Scientists have managed to film a spectacular event rarely witnessed by humans: a sperm whale giving birth while other females worked together to support the mother and her newborn.<\/p>\n
A team from Project CETI, an international effort seeking to understand how whales communicate, were in a boat near a pod of 11 whales off the coast of the Caribbean island of Dominica on 8 July, 2023.<\/p>\n
A 19-year-old female named Rounder was surrounded by family members and others as she was about to give birth to her second calf.<\/p>\n
Over nearly five and a half hours, the scientists documented the group’s behaviour, watching them from the boat, filming them with drones and recording the sounds underneath the waves.<\/p>\n
The data they collected, which was published in the journals Scientific Reports and Science, represent an exceptional rarity in the history of science.<\/p>\n
Out of 93 species of cetaceans – a group that includes whales, dolphins and porpoises – only nine have ever been observed giving birth in the wild.<\/p>\n
Rarer still was that whales not related to the mother were helping her.<\/p>\n
“This is the first evidence of birth assistance in non-primates,” Project CETI team member Shane Gero told the New Scientist.<\/p>\n
“It is fascinating to see the intergenerational support from the grandmother to her labouring daughter, and the support from the other, unrelated females.”<\/p>\n
Lifting up the newborn <\/p>\n
The birth lasted 34 minutes, from their tails emerging from the water to the calf being born.<\/p>\n
During labour, other adult females dove under Rounder’s dorsal fin, often on their backs with the heads facing her genital slit.<\/p>\n
Immediately after the birth, the pod’s behaviour “rapidly changed” as every member became active, according to the study in Scientific Reports.<\/p>\n
All the adults were “squeezing the newborn’s body between theirs, touching it with their heads”, the researchers wrote.<\/p>\n
The whales pointed their noses towards the newborn, “pushing it around, under the water, and onto and across their bodies above the surface”.<\/p>\n
The remarkable behaviour dates back more than 36 million years and is believed to be due to the unique history of cetaceans.<\/p>\n
After their distant ancestors left the water and adapted to life on land, cetaceans are the only mammals that returned to the ocean.<\/p>\n
This dive back into the water required some evolutionary tricks to prevent newborns from drowning.<\/p>\n
For example, whale calves are born tail-first, rather than head-first like other mammals.<\/p>\n
However, while newborn sperm whales become talented swimmers within a few hours, they still sink right after birth.<\/p>\n
So other whales have to lift the calf up “to prevent the newborn from sinking while also facilitating its first breaths”, the researchers suggested.<\/p>\n
Primates, including humans, are the only other mammals known to help assist each other out during birth.<\/p>\n
Excited vocal sounds<\/p>\n
The scientists also recorded the whales making many sounds, including significant changes in “vocal style” during key events, the study said.<\/p>\n
This included when a group of pilot whales approached the pod after the birth.<\/p>\n
The changes in vocalisation suggest that the group was coordinating to support the birth – or protect the newborn, the researchers said.<\/p>\n
Sperm whales have one of the longest pregnancies in the animal kingdom, with a gestation period that lasts up to 16 months.<\/p>\n
When calves are born, they are already 4m long. They rely on their mother’s milk for at least two years.<\/p>\n
As they grow, the young become the centre of their pod’s social unit, with others helping out with babysitting while the mother searches for food.<\/p>\n
After the birth was filmed in 2023, the pod was not spotted again for over a year.<\/p>\n
Then the newborn was spotted with Accra and Aurora – the other young members of the pod \u2013 on 25 July last year.<\/p>\n
Surviving its first year is a good sign that the sperm whale will reach adulthood, the Project CETI team said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Scientists have managed to film a spectacular event rarely witnessed by humans: a sperm whale giving birth while…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":368501,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[61,60,82,263],"class_list":["post-368500","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wildlife","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-science","tag-wildlife"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/368500","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=368500"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/368500\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/368501"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=368500"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=368500"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=368500"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}