#dominica sperm whale project

[leparoledelmondo]

La cacca dei capodogli salverà il mondo

C’è una nuova area marina protetta di 800 kmq per i capodogli, in Dominica, mar dei Caraibi. Serve a proteggere gli animali ma anche noi nella lotta alla crisi climatica grazie alla cacca di questi capodogli. Defecando vicino alla superficie nutrono i moltissimi plancton che catturano la anidride carbonica e quindi fanno respirare gli oceani. Grazie a The Dominica Sperm Whale Project e grazie anche ai capodogli che combattono il cambiamento climatico per conto nostro.

Photo by Rudolf Kirchner on pexels

[mindblowingscience]

The tiny Caribbean island of Dominica is creating the world's first marine protected area for one of earth's largest animals: the endangered sperm whale. Nearly 300 square miles (800 square kilometers) of royal blue waters on the western side of the island nation that serve as key nursing and feeding grounds will be designated as a reserve, the government announced Monday. "We want to ensure these majestic and highly intelligent animals are safe from harm and continue keeping our waters and our climate healthy," Dominica Prime Minister Roosevelt Skerrit said in a statement. Scientists say the reserve not only will protect the animals, but it will also help fight climate change. Sperm whales defecate near the surface because they shut down non-vital functions when they dive to depths of up to 10,000 feet (3,000 meters). As a result, nutrient-rich poop remains along the ocean surface and creates plankton blooms, which capture carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and drag it to the ocean floor when they die. And sperm whales in Dominica are believed to defecate more than whales elsewhere, said Shane Gero, a whale biologist and founder of the Dominica Sperm Whale Project, a research program focused on sperm whales in the eastern Caribbean.

Continue Reading.

[jdpink]

As anyone who has been conscious for the past ten months knows, ChatGPT is capable of amazing feats. It can write essays, compose sonnets, explain scientific concepts, and produce jokes (though these last are not necessarily funny). If you ask ChatGPT how it was created, it will tell you that first it was trained on a “massive corpus” of data from the Internet. This phase consisted of what’s called “unsupervised machine learning,” which was performed by an intricate array of processing nodes known as a neural network. Basically, the “learning” involved filling in the blanks; according to ChatGPT, the exercise entailed “predicting the next word in a sentence given the context of the previous words.” By digesting millions of Web pages—and calculating and recalculating the odds—ChatGPT got so good at this guessing game that, without ever understanding English, it mastered the language. (Other languages it is “fluent” in include Chinese, Spanish, and French.)

In theory at least, what goes for English (and Chinese and French) also goes for sperm whale. Provided that a computer model can be trained on enough data, it should be able to master coda prediction. It could then—once again in theory—generate sequences of codas that a sperm whale would find convincing. The model wouldn’t understand sperm whale-ese, but it could, in a manner of speaking, speak it. Call it ClickGPT.

Currently, the largest collection of sperm-whale codas is an archive assembled by Gero in his years on and off Dominica. The codas contain roughly a hundred thousand clicks. In a paper published last year, members of the CETI team estimated that, to fulfill its goals, the project would need to assemble some four billion clicks, which is to say, a collection roughly forty thousand times larger than Gero’s.

““Everybody’s talking these days about these generative A.I. models like ChatGPT,” Goldwasser, who now directs the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing, at the University of California, Berkeley, went on. “What are they doing? You are giving them questions or prompts, and then they give you answers, and the way that they do that is by predicting how to complete sentences or what the next word would be. So you could say that’s a goal for CETI—that you don’t necessarily understand what the whales are saying, but that you could predict it with good success. And, therefore, you could maybe generate a conversation that would be understood by a whale, but maybe you don’t understand it. So that’s kind of a weird success.””

Can We Talk to Whales?

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/09/11/can-we-talk-to-whales

via Instapaper

[cletusthurstonbeauregard]

(CNN) — Scientists have accomplished a whale of a feat. They’ve identified previously unknown complexity in whale communication by analyzing thousands of recorded sequences of sperm whale clicks with artificial intelligence.

Variations in tempo, rhythm and length of the whales’ click sequences, called codas, weave a rich acoustic tapestry. These variables hint that whales can combine click patterns in multiple ways, mixing and matching phrases to convey a broad range of information to one another.

What sperm whales are saying with their clicks remains a mystery to human ears. Still, uncovering the scope of whales’ vocal exchanges is an important step toward linking whale calls to specific messages or social behaviors, the scientists reported May 7 in the journal Nature Communications.

“This work builds on a lot of prior work focused on understanding the calls of sperm whales. However, this is the first work that has started to look at sperm whale calls in their wider communicative context and in the context of exchanges between whales, which has made some of the findings possible,” said study coauthor Dr. Daniela Rus, director of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) at MIT, in an email.

“Understanding what aspects of their codas they can control and vary helps us understand how they can encode information in their calls,” Rus said.

The researchers dubbed their catalog of sound combinations a “phonetic alphabet” for sperm whales, comparing variations in the whales’ click sequences to the production of different phonetic sounds in human speech.

But while the team’s findings are interesting, that term offers a misleading perspective on whales’ vocal interactions, said Dr. Luke Rendell, a researcher at the University of St. Andrews in the United Kingdom whose work focuses on communication in marine mammals, in an email.

“The presentation of the ‘phonetic alphabet’ — it’s nothing of the sort,” said Rendell, who was not involved in the research.

“The way the tempo variation is used is completely different to how, say, we use elements of an alphabet to construct linguistic expression,” he said. “There’s no evidence of that, and it’s not a super helpful interpretation because it forces everything into a restricted and somewhat over-sold perspective of ‘is it like human language or not,’ when there are a much broader range of interpretations available.”

Pattern recognition

Sperm whales produce their clicks by forcing air through an organ in their heads called the spermaceti, and these sounds can be as loud as 230 decibels — louder than a rocket launch and capable of rupturing human eardrums — another team of scientists previously reported in the journal Scientific Reports.

For the new study, the researchers used machine learning to detect patterns in audio data collected by The Dominica Sperm Whale Project, a repository for observations of sperm whales that inhabit the Caribbean Sea. The recordings represented the voices of approximately 60 sperm whales — a subset of a group of about 400 whales known as the Eastern Caribbean clan — and the vocalizations were recorded between 2005 and 2018.

Prior research had identified 150 types of codas in sperm whales worldwide, but the Caribbean whales used just 21 of those codes.

The scientists examined the timing and frequency of 8,719 coda sequences — in solitary whale utterances, in choruses and in call-and-response exchanges between whales. When visualized with artificial intelligence, previously unseen coda patterns emerged.

The study authors defined four features in codas: rhythm, tempo, rubato and ornamentation. Rhythm describes the sequence of intervals between clicks. Tempo is the duration of the entire coda. Rubato refers to variations in duration across adjacent codas of the same rhythm and tempo. And ornamentation is an “extra click” added at the end of a coda in a group of shorter codas, Rus explained.

These so-called ornament clicks “occur more towards the beginning and end of turns” during vocal exchanges between whales, “behaving like discourse markers,” Rus said.

The discovery that whales could synchronize variations in coda tempo was “a really interesting observation,” Rendell said.

“I am less convinced by the ‘ornamentation,’” he added. “It occurs very rarely, and I think we need more evidence that they aren’t just production glitches,” or filler sounds, “like when we say ‘um’ or ‘err.’”

In all, the program detected 18 types of rhythm, five types of tempo, three types of rubato and two types of ornamentation. These coda features could all be mixed and matched to form an “enormous repertoire” of phrases, the study authors reported. What’s more, meaning could be tweaked even further depending on the placement of a coda — following or overlapping other codas — within an exchange or chorus involving two or more whales.

Interactive experimentation

“Actually, many of us have been waiting for advanced technology to allow us to do something like this for decades!” said Dr. Brenda McCowan, a professor at the University of California Davis School of Veterinary Medicine, in an email.

McCowan, who was not involved in the research, was part of another team that, in 2021, conducted an interactive “conversation” with a humpback whale in waters near Alaska. For about 20 minutes, a curious whale repeatedly responded to a recording of a humpback song transmitted from the scientists’ boat.

“This particular playback (with the humpback in 2021) was an opportunistic experiment with an inquisitive whale engaging us both behaviorally and vocally, and completely at her own volition,” McCowan said.

Such interactive experimentation with whales, along with observations of whale behavior, could be an important part of unraveling the syntax of sperm whale click sequences, the authors wrote in the study.

Their machine learning method may also prove useful for studying other types of animal vocalizations, McCowan added.

“Tempo, rhythm, rubato and ornamentation are likely to be found in other species of whales,” McCowan said. “We already know this is true of humpback song. But there is also evidence for this type of patterning in other aquatic, terrestrial and arboreal species to which this approach could be applied.”

But although this technique is helpful for identifying certain aspects of communication, it’s no Rosetta stone, Rendell cautioned.

“Machine learning is great for finding patterns in large datasets,” he said, “but it doesn’t create meaning.”

[sunaleisocial]

Exploring the mysterious alphabet of sperm whales

New Post has been published on https://sunalei.org/news/exploring-the-mysterious-alphabet-of-sperm-whales/

Exploring the mysterious alphabet of sperm whales

The allure of whales has stoked human consciousness for millennia, casting these ocean giants as enigmatic residents of the deep seas. From the biblical Leviathan to Herman Melville’s formidable Moby Dick, whales have been central to mythologies and folklore. And while cetology, or whale science, has improved our knowledge of these marine mammals in the past century in particular, studying whales has remained a formidable a challenge.

Now, thanks to machine learning, we’re a little closer to understanding these gentle giants. Researchers from the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and Project CETI (Cetacean Translation Initiative) recently used algorithms to decode the “sperm whale phonetic alphabet,” revealing sophisticated structures in sperm whale communication akin to human phonetics and communication systems in other animal species. 

In a new open-access study published in Nature Communications, the research shows that sperm whales codas, or short bursts of clicks that they use to communicate, vary significantly in structure depending on the conversational context, revealing a communication system far more intricate than previously understood. 

Play video

The Secret Language of Sperm Whales, Decoded Video: MIT CSAIL

Nine thousand codas, collected from Eastern Caribbean sperm whale families observed by the Dominica Sperm Whale Project, proved an instrumental starting point in uncovering the creatures’ complex communication system. Alongside the data gold mine, the team used a mix of algorithms for pattern recognition and classification, as well as on-body recording equipment. It turned out that sperm whale communications were indeed not random or simplistic, but rather structured in a complex, combinatorial manner. 

The researchers identified something of a “sperm whale phonetic alphabet,” where various elements that researchers call  “rhythm,” “tempo,” “rubato,” and “ornamentation” interplay to form a vast array of distinguishable codas. For example, the whales would systematically modulate certain aspects of their codas based on the conversational context, such as smoothly varying the duration of the calls — rubato — or adding extra ornamental clicks. But even more remarkably, they found that the basic building blocks of these codas could be combined in a combinatorial fashion, allowing the whales to construct a vast repertoire of distinct vocalizations.

The experiments were conducted using acoustic bio-logging tags (specifically something called “D-tags”) deployed on whales from the Eastern Caribbean clan. These tags captured the intricate details of the whales’ vocal patterns. By developing new visualization and data analysis techniques, the CSAIL researchers found that individual sperm whales could emit various coda patterns in long exchanges, not just repeats of the same coda. These patterns, they say, are nuanced, and include fine-grained variations that other whales also produce and recognize.

“We are venturing into the unknown, to decipher the mysteries of sperm whale communication without any pre-existing ground truth data,” says Daniela Rus, CSAIL director and professor of electrical engineering and computer science (EECS) at MIT. “Using machine learning is important for identifying the features of their communications and predicting what they say next. Our findings indicate the presence of structured information content and also challenges the prevailing belief among many linguists that complex communication is unique to humans. This is a step toward showing that other species have levels of communication complexity that have not been identified so far, deeply connected to behavior. Our next steps aim to decipher the meaning behind these communications and explore the societal-level correlations between what is being said and group actions.”

Whaling around

Sperm whales have the largest brains among all known animals. This is accompanied by very complex social behaviors between families and cultural groups, necessitating strong communication for coordination, especially in pressurized environments like deep sea hunting.

Whales owe much to Roger Payne, former Project CETI advisor, whale biologist, conservationist, and MacArthur Fellow who was a major figure in elucidating their musical careers. In the noted 1971 Science article “Songs of Humpback Whales,” Payne documented how whales can sing. His work later catalyzed the “Save the Whales” movement, a successful and timely conservation initiative.

“Roger’s research highlights the impact science can have on society. His finding that whales sing led to the marine mammal protection act and helped save several whale species from extinction. This interdisciplinary research now brings us one step closer to knowing what sperm whales are saying,” says David Gruber, lead and founder of Project CETI and distinguished professor of biology at the City University of New York.

Today, CETI’s upcoming research aims to discern whether elements like rhythm, tempo, ornamentation, and rubato carry specific communicative intents, potentially providing insights into the “duality of patterning” — a linguistic phenomenon where simple elements combine to convey complex meanings previously thought unique to human language.

Aliens among us

“One of the intriguing aspects of our research is that it parallels the hypothetical scenario of contacting alien species. It’s about understanding a species with a completely different environment and communication protocols, where their interactions are distinctly different from human norms,” says Pratyusha Sharma, an MIT PhD student in EECS, CSAIL affiliate, and the study’s lead author. “We’re exploring how to interpret the basic units of meaning in their communication. This isn’t just about teaching animals a subset of human language, but decoding a naturally evolved communication system within their unique biological and environmental constraints. Essentially, our work could lay the groundwork for deciphering how an ‘alien civilization’ might communicate, providing insights into creating algorithms or systems to understand entirely unfamiliar forms of communication.”

“Many animal species have repertoires of several distinct signals, but we are only beginning to uncover the extent to which they combine these signals to create new messages,” says Robert Seyfarth, a University of Pennsylvania professor emeritus of psychology who was not involved in the research. “Scientists are particularly interested in whether signal combinations vary according to the social or ecological context in which they are given, and the extent to which signal combinations follow discernible ‘rules’ that are recognized by listeners. The problem is particularly challenging in the case of marine mammals, because scientists usually cannot see their subjects or identify in complete detail the context of communication. Nonetheless, this paper offers new, tantalizing details of call combinations and the rules that underlie them in sperm whales.”

Joining Sharma, Rus, and Gruber are two others from MIT, both CSAIL principal investigators and professors in EECS: Jacob Andreas and Antonio Torralba. They join Shane Gero, biology lead at CETI, founder of the Dominica Sperm Whale Project, and scientist-in residence at Carleton University. The paper was funded by Project CETI via Dalio Philanthropies and Ocean X, Sea Grape Foundation, Rosamund Zander/Hansjorg Wyss, and Chris Anderson/Jacqueline Novogratz through The Audacious Project: a collaborative funding initiative housed at TED, with further support from the J.H. and E.V. Wade Fund at MIT.

[jcmarchi]

Exploring the mysterious alphabet of sperm whales

New Post has been published on https://thedigitalinsider.com/exploring-the-mysterious-alphabet-of-sperm-whales/

Exploring the mysterious alphabet of sperm whales

The allure of whales has stoked human consciousness for millennia, casting these ocean giants as enigmatic residents of the deep seas. From the biblical Leviathan to Herman Melville’s formidable Moby Dick, whales have been central to mythologies and folklore. And while cetology, or whale science, has improved our knowledge of these marine mammals in the past century in particular, studying whales has remained a formidable a challenge.

Now, thanks to machine learning, we’re a little closer to understanding these gentle giants. Researchers from the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and Project CETI (Cetacean Translation Initiative) recently used algorithms to decode the “sperm whale phonetic alphabet,” revealing sophisticated structures in sperm whale communication akin to human phonetics and communication systems in other animal species. 

In a new open-access study published in Nature Communications, the research shows that sperm whales codas, or short bursts of clicks that they use to communicate, vary significantly in structure depending on the conversational context, revealing a communication system far more intricate than previously understood. 

Play video

The Secret Language of Sperm Whales, Decoded Video: MIT CSAIL

Nine thousand codas, collected from Eastern Caribbean sperm whale families observed by the Dominica Sperm Whale Project, proved an instrumental starting point in uncovering the creatures’ complex communication system. Alongside the data gold mine, the team used a mix of algorithms for pattern recognition and classification, as well as on-body recording equipment. It turned out that sperm whale communications were indeed not random or simplistic, but rather structured in a complex, combinatorial manner. 

The researchers identified something of a “sperm whale phonetic alphabet,” where various elements that researchers call  “rhythm,” “tempo,” “rubato,” and “ornamentation” interplay to form a vast array of distinguishable codas. For example, the whales would systematically modulate certain aspects of their codas based on the conversational context, such as smoothly varying the duration of the calls — rubato — or adding extra ornamental clicks. But even more remarkably, they found that the basic building blocks of these codas could be combined in a combinatorial fashion, allowing the whales to construct a vast repertoire of distinct vocalizations.

The experiments were conducted using acoustic bio-logging tags (specifically something called “D-tags”) deployed on whales from the Eastern Caribbean clan. These tags captured the intricate details of the whales’ vocal patterns. By developing new visualization and data analysis techniques, the CSAIL researchers found that individual sperm whales could emit various coda patterns in long exchanges, not just repeats of the same coda. These patterns, they say, are nuanced, and include fine-grained variations that other whales also produce and recognize.

“We are venturing into the unknown, to decipher the mysteries of sperm whale communication without any pre-existing ground truth data,” says Daniela Rus, CSAIL director and professor of electrical engineering and computer science (EECS) at MIT. “Using machine learning is important for identifying the features of their communications and predicting what they say next. Our findings indicate the presence of structured information content and also challenges the prevailing belief among many linguists that complex communication is unique to humans. This is a step toward showing that other species have levels of communication complexity that have not been identified so far, deeply connected to behavior. Our next steps aim to decipher the meaning behind these communications and explore the societal-level correlations between what is being said and group actions.”

Whaling around

Sperm whales have the largest brains among all known animals. This is accompanied by very complex social behaviors between families and cultural groups, necessitating strong communication for coordination, especially in pressurized environments like deep sea hunting.

Whales owe much to Roger Payne, former Project CETI advisor, whale biologist, conservationist, and MacArthur Fellow who was a major figure in elucidating their musical careers. In the noted 1971 Science article “Songs of Humpback Whales,” Payne documented how whales can sing. His work later catalyzed the “Save the Whales” movement, a successful and timely conservation initiative.

“Roger’s research highlights the impact science can have on society. His finding that whales sing led to the marine mammal protection act and helped save several whale species from extinction. This interdisciplinary research now brings us one step closer to knowing what sperm whales are saying,” says David Gruber, lead and founder of Project CETI and distinguished professor of biology at the City University of New York.

Today, CETI’s upcoming research aims to discern whether elements like rhythm, tempo, ornamentation, and rubato carry specific communicative intents, potentially providing insights into the “duality of patterning” — a linguistic phenomenon where simple elements combine to convey complex meanings previously thought unique to human language.

Aliens among us

“One of the intriguing aspects of our research is that it parallels the hypothetical scenario of contacting alien species. It’s about understanding a species with a completely different environment and communication protocols, where their interactions are distinctly different from human norms,” says Pratyusha Sharma, an MIT PhD student in EECS, CSAIL affiliate, and the study’s lead author. “We’re exploring how to interpret the basic units of meaning in their communication. This isn’t just about teaching animals a subset of human language, but decoding a naturally evolved communication system within their unique biological and environmental constraints. Essentially, our work could lay the groundwork for deciphering how an ‘alien civilization’ might communicate, providing insights into creating algorithms or systems to understand entirely unfamiliar forms of communication.”

“Many animal species have repertoires of several distinct signals, but we are only beginning to uncover the extent to which they combine these signals to create new messages,” says Robert Seyfarth, a University of Pennsylvania professor emeritus of psychology who was not involved in the research. “Scientists are particularly interested in whether signal combinations vary according to the social or ecological context in which they are given, and the extent to which signal combinations follow discernible ‘rules’ that are recognized by listeners. The problem is particularly challenging in the case of marine mammals, because scientists usually cannot see their subjects or identify in complete detail the context of communication. Nonetheless, this paper offers new, tantalizing details of call combinations and the rules that underlie them in sperm whales.”

Joining Sharma, Rus, and Gruber are two others from MIT, both CSAIL principal investigators and professors in EECS: Jacob Andreas and Antonio Torralba. They join Shane Gero, biology lead at CETI, founder of the Dominica Sperm Whale Project, and scientist-in residence at Carleton University. The paper was funded by Project CETI via Dalio Philanthropies and Ocean X, Sea Grape Foundation, Rosamund Zander/Hansjorg Wyss, and Chris Anderson/Jacqueline Novogratz through The Audacious Project: a collaborative funding initiative housed at TED, with further support from the J.H. and E.V. Wade Fund at MIT.

[wildsuncatchers]

Earth historians and Memorykeepers of the Sea

Memorykeepers among memorykeepers, home in the ocean, holding knowledge and wisdom about the kelp forests where many of them live, and die. What stories they carry about the Earth! And beyond!

Garibaldi Fish (bottom) actually live in/around the Channel Islands off the coast of California, and they are also memorykeepers of the sea in Wild Sun Catchers. It's important to know that there are other Memorykeepers who live in different oceanic ecosystems, and really, many creatures who call the ocean home hold various memories.

Whales are (often thought of as) Memorykeepers and over the years I've noticed many people doing work with Whale Communication, like Project CETI (top), which is a "nonprofit organization applying advanced machine learning and state-of-the-art robotics to listen to and translate the communication of sperm whales". Their research takes place in Dominica in the Caribbean.

I thought about how, in this story and in reality, Earth historians and Memorykeepers of the ocean can hold A LOT, and found myself interested in showing AI images of them (i.e. merfolk) in friendship with each other and their other than human kin, the Giribaldi fish, smiling and laughing despite any difficult or traumatic memories (from a looong time ago to the most recent).

Affirmations for my/our Memories

Now loading . . .

[richdadpoor]

How to Use AI to Talk to Whales—and Save Life on Earth

For researchers and conservationists alike, the potential applications of machine learning are basically limitless. And Earth Species is not the only group working on decoding animal communication. Payne spent the last months of his life advising for Project CETI, a nonprofit that built a base in Dominica this year for the study of sperm whale communication. “Just imagine what would be possible…

[whalewaste]

whale019notes

Interview with Dr Shane Gero:

 The whales...are using language for many communicative purposes–including, it seems, greeting other whales using first and last names. Also, sperm whales from different parts of the world and from different social groups speak the differently. Not only do they speak their language differently, they also exhibit varying cultures depending on where they live and which social group they belong to.

“The focus of my study has been at the level of the individual whale.” Gero told us. “We’ve been able to follow these animals year after year–the same about two dozen families–some of them we’ve spent hundreds of hours wit.”

“We’ve collected a huge data set on who has spent time with who–but also, from a communications standpoint, who says what to whom. And that’s really a first: being able to look at individuals chatting with each other at a conversational level.

“Language is a big question. Language comes with syntax and it comes with meaning and orders, and we haven’t figured all that out yet. But what we do know is that sperm whales use a system of clicks to communicate with each other.

“It’s kind of like Morse code. So, some calls sound like this: ‘tap-tap-taptaptap,’ where others sound like this: ‘taptaptaptaptaptaptap.’ And different rhythms are used at different times. Animals exchange these back and forth, kind of like you would using Morse code.”

Sperm whales throughout the world exhibit common features of communication, but also exhibit variation, Gero explained. The variation seemingly depends on the geographic origin of a particular whale, among other factors, and serves the whales as a social marker.

“So, what’s interesting about variation in the world is that animals in the Caribbean sound different from animals in the Mediterranean, and they sound different from animals in the Gulf of Mexico and so on.

“At least in the Atlantic, it seems like it’s geographic. So all the animals in the Caribbean sound very similar, but they sound different from the animals in the Med–that sound very similar.

“But in the Pacific it’s different. In the Pacific you actually have different sperm whale dialects living in the same area. So some of the animals off the Galapagos sound one way, and some of the animals sound differently. But what’s really neat about that is that they seem to use these dialects to segregate their society.

“So as a whale that means making a certain type of coda,” said Gero. Codas are patterns of clicks used by whales to communicate.

- the language of sperm whales

The Dominica Sperm Whale Project

There are 20 unique codas among Caribbean sperm whales, but there is one coda that they share with sperm whales throughout the world. It's known colloquially among human scientists as "five regular." Every sperm whale broadcasts this series of five rapid clicks, but with slight variations that serve as the whale's "name" or signature call. A whale might use the five regular as a greeting, or as a signal to a distant companion that she's still in the area.

– Whales Form Clans with Diverse Cultures, Languages

[mandibierly]

The most heartbreaking sequence in 'Blue Planet II': A pilot whale mourning her calf

This Saturday’s episode of BBC America’s Blue Planet II takes us out into the “big blue,” the open ocean. “Here there is nowhere to hide and little to eat. It’s the marine equivalent of a desert,” narrator Sir David Attenborough says at the top of the hour. If you’ve been waiting to see more whales in the series, this installment is for you. But it won’t all go down easily.

As you see in the sneak peek above, the crew captured what producer Mark Brownlow describes as “a profoundly tragic story” — a pilot whale refusing to let go of the body of her dead newborn. His team worked closely with a cameraman based in the Canary Islands who’s been filming pods of pilot whales for many years and has witnessed, a couple of times, mothers holding on to their dead infants for days. “Pilot whales have such large brains, so filled with the cells called spindle cells, which scientists know are responsible for conscious thought and emotions — they really believe that these whales have the ability to mourn and feel the sense of loss the same way that we do,” Brownlow says. “So there’s this incredible connection that the audience has with this story.”

Scientists also know that plastic in the water can combine with other industrial pollutants to form a toxic chemical cocktail. The heartbreaking theory: “When you have top predators like pilot whales, they accumulate over time high levels of toxins as they feed on the fish and squid and things that themselves have fed on all these different levels of the food chain that have accumulated these toxins. It leads to these lethal doses. When they suckle their newborns, they can actually be poisoned by their mother’s contaminated milk,” Brownlow says.

That familial bond is a happier story in a sperm whale sequence. The team worked with a cameraman who had been filming a particular pod of sperm whales off Mauritius for more than six years. One of the most beautiful, peaceful shots of all of Blue Planet II is the pod resting, floating vertically in the water. A calf, estimated to be about 2 weeks old, communicates to its slumbering mother that it’s hungry through a series of clicking sounds. “They’ve learned to accept him, and it enabled him to get incredibly intimate portrait details in a way that you’ve never seen before,” Brownlow says.

Scientists from The Dominica Sperm Whale Project have studied families of sperm whales since 2005, but for the first time, with Blue Planet II, they were able to put a sucker cam on the back of a sperm whale they knew by name, Fingers, to see how she dove with her calf, Digits. The camera, which detaches on its own after 30 hours, records video, sound, and scientific data. As the video above shows, you can see how closely the calf sticks to its mother, touching her repeatedly (“as if for reassurance,” Attenborough says). Because a calf can’t hold its breath as long as adults, it has to return to the surface and wait — sometimes as long as an hour — for its mother to finish hunting squid, which gives her the energy to produce milk.

Avid nature series viewers may find themselves tensing — we know calves are often prey. “You could say that sperm whales are the largest carnivore on the planet and you’d think they’re invincible, but the calves are subject to attack by pilot whales and killer whales,” Brownlow says. “When they are left at the surface, you do kind of fear for them, but they do communicate, send clicks out to their mother and the rest of the family. They are very social and protective. Sometimes they even leave a sort of nanny relative to nurse them whilst the others all dive in the deep.”

Blue Planet II was also able to place a sucker cam on a pregnant whale shark, revealing how silky sharks will bounce against her rough skin, perhaps to rid themselves of parasites. The goal is to find out where whale sharks give birth, to make sure those waters — and the migration route — are protected. “It’s extraordinary: This summarizes how little we still know about the ocean and its creatures. Here we have the largest fish of all, and we still don’t absolutely know where it gives birth to its pups,” Brownlow says. Though Jonathan Green of the Galapagos Whale Shark Project believes he’s close to a discovery at Darwin Island (which is explored more in Blue Planet II‘s seventh episode, “Our Blue Planet”). As Brownlow explains, “These pregnant whale sharks are indeed turning up to this tiny pinprick of an island in the Galápagos, for literally just two or three days, having swam across the Pacific Ocean. Then they just disappear after three days, but during that time they appear to have all gone down to the base of Darwin’s Arch, we think to give birth.”

“The boiling sea.” (GIF: BBC America)

Another great search, which is chronicled in the making-of segment at the end of this episode, was the Blue Planet II crew’s quest to film the phenomenon known as “the boiling sea,” a rare event fishermen and scientists have documented but no one has ever filmed. The sea literally erupts with whitewater as yellowfin tuna jump at the surface preying on a shoal of spawning lanternfish, which has been herded upward by hundreds of hungry spinner dolphins.

“It’s a nail-biting endeavor making a film of the open ocean, because finding your subjects is extremely hard. You’re combing this huge area of ocean every time, as opposed to let’s say a coral reef where you can work with scientists who’ve even identified individual fish that do these pieces of amazing behavior,” Brownlow says. “So it’s not for the faint-hearted, but if you put in the time, the effort, and stick with your conviction, more often than not you are rewarded.”

Spinner dolphins herd lanternfish. (GIF: BBC America)

After one failed expedition trip off the coast of Australia — it was the start of El Niño, when the sea temperatures rise to a point that disrupts the spawning behavior — the team had to wait 18 months until conditions improved to try again. This time, they traveled to Costa Rica to search for the dolphins first. It took 10 days in a helicopter for Brownlow to spot a pod, and another three weeks until the team was finally able to film them in “boiling sea” action.

“Euphoric joy!” is how he describes that moment. “You can’t really relax until you’ve filmed it, because it’s one thing eventually hitting upon the event, the other thing is then, Christ, it could be over in 10, 15 minutes. So we have to make sure that we cover it the very best way that we can. And sure enough, we were able to get action from both above from the helicopter, and underwater from the divers,” Brownlow says.

You’ll feel as though you’re part of the pursuit and the frenzy. “All these predators know that the lanternfish will only be at the surface momentarily, so they all have to race to get to the prize before it disappears again into the deep,” Brownlow says. “I wanted to reflect that in the way that we filmed it, that’s why we had to develop these camera systems that would enable us to fly alongside the dolphins and tuna as they are charging toward the bait ball. And then once [two cameramen with handhelds are] in the water, being in the middle of 40-mile-an-hour underwater torpedoes — these tuna are massive and they could knock you out, but they are so agile and they know exactly where you are, so they don’t actually run into you. Thank God.”

As always, the music in this episode is memorable as well. Hans Zimmer and the team at Bleeding Fingers particularly outdid themselves in the feeding Portuguese man o’ war sequence above. “That particular sequence was an homage to Pirates of the Caribbean, which of course Hans composed,” Brownlow says. “We wanted to have a bit of fun at that point. Of course this is a documentary — all we’re showing is truth and science — but at the same time, we want to build a connection with these characters with the audience, and music acts as our bridge. We wanted people not to feel coldly toward this sort of alien-like Portuguese man o’ war, but give it a bit of personality through the music. That’s what’s so incredible about Hans. He can make something profoundly moving, like the pilot whale sequence, through music, and then have great, great comedy like with the Pirates of the Caribbean music for the Portuguese man o’ war. Music has that ability to help to build these connections, and Hans is the master.”

Blue Planet II airs Saturdays at 9 p.m. on BBC America.

Read more from Yahoo Entertainment:

The most terrifying sequence of ‘Blue Planet II,’ the Bobbit worm

Why ‘The Deep’ episode of ‘Blue Planet II’ is the one you can’t miss

‘Blue Planet II’ premiere: Bird-eating fish and 5 more sequences you’ll be talking about

[gwendominica]

Gentle Giants Sighted off of Dominica! A Seafaring Excursion in the Whale Watching Capital of the Caribbean*

Gentle Giants Sighted off of Dominica! A Seafaring Excursion in the Whale Watching Capital of the Caribbean*

Whale tails off of the coast of Salisbury, Dominica thrilled respectful onlookers aboard the Anchorage Hotel’s catamaran, ‘Passion’ on Sunday April 19, 2015.

On a breezy, hazy Sunday in mid-April 2015, I, along with  my companions Jenny and Jeremiah stepped  from the wharf at Dominica’s Anchorage Hotel, Whale Watch and Dive Center onto the ‘Passion’ catamaran for a memorable whale watch…