those, you’re dead in the water. So we thought, what about the effects on big charismatic animals, the baleen whales that feed on plankton?

Plastic pollution a water body. Credit: olenalavrova/shutterstock

Scientists have warned about the dangers of plastic pollution and microplastics in the environment for a while now. But most people still aren’t convinced of the link between carelessly discarding a water bottle and damage in the seas. After all, plastic in the ocean doesn’t have the powerful symbolism of nuclear plants or oil spills: most of it is below the waves, often invisible to the naked eye.

A new documentary feature film, A Plastic Ocean, wants to change all that. It follows several popular films on the oceans that have successfully shifted attitudes and even shaped legislation. The End of the Line triggered a wave of media attention on unsustainable fishing practices, while SeaWorld finally agreed to halt its orca breeding programme after the “Blackfish effect”.

I’m a media sociologist specialising in science communication. As part of my research I recently spoke to the movie’s producer, former BBC Blue Planet producer Jo Ruxton. She discusses the film, and her hopes that it will create a cultural shift in public perceptions and behaviour concerning plastic pollution.

Lesley Henderson: You’ve always been interested in the ocean through your work as a filmmaker and have spent several years living on islands around the world. Was there something specific that prompted you to create this film?

Jo Ruxton: I’d heard about the so-called “Great Pacific Garbage Patch”, a floating continent twice the size of Texas and ten metres deep. I started looking into it but couldn’t find any pictures or anything on Google Earth. I went out to the centre of the North Pacific to look for it on an expedition with scientists and volunteers and but we still couldn’t see it.

Then we started to do surface plankton trawls about 400 miles off San Francisco just to see what was in there. The closer we got to the centre the more plastic we found. Every trawl was coming up jam-packed with plastics but when you actually looked out on the water you could hardly see anything. There were a few floating bits around but it certainly wasn’t a ten metre deep continent.

I talked to the scientists and found out that plastic becomes very brittle in sea water because it’s subjected to sunlight, waves and salt and it takes about 20 years to get from the coast to the centre. It breaks up until it’s smaller and smaller and now of course it’s mixing with the plankton. That to me was a much more insidious story because if it’s mixing with the plankton it’s clearly getting into the food chain which can’t be good for the plankton and the fish that are feeding on it.

A group of sperm whales recently stranded in Germany were starving – their stomachs were full of plastic. Credit: Christian Charisius/EPA

LH: So were there particular visual challenges of filming microplastics? How did you overcome these?

JR: It’s the images that sell a film, if you don’t have those, you’re dead in the water. So we thought, what about the effects on big charismatic animals, the baleen whales that feed on plankton? We used interesting scientists: seeing a woman walk along the side of the jetty with a crossbow slung over her shoulder and finding out she’s a professor about to go and shoot dolphins to take blubber samples makes you sit up and watch.

Another scientist was doing night dives and trawls looking at lantern fish travelling up from the depths and finding pieces of plastic in their stomachs. The visual images of squid hunting at night in torch light are quite special. To get people interested it was a case of finding the right animals, getting the images, and getting some fun stuff in there including “boys toys” like a submersible.

LH: How did you approach presenting the scientific information about the risks to human health posed by microplastics?

JR: We used lay people (champion free diver Tanya Streeter and journalist Craig Leeson) to ask the questions. Though we’ve really simplified the science, every statement we make has been backed by peer-reviewed papers.

Tanya Streeter checking the health of a reef in Fiji. Credit: David Jones, Author provided

This link between chemicals leaching out of plastics and plastics attracting chemicals was particularly difficult to explain. Tuvalu was the most important sequence: here was a place drowning under its own plastic waste. They’re just burning it, and kids are playing with bonfires as they come home from school. We filmed a family group of 30 and five had cancer and two more had died of it in the previous 18 months. We know that furans and dioxins have been linked to cancer and we know that those gases are produced when we burn plastic but no one’s linked the two.

LH: In the film you show deposit schemes in Germany where people receive money for recycling plastic bottles – was part of your aim to try to create value for plastic?

JR: The movie has for key messages: it’s about health, value, charismatic animals and it’s about the environment. I care about all four but even if people don’t care about their own health they might care about money, if they don’t care about people and the environment then they care about money.

LH: Why a feature documentary film rather than other forms of media or education?

JR: There are a lot of short films on the internet but I think there is now more of an appetite for big environmental films. The End of the Line brought huge change, the whole Hugh’s Fish Fight changed policy in Europe, Blackfish too – it’s not just the tree huggers who are going to see it. An Inconvenient Truth was basically a power point presentation but was powerful enough to get a lot of people sitting up and thinking.

So why not have one about plastic pollution? It is a growing concern, we’re finding out more and more about it and perhaps this is the way forward. I can go and give lectures to 100 people at a time but a successful film can reach many more people.

LH: How do you envisage that audiences will engage with A Plastic Ocean?

JR: I think it will be an eye opener. One of the reasons environmental films are so hard to get commissioned is because they’re very doom and gloom. It’s people who already care who come and watch them and they come out feeling like they’ve been punched in the stomach and guilty every time they eat a fish or start the car up. But the last 20 minutes of this film is dedicated to “what we can do” in terms of legislation, technology, or changes in our behaviour.

LH: So what you’re trying to do is trigger a cultural change?

JR: Yes cultural change is probably the biggest thing along with legislation. If there is an oil spill it’s all hands on deck to clean it up and restore the habitat. If plastic was reclassified as hazardous that’s exactly what we would be doing: restoring habitats and doing something positive with all that plastic.

Lesley Henderson is Senior Lecturer in Sociology & Communications, Institute for Environment, Health & Societies, Brunel University London.

This article was originally published on The Conversation.

How to Tell if You’ve Struck Gold with ‘Whale Vomit’ or Stumbled Upon Sewage

Described as floating gold, it’s a highly-prized natural treasure used by past kings and still sought after by artisan perfumers.

Only sperm whales do it. Credit: William Hartman/Flickr, CC BY

When walking along the beach, some objects might seem unusual because they are neither pebble nor shell nor seaweed. They can be covered with a soft white layer that looks a bit like cotton wool. They may appear hard or waxy, and sometimes have objects trapped within. And a smell that has been described as “a cross between squid and farmyard manure”. Dogs with their keen sense of smell often find these objects first.

If you find one of these, you might hope for ambergris – sometimes referred to as “whale vomit” – as one couple recently reported finding in Morecambe Bay in Lancashire, UK. Described as floating gold, it’s a highly-prized natural treasure used by past kings and still sought after by artisan perfumers. According to reports, this latest could be worth £50,000 (US$71,000) for a 1.57kg lump. So what exactly is ambergris and why does it still cost more than gold or truffles?

The reason for the high prize lies in the origin of ambergris. It is a product of the sperm whale, as only sperm whales make the compound responsible for ambergris’ allure: ambrein. Different organisms biosynthesise different compounds, such as caffeine made by cocoa, coffee or tea plants. Ambrein is made by sperm whales only to glue together squid beaks. Squid is the main diet of sperm whales but as the beaks can’t be digested, they need to be passed out without causing injury. They do this by coating them with ambrein.

Ambergris starts as a mixture of squid beaks, ambrein and another digestive product called epicoprostanol. Once expelled – usually as faecal matter but also through vomiting, hence the name – ambergris floats in the ocean, turning from a “lump of poo” that smells of faeces into floating gold that has incorporated the varied smells of the sea.

Visually this means ambergris starts more as a black lump and slowly bleaches. This ageing process is suspected to have two chemical effects: the reduction in the scent of faeces, which is more water-soluble and gradually lost, and the incorporation of the scents of the sea, which is fat-loving and absorbed by the waxy ambergris in the making (much like butter in your fridge takes on the smell of other things). The longer it floats in the sea, the waxier it gets.

Considering that not every sperm whale poo includes lumps and that the numbers of sperm whales are much lower these days, it’s clear why this ambergris is so rare.

Ambergris has been used in some expensive perfumes as it allows scent to last longer, in part because the ambrein molecule on exposure to a certain type of activated oxygen, creates fragrance compounds that are lighter and are more volatile or smelly, and they may take other volatile molecules present in ambergris with them. But these days perfumiers mostly use synthetic versions. Ambergris was also thought to be an aphrodisiac and a study found found that it acted as a sexual stimulant in rats.

Fool’s gold

Not all that shines is gold, however. Suspect ambergris finders quickly get excited about their discovery. A “hot needle test” is recommended to confirm that it is ambergris – a test and this is where the challenge starts.

Touching the waxy lump with a hot needle should melt it, release white smoke and give off an interesting smell. Let’s consider other substances washed up on the beach that also react positively to this test: candle or paraffin wax, residues from palm oil distillation, rubber, or solidified sewer grease. As far as abundance is concerned, there is much more wax or vegetable oil about compared to ambergris.

Suspect package but not the real thing. Credit: Vera Thoss, Author provided

Some of these compounds find their way into the sea through pollution: by falling overboard; becoming dislodged from sewer pipes; or discarded elsewhere. All of these waxy substances will be smoothed by exposure to the sea for longer periods of time and bleach. The sea also has a habit of bleaching any object, hence the whiteness of driftwood.

One test for ambergris is to poke it with a hot needle and a liquid should ooze out – try the “hot needle test” with a candle at home. But many waxy objects melt when exposed to heat. As for the white smoke, most objects immersed in water take on some of it. Most wet objects burned give off white smoke, similar to what you might think of coal-fired power stations.

And then there is the smell of ambergris – one would expect ambergris to smell unlike anything else smelled before. However, our sense of smell usually works by association. Some may find it revolting, some might start to think it smells like perfume, because they’re thinking of it in that way. I have been sent many samples where the sender referred to the smell as attractive and I found it revolting. With few people having smelled ambergris, then, it’s hard to say whether you’d smell rancid oil or something sweeter. Dogs, on the other hand, are quite attracted to smells we find rancid.

Ambergris is rare. Hoped-for ambergris is much more likely to be what you’ve found if you stumble upon that waxy, stinky blob. Increasingly, oil residues, be they derived from petroleum mining, vegetable oil refining or sewers, find their way to our beaches. Marine organisations are keenly aware of this pollution, but not everyone else is, unfortunately. If you do encounter a strange rock that smells unusual, think twice whether the smell is what you would like to put on your body or whether it is more unpleasant. If the latter, it is most likely not ambergris. If still in doubt, send me a sample.

Vera Thoss is Lecturer in Chemistry, Bangor University.

This article was originally published on The Conversation.

Do Sperm Whales Use Their Heads as Battering Rams?

Could a 56-ton Moby Dick ram and sink Ahab’s Pequod that would have weighed nearly 240 tons? Using computer simulations, a study says sperm whales have the ability to ram ships without suffering serious harm.

Animals do the most amazing things. Read about them in this series by Janaki Lenin.

A sperm whale. Credit: lakpura/Flickr, CC BY 2.0

Could a 56-ton Moby Dick ram and sink Ahab’s Pequod that would have weighed nearly 240 tons? Using computer simulations, a study says sperm whales have the ability to ram ships without suffering serious harm.

Nineteenth century whalers claimed sperm whales deliberately collided with whaling ships and sank them. The first such recorded incident occurred in 1820. A large 26-metre sperm whale sank the 238-ton whaling ship Essex in the South Pacific. The hull of the ship was made of white oak, one of the strongest woods available then. Owen Chase, the ship’s first mate, proposed the heads of these giants were uniquely designed for use as battering rams. More than 30 years after the sinking the Essex, a sperm whale sank another ship, the Ann Alexander.

In many species, male animals are physically different from females, a phenomenon called sexual dimorphism. Typically, such males fight over mates and their weapons are huge relative to body size. For instance, blackbuck have to defend their harem of tan-coloured does from rivals. While does have no horns, the bucks have a prominent set of ringed corkscrew-like horns.

Similarly, male sperm whales are three-times larger than females and skirmish over mates. Since the bulls have the world’s largest nose, they could use their massive snouts to butt each other – so suggest the authors of the paper. In similar contests, male humpback whales, narwhals and killer whales ram each other. However, there were few records of such fights between sperm whales.

“There is no physical reason sperm whales could not butt each other in aggressive or non-aggressive encounters,” Luke Rendell, of the University of St. Andrews, UK, told The Wire. “However, aside from the single account offered by the pilot in the paper, there is no report of this behaviour from any of the long periods of time researchers have spent with the animals. Hal Whitehead [Dalhousie University, Canada] describes an account of one whale grasping the tail stock of another in its jaws, while I have personally observed two males swimming toward each other blasting each other with very rapid and very loud clicks – but no butting.”

On January 30, 1997, wildlife pilot Sandy Lanham spotted two male sperm whales as she flew over the Gulf of California, Mexico. She estimated they were more than 6 km apart and swimming toward each other at 17 km/hr. They dove just below the surface before colliding head-on with each other. Could this be a common behaviour? Biologists are skeptical because sperm whales’ heads house sensitive communication and navigation tools.

Sperm whales dive to over 1,000 metres and are the second-deepest diving animals. While hunting in the dark depths, they need to communicate with others in the pod and also find their prey, giant squids. Through a pair of lip-like valves located in the head, they make click sounds. Different populations have distinct dialects and each sperm whale has its own unique accent or pattern of clicks. Their echolocation gear and buoyancy control sit at the front end of their noses.

In addition, two enormous oil and wax-filled organs – the spermaceti organ and the junk sac – take up most of the space in their gigantic noses. From the early 18th century, whaling ships targeted sperm whales for their spermaceti. Oil drained from their heads lit the streets of London, New York, Berlin and Paris, and became a key ingredient in candles, soaps and lubricants. Whalers thought the oil was semen and hence the name ‘spermaceti’. On the other hand, whales use the two oil-filled glands to direct and amplify their sonar clicks and stun their prey with a high decibel buzz. If these whales used their heads to batter each other, they could cause irreparable damage to these sensitive communication, stunning and navigation structures.

Schematic representation of sperm whale head structure. Credit: Ali Nabavizadeh

“The forehead of the sperm whale is one of the strangest structures in the animal kingdom,” says Olga Panagiotopoulou, University of Queensland, Australia, and the main author of the latest paper.

Back in 2002, David Carrier, professor of Biology at University of Utah, US, suspected that sperm whales must somehow absorb the shock to their brains and skulls. In spring 2003, Carrier’s brother and Lanham met at a friend’s house and somehow the conversation turned to sperm whales. Carrier learnt of Lanham’s story when his brother alerted him. “We then knew that our ramming hypothesis had some merit and looked into the available technology to test it,” says Carrier.

An interdisciplinary research team, including Carrier, used structural engineering principles and computer models to test how the sperm whale’s head might withstand the impacts of ramming. The junk sac has a series of vertical partitions made of connective tissue. The researchers say these tissues reduce stress to the skull and protect bone and soft tissue when a whale rams against another. Without these partitions, stress to the skull was 45% greater and could cause fatal fractures.

“[O]ur findings show that connective tissue partitions within the junk of the sperm whale forehead may function as a shock absorber,” says Panagiotopoulou. “Although male sperm whales may not fight frequently, we know that aggressive ramming behaviour is a common characteristic in the group of mammals from which whales are derived – the even-toed ungulates, the artiodactyls. A closer look into the anatomy of the heads of other species of whales that ram may reveal a variety of protective mechanisms.”

However, Rendell isn’t convinced. “The authors showed that, in theory, a structure with partitions in it is better at absorbing shock than one without,” he says. “But then they spin this into an evolutionary just-so story which has absolutely minimal empirical support by claiming that the sperm whale head evolved as a ramming device for males. The fact that females have one too is just a ‘male nipple’ epiphenomenon, and the fact that the whole thing is brilliant for echolocation in both sexes is a fortuitous coincidence.”

“It is scientifically incorrect for a biologist to reject a hypothesis and call a peer-reviewed study ‘fortuitous coincidence’ without scientific evidence to back up such claims,” counter Panagiotopoulou and Carrier. They add that sexually dimorphic traits evolve for a reason and they could have multiple functions.

Witnessing a ramming

Devising a model for simulating impacts on a sperm whale head wasn’t easy. Little is known of the anatomy and structure of sperm whale foreheads. “To study the mechanical role of the connective tissue partitions during quasi-static impact stresses,” says Panagiotopoulou, “we used a novel combination of finite element analysis and probabilistic simulation. These are approaches engineers use to test the endurance of bridges and tunnels, but functional anatomists also use such approaches to investigate the deformations of anatomical tissues during dynamic events. Due to the limited published information on the structural configuration of the sperm whale forehead, we conducted a series of sensitivity analyses on the type and direction of impact force on the sperm whale head to ensure model accuracy.”

Even more challenging than designing and testing the theory is witnessing two oceanic mammoths having a go at each other. There may be a reason why biologists haven’t witnessed a ramming incident. “If these ramming contests generally occur at a shallow depth, they may be much more common than whale biologists realise because a human observer would have to be located well above the surface of the water to watch it happen,” say the authors of the paper.

“I doubt this could explain it,” says Rendell. “The whales in the pilot’s account dove when they were an estimated 6 metres from each other. We have definitely noticed whales swimming straight toward each other in this way, coupled with incredibly loud acoustic displays. But there was no dive and no head-butting. Also, we observe from elevated platforms, and have observed head-butting in another species – northern bottlenose whales.”

In this case, the bony anatomy of the male head is indeed consistent with head-butting – so the notion that current observation methods would have missed a significant amount of head-butting in males does not bear scrutiny.” So the bottomline is: sperm whales can ram each other, but whether they do as a normal part of their aggressive repertoire remains uncertain. The paper was published in the journal PeerJ on April 5, 2016.

Janaki Lenin is the author of My Husband and Other Animals. She lives in a forest with snake-man Rom Whitaker and tweets at @janakilenin.