Today, if a marine animal hits the news for sinking boats, chances are the damage was done by an orca. But, in the 19th century, there was a very different culprit – an ocean giant with a long, rounded head like a battering ram.
Many 19th-century whalers shared arresting accounts of sperm whales striking other whales, objects and even ships with their bulbous heads.
Perhaps the most famous tale is that of the whaleship Essex. In November 1820, a sperm whale smashed headlong into the ship and caused it to sink. This extraordinary event inspired the novelist Herman Melville to write Moby Dick.
If you look at a sperm whale’s head, you might notice that its shape is somewhat reminiscent of a battering ram. And when scientists examined the heads of these enormous whales, they concluded that they were built for ramming.
Now, researchers from the University of St Andrews have filmed sperm whales headbutting each other and described the odd behaviour – which they saw in the Azores and Balearic Islands – for the first time. Their paper is now published in Marine Mammal Science.
In the aerial video, one sperm whale can be seen approaching another before hitting it in the face with its head and pushing it along for a short distance.
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“It was really exciting to observe this behaviour, which we knew had been hypothesised for such a long time, but not yet documented and described systematically,” says lead author Dr Alec Burslem in a press release. Burslem, an ecophysiologist at the University of Hawaii, conducted the research while at the University of St Andrews in collaboration with scientists from University of the Azores and the marine research NGO Asociación Tursiops.
Scientists had previously thought that large adult males were the ones doing the headbutting but this new paper shows that young whales were the assailants. Now, the researchers want to get to the bottom of why they do it.
“It’s exciting to think about what as-yet unseen behaviours we may soon uncover, as well how more headbutting observations may help us to shed light on the functions the behaviour may serve,” says Burslem.
Although this is the first scientific description of the behaviour, the research team want to know if other people have also caught sperm whale headbutts on camera. Burslem adds: “If there are people out there with similar footage, we would be very keen to hear from them.”
Image and video credit: Association Tursiops (Asociación Tursiops)
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