Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1: Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My
Speaker 1: name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and we're
Speaker 1: back with part two of our series on gray whales,
Speaker 1: inspired by a first end encounter that Rob had recently, Right,
Speaker 1: that's right. Yeah. I go into detail a bit more
Speaker 1: about this in the first episode, but basically, the family
Speaker 1: and I got to go down to Baja California, Mexico
Speaker 1: to see gray whales in their their breeding lagoons and
Speaker 1: it was it was magical. We got to observe them
Speaker 1: in their their their most peaceful setting. Um and uh.
Speaker 1: And so we're gonna we're gonna talk a little bit
Speaker 1: about about that setting today, but also their their cycle
Speaker 1: while they go through why they go through these migration
Speaker 1: cycles and so forth. Yeah, So if you haven't heard
Speaker 1: part one, you should probably go back check that one
Speaker 1: out first. In that we explored the basics of gray whales,
Speaker 1: describe some of their their major characteristics, but we also
Speaker 1: talked about things like their relationship with barnacles. They have
Speaker 1: some obligate barnacles that they are usually encrusted with. Today
Speaker 1: we're going to focus some more on gray whale ecology,
Speaker 1: such as how they fit into their environment, especially with
Speaker 1: regard to predators. That's right, especially they're they're really their
Speaker 1: primary predator, their main predator, and that is the orca,
Speaker 1: the killer whale, I guess, their main predator other than humans. Yes,
Speaker 1: aside from humans, and of course there have been fluctuations
Speaker 1: in the risk posed by by humans to gray whales.
Speaker 1: It certainly hasn't gone away. Our risk to gray whales
Speaker 1: go beyond merely whaling them. It also applies to other
Speaker 1: things we're doing to the environment. But yes, aside from us,
Speaker 1: it's the orca that is the main I mean, it's
Speaker 1: really the orc of that is, that is the threat
Speaker 1: posed to gray whales that have helped shape what the
Speaker 1: gray whale is. It's really difficult. It seems to overstress
Speaker 1: the importance of this predator's role in the life cycle
Speaker 1: of this whale in particular, but multiple whale species. So
Speaker 1: we've discussed the orc on the show before, I believe
Speaker 1: if they've come up, although I don't think we've ever
Speaker 1: really done a deep dive on them. They are an
Speaker 1: apex predator, They're an oceanic dolphin, and their range is
Speaker 1: nothing short of the world's oceans. If you look at
Speaker 1: maps depicting where killer whales can be found, and it's
Speaker 1: basically like, well, is the ocean there, well, then that's
Speaker 1: their range. Though that coverage has also been described as
Speaker 1: a bit patchy. It doesn't mean like the oceans just
Speaker 1: packed with them. And their conservation status is technically dated deficient,
Speaker 1: so you know, there's still some unknowns about about their
Speaker 1: their their cycles, and their whereabouts. But the orca itself
Speaker 1: has no natural predators. It is the absolute top of
Speaker 1: the food chain. Now. The orca has long been creatures
Speaker 1: of reverence for many indigenous populations, especially those populations with
Speaker 1: ties to the sea, and many of these understandings have
Speaker 1: a more i would say, based on what I've been reading,
Speaker 1: more nuanced visions of the orcas and understandings of the
Speaker 1: orca compared to Western depictions that up until very recent times,
Speaker 1: depictions and understandings of killer whale, we're very much focusing
Speaker 1: in on their their savagery and also greatly exaggerating their
Speaker 1: potential threat to humans because we'll touch on this later,
Speaker 1: but there have been no documented cases of a killer
Speaker 1: whale in the wild killing a human being, though there
Speaker 1: have been quite a few cases in captivity, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: and uh, and that's that's, of course a sad story
Speaker 1: in and of itself. Were probably not going to go
Speaker 1: into that much, but I did a fair amount of
Speaker 1: reading about that over the weekend as well. I watched
Speaker 1: the trailer for Blackfish, and it made just the trailer
Speaker 1: alone was a bit too much for me. I'm gonna
Speaker 1: have to build up my courage to actually watch a Blackfish,
Speaker 1: which is a documentary about captive orcas and some of
Speaker 1: the very tragic events and deaths that have surrounded that practice.
Speaker 1: But long before that was taking place, you had people
Speaker 1: like plenty of the elder, our old friend plenty of
Speaker 1: the elder chiming in on Orca. He describes them in
Speaker 1: detail in one chapter of the Natural History, stating that
Speaker 1: their form quote cannot be in any way adequately described,
Speaker 1: but as an enormous mass of flesh armed with teeth.
Speaker 1: You could say that about almost any mammal. Yeah, I don't.
Speaker 1: It's a it's a strange description. I mean, we're we're fortunate,
Speaker 1: I guess, and that we we have so many wonderful photographs,
Speaker 1: so much great footage of Orca, and in many cases
Speaker 1: as well, a lot of people get to glimpse them
Speaker 1: in the wild. Uh, you know, from from a distance usually,
Speaker 1: I guess, but um. But still we have a better
Speaker 1: idea of like what a killer whale is, and we
Speaker 1: don't have to just think, well, I know there was
Speaker 1: flesh and I know there were teeth. I mean that
Speaker 1: image conjures to mind just like uh, one of those
Speaker 1: tumors that grows teeth. But it's just like floating in
Speaker 1: the ocean. Yeah, it sounds like some sort of science
Speaker 1: fiction monster. Um. But at the same time, this this
Speaker 1: chapter is definitely worth checking out for plenty fans because
Speaker 1: he goes into a little bit of detail though about
Speaker 1: their their hostility toward the palana towards the whales. And this,
Speaker 1: of course is very true or at least of of
Speaker 1: some varieties of work in one variety in particular that
Speaker 1: we're going to discuss, and it's actually reflected in the
Speaker 1: name killer whale, which the author and naturalist Mark Carwardine
Speaker 1: in his book A Handbook of Whales, Dolphins and Porpoises
Speaker 1: of the World. He points out that moniker killer whale
Speaker 1: is derived from whale killer. Now The species name for
Speaker 1: the orca is Orcanus orca, and this is an interesting
Speaker 1: assembly as well, with the ancient Roman use of orcanus
Speaker 1: meaning belonging to the kingdom of the dead, and orca
Speaker 1: meaning either a kind of whale or a barrel. In
Speaker 1: the Greek, I've seen it also translated as like barrel whale.
Speaker 1: So orca may be the only true natural predator of
Speaker 1: the gray whale, though large sharks like gray white sharks
Speaker 1: have been known to attack calves and even adults. And
Speaker 1: then you have things like the cookie cutter shark. That
Speaker 1: makes a small shark species that may take bites out
Speaker 1: of adults. But these are you know, I think you
Speaker 1: might think of these more as nuisances than like true predators.
Speaker 1: Though maybe I'm not being fair to the cookie cutter sharks.
Speaker 1: I mean they are taking bites out of If something
Speaker 1: was taking a bite out of me, I would consider
Speaker 1: it probably a predator. Depends how big the bite is.
Speaker 1: As the name implies, they're small bites and and they're
Speaker 1: smaller I guess the bigger you are. But anyway, yeah,
Speaker 1: the orca are the very to say the least, a
Speaker 1: hell of a predator to have to deal with they are.
Speaker 1: They are ruthless and cunning. Their employ various pack hunting
Speaker 1: or I guess you might call it called pod hunting
Speaker 1: attack strategies against their prey, and the list of possible
Speaker 1: prey for a killer whale is pretty long. Um, They've
Speaker 1: been observed to prey on great white sharks and the
Speaker 1: waters off the coast of South Africa and New Zealand,
Speaker 1: strategically targeting and removing the livers of these great whites,
Speaker 1: like tucking into them right behind the pectoral find and
Speaker 1: like removing the liver and then eating the liver from
Speaker 1: the great white. But when it comes to orcas and
Speaker 1: their diets, it gets intriguingly complicated. So orcas, as Carbadine describes, quote,
Speaker 1: have a bewildering array of ecologically distinct forms called ecotypes.
Speaker 1: And while they they're generally considered to be all of
Speaker 1: the same species again Orcanus Orca, you might think of
Speaker 1: them as genetically distinct orca cultures. This makes sense given
Speaker 1: all of the different things I was reading about sort
Speaker 1: of uh, subgroups of orcas specializing in different types of prey, like,
Speaker 1: for example, while the orcas are one of the main
Speaker 1: predators of gray whales. Not all orcas would show any
Speaker 1: interest in a gray whale. That's right, um. And it
Speaker 1: gets even crazy when you look at again genetically distinct
Speaker 1: orca groups, these these ecotypes and then each they You
Speaker 1: may have two different ecotypes inhabiting the same waters, but
Speaker 1: they don't associate with each other. Each each ecotype has
Speaker 1: its own behaviors, its own diet, its own social structure,
Speaker 1: its own vocal signatures, its own distribution patterns. So it
Speaker 1: gets really fascinating look at all the different examples. And
Speaker 1: I'm not going to go into all the different ecotypes here,
Speaker 1: but of note, for our discussion of the North Pacific,
Speaker 1: there are two distinct ecotypes to consider. There's the resident
Speaker 1: or fish eating killer whale, and then there's Biggs killer
Speaker 1: whale also known as transient killer whales. But I think
Speaker 1: Bigg's killer whale is the prefer tile. Okay, So I'd
Speaker 1: imagine it's some of those resident or fish eating killer
Speaker 1: whales that you know, gray whales might go right by
Speaker 1: them and they're not going to mess with them. They're
Speaker 1: not going to be interested. Yeah. As the name implies,
Speaker 1: members of the fish eating ecotype eat mostly fish and
Speaker 1: they usually ignore marine mammals, biggs killer whales though, yeah,
Speaker 1: these are the true whale killers, and it's fascinating. They
Speaker 1: live in smaller groups, usually just two to six. The
Speaker 1: groupings for other varieties of like fish eating orca tend
Speaker 1: to be larger. They're seemingly the biggs whales carbating rights
Speaker 1: are not interested in eating fish at all, though, I
Speaker 1: have to say in his book there is a photo
Speaker 1: of one that's labeled as a is a big skiller
Speaker 1: whale that's playing with a salmon in its mouth. So
Speaker 1: I don't know. Maybe it's just playing with the salmon,
Speaker 1: maybe it's eating it a little bit. I don't know.
Speaker 1: Part of being such an intelligent apex predator is killer
Speaker 1: whales have been observed to play with their food a bit.
Speaker 1: The big skiller whale occasionally kill birds, but yes, as
Speaker 1: the description implies, they mostly hunt whales, pinnipeds, and sea otters.
Speaker 1: Now they are transient, they are kind of erratic, apparently
Speaker 1: in their movements. I couldn't help but think of this
Speaker 1: kind of like this roving band of bikers. Though I'm
Speaker 1: over anthromorphizing here. And it's also worth noting that one
Speaker 1: of the reasons that biggs is preferred over the name
Speaker 1: transient is because apparently transient can be a little misleading,
Speaker 1: so that their movements are erratic, but they do follow
Speaker 1: the movements of their prey species, so they're not just
Speaker 1: They're not just completely random. There. I guess we might
Speaker 1: compare them to the bankers in um what is it
Speaker 1: point break the mass bankrappers in the surfing movie. They're
Speaker 1: kind of like maks. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you know, they're
Speaker 1: they may seem chaotic, but they have they have a code,
Speaker 1: and there there are certain patterns they're following. Now, I
Speaker 1: mentioned the genetic differences, carbon in mentions that the Biggs
Speaker 1: orcas are actually the most genetically divergent out of all
Speaker 1: these ecotypes, and there are actually strong arguments to be
Speaker 1: made for speciation. Here, he writes that DNA evidence has
Speaker 1: shown that Biggs killer whales began diverging some seven hundred
Speaker 1: thousand to seven hundred and fifty thousand years ago, So
Speaker 1: again the orca. It seems difficult to overstress how important
Speaker 1: a role they play in the shape of modern whales,
Speaker 1: the way that these whales have survived, because one of
Speaker 1: the things you have to survive in the world, as
Speaker 1: as a whale, or basically any organism that's to be
Speaker 1: in the same waters as the killer whale, you have
Speaker 1: to be able to survive the killer whale. And it's
Speaker 1: a heck of a thing to have to survive because
Speaker 1: I just kept thinking reading about them that it's like
Speaker 1: they seem like the absolute perfect oceanic predator. You know,
Speaker 1: like they're they're they're robust, they're fast, they're intelligent, they're
Speaker 1: they're social. Um, you know, you can you can compare
Speaker 1: them in some ways to something like a great white shark.
Speaker 1: But great white sharks are for the most part solitary,
Speaker 1: like they don't work together. They lack the uh the
Speaker 1: intellect of of of of of an orca. Uh. The
Speaker 1: orcas are just and then the orcas are also not
Speaker 1: not to say that sharks are set in their ways,
Speaker 1: but but like the orca have shown that they have
Speaker 1: a have a real resiliency that they can they can change,
Speaker 1: they can alter uh there, uh you know whatever have
Speaker 1: if they're changes in available food sources, they may shift
Speaker 1: in what they're eating, that sort of thing. And so
Speaker 1: for just a few examples of how this has affected
Speaker 1: the shape of modern whales, I was reading now their
Speaker 1: book Whales their biology and behavior by Hammond at all,
Speaker 1: and apparently their their threat factors into the audible world
Speaker 1: of the marine environment. So fish eating orca produce loud
Speaker 1: clicks that in many cases their prey can't hear. This
Speaker 1: is certainly seems to be the case with salmon, for example,
Speaker 1: and they use these clicks for echolocation. But the bigs
Speaker 1: killer whale while they're they're feeding mostly or exclusively on
Speaker 1: mammals that are acoustically sensitive, and so big killer whales
Speaker 1: are quieter, and they use what they referred to in
Speaker 1: this book as a cryptic echolocation strategy that employs fewer
Speaker 1: clicks and irregular timing of said clicks. Oh so it's
Speaker 1: harder to detect that you are being clicked at right right,
Speaker 1: And the threat of the big killer whales is led
Speaker 1: to led various whale species to adopt the use of
Speaker 1: narrow band, high frequency clicks that orcas can't hear, So
Speaker 1: pygmy sperm whales, for example, this though they sacrifice signal
Speaker 1: range for stealth by making this change. Other whales, like
Speaker 1: beat whales, only use their echolocation at great depths below
Speaker 1: where the orcas hunt and there are also various anti
Speaker 1: anti predator strategies that various whales use. I think we'll
Speaker 1: end up discussing these in a bit. But basically, like
Speaker 1: the orca posts such a threat, and such a complex
Speaker 1: and intelligent threat, like every whale species on the menu
Speaker 1: has had to adapt to that threat and come up
Speaker 1: with tactics for survival. Yes, though, I think, as we
Speaker 1: mentioned in the last episode, one thing that's very important
Speaker 1: to stress is that for most whale species we're talking about,
Speaker 1: there might be some a couple of exceptions, such as
Speaker 1: like maybe some of the Minka whales, but for most
Speaker 1: billen whale species, it is really only the young that
Speaker 1: are directly threatened by orcas. Orca's rarely try i to
Speaker 1: prey on healthy adults, and even even more rarely succeed
Speaker 1: and preying on healthy adults, right, I mean, you will
Speaker 1: find some accounts. I think there was a real I
Speaker 1: was just reading this before we came in here there
Speaker 1: was an account of what seemed to be a pack
Speaker 1: of work as attacking an adult blue whale. But yes,
Speaker 1: for the most part, this goes for I mean most
Speaker 1: predators species. What are predators going after? They going after
Speaker 1: the hardest thing possible to kill. Uh No, there's a there,
Speaker 1: there's a you know, the various economic factors that have
Speaker 1: to be taken into account. They want to go after
Speaker 1: the easiest thing to get that will give them that
Speaker 1: that that nutrient payoff. And in the case of whales,
Speaker 1: the other calves are the best bet. They're smaller, they're weaker.
Speaker 1: If they can separate them, if they can get to them,
Speaker 1: if they have if they can tip the scales in
Speaker 1: their favor, then that's what they're going to go for.
Speaker 1: A paper that I'm going to talk about in a
Speaker 1: minute cites an older bit of research from Rice and
Speaker 1: Woolman published in the year nineteen seventy one, that included
Speaker 1: a survey of the bodies of three hundred and sixteen
Speaker 1: gray whales that I think we're off the coast of California,
Speaker 1: and it found that of those whales, eighteen percent had
Speaker 1: scars from previous orca attacks. And these would have been
Speaker 1: orca attacks. I guess that the whales survived. That doesn't
Speaker 1: necessarily tell you how many whales did not survive orca attacks. Oh,
Speaker 1: that's this interesting. Carwodine writes that possibly every single gray
Speaker 1: whale alive has possibly been I think the way where
Speaker 1: it was in the mouth of a killer whale at
Speaker 1: one point or another. And certainly you see you see
Speaker 1: a lot of these rake like scars left by orca
Speaker 1: teeth on their bodies. They're apparently attacked by the orca
Speaker 1: at a greater rate and any other whale species and
Speaker 1: as far as the young go. According to Carveden, orca
Speaker 1: quote probably take up to thirty five percent of the
Speaker 1: gray whale calf population annually and most of those attacks,
Speaker 1: it is believed, occur on the migratory corridor. And we'll
Speaker 1: talk more about gray whale migrations in a little bit
Speaker 1: or possibly in the next episode if the series goes
Speaker 1: to three parts. But yeah, there's like a migratory corridor
Speaker 1: for the eastern Pacific gray whale where they go back
Speaker 1: and forth between their northern feeding grounds up in the
Speaker 1: Arctic regions in the summertime, and then in the colder
Speaker 1: months they go south to areas like Baja California where
Speaker 1: they have their breeding grounds, their calving grounds and these lagoons,
Speaker 1: and it's during the travel back and forth that a
Speaker 1: lot of these attacks are going to occur, that's right, Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: we'll get into the specifics of that in a bit,
Speaker 1: but it but again, the orcas are cunning and they
Speaker 1: are going to choose the egg zach right time, in
Speaker 1: the exact right place to attack these these rather large
Speaker 1: prey animals. But you know, briefly, you know again, why
Speaker 1: is this migration taking place. What's because when you have
Speaker 1: a threat like the orca as a mother whale, you
Speaker 1: can't just give birth anywhere. You have to go where
Speaker 1: the orcas cannot go or won't go. And that's where these, uh,
Speaker 1: these lagoons come into play. Um like the Ojo de
Speaker 1: Labre lagoon that I went to in Um near Guerrero Negro,
Speaker 1: in Um in Baja California, Mexico, place that is shallow,
Speaker 1: too shallow to favor certain killer whale hunting strategies, but
Speaker 1: also not so shallow that the whales themselves cannot move
Speaker 1: around in the waters. Now that being said, Um, I
Speaker 1: happened across a paper this came out just last year
Speaker 1: in October, and this was the title of this paper
Speaker 1: was new Peril for gray Whale survival question mark predatory
Speaker 1: orca is spotted in Baja Calvin Lagoon. It's a situation
Speaker 1: where observers there had not seen orcas venturing into the lagoon,
Speaker 1: but then there was a spotting of them, and it's
Speaker 1: it doesn't sound like much came of this. It doesn't
Speaker 1: seem like there was any real follow up coverage that
Speaker 1: would indicate that the orcas came back and say, killed
Speaker 1: a bunch of calves or anything. I guess it was
Speaker 1: maybe more like a scouting mission, like maybe the orcas
Speaker 1: come in they kind of realize, Okay, well, these this
Speaker 1: is not optimal for hunting, even though the things we
Speaker 1: want to eat are here, and then they move around
Speaker 1: and go back. But anyway, in this paper that the
Speaker 1: author speaks with Stephen Schwartz, a primary researcher with the
Speaker 1: Lagunas send Ignacio Ecosystem Science project down there, and the
Speaker 1: way he describes that is, okay, you have the orca is.
Speaker 1: They're engaging in this. They engage in this kind of
Speaker 1: pack hunting behavior, but it's not two dimensional. It's three dimensional.
Speaker 1: Especially when they're going up against dangerous prey like the
Speaker 1: gray whale, something that can con pably kill them with
Speaker 1: a single blow of its tail. They need to be
Speaker 1: able to employ all of their strategies. They need to
Speaker 1: be able to you know, come at it from below,
Speaker 1: from the sides, etc. And we'll get into some of
Speaker 1: their tactics here in a bit, but basically they can't
Speaker 1: do that in the lagoon environment, right, and as surface
Speaker 1: dwelling animals, where it's not intuitive for us to think
Speaker 1: about physical conflict in this way. Really, you know, we're
Speaker 1: usually thinking about physical conflicts taking place with something on
Speaker 1: the same level as us on a plane, but in
Speaker 1: this case, it would be something more like you know,
Speaker 1: a space fight in like a Star Wars movie where
Speaker 1: there's you know, there is multidirectional attack exactly. Yeah. So again,
Speaker 1: the orcas are cunning, they're intelligent. They realize that this
Speaker 1: is not the battlefield where they will have the advantage,
Speaker 1: and they know that if they they waited out, there
Speaker 1: will come a time when the battlefield does tip to
Speaker 1: their advantage. Now, one thing we always try to do,
Speaker 1: at least when we remember is, you know, it's like
Speaker 1: when you're approaching the subject of predator prey conflicts from
Speaker 1: the origin point of the prey animal. Like we we
Speaker 1: started off talking about gray whales and then now we're
Speaker 1: talking about orcas that can tend to kind of make
Speaker 1: you want to, even if you normally have have some
Speaker 1: protections against this, to unconsciously vilify the predator animal. Uh,
Speaker 1: you know, think like, oh, the orcas are so bad
Speaker 1: because they're attacking the gray whales we've been thinking about
Speaker 1: but of course, you know, we all that the orcas
Speaker 1: are are beautiful, wonderful animals in their own way, and
Speaker 1: they're also just trying to survive. That this is just
Speaker 1: what their ecological niche is their predators. Yeah, that's right.
Speaker 1: We can't think to think of it as as the
Speaker 1: heroes versus villains and all of this, though I know
Speaker 1: it's it's very tempting to do so, and I found
Speaker 1: myself sort of fighting off that feeling, especially when when
Speaker 1: observing the gray whales. But even in that that paper,
Speaker 1: that Los Angeles Times paper, an I want to credit
Speaker 1: the author on that. Suzanne rust is the author. In
Speaker 1: speaking with the Swarts like sports basically, you know, it
Speaker 1: says like, look, you know, this is just this is
Speaker 1: how it is. Uh, you know, we're we're not just
Speaker 1: looking out for the great whales here, We're also looking
Speaker 1: out for the orca like they're they're It's part of
Speaker 1: the natural cycle of things here. So we shouldn't Yeah,
Speaker 1: we shouldn't fall into that line of thinking where oh no,
Speaker 1: the the the the orca orcas or the enemy, and
Speaker 1: the gray whales are are the only heroes of the
Speaker 1: ecology story going on before us. That being said, let's
Speaker 1: get into some of the dastardly ways the orcas attack
Speaker 1: gray whales and other whale species. Not dastardly except in
Speaker 1: the sense that every organism is, I guess, dastardly, and
Speaker 1: it's in its quest for survival. But they're they're solving problems.
Speaker 1: They're solving problems. Okay, So I wanted to return to
Speaker 1: a paper that I brought up with a more narrow
Speaker 1: focus in the previous episode, and it was a paper
Speaker 1: called Fight or Flight Anti Predator Stress Rategies of Baleen Whales,
Speaker 1: published in The Mammal Review in the year two thousand
Speaker 1: and eight by John kb Ford and Randall are Reeves. Now,
Speaker 1: you might remember in the last episode the context was
Speaker 1: I was consulting this paper to explore whether the barnacle
Speaker 1: incrustations on gray whales should be thought of purely as
Speaker 1: either a parasitic type of infestation, where it's harming the whale,
Speaker 1: or as a commensal infestation where you know, the barnacles
Speaker 1: getting something out of it. It has a substrate that
Speaker 1: brings it water flowing over it so it can filter
Speaker 1: feed and it gets protection from predators, but the whale
Speaker 1: is not really affected one way or another. That would
Speaker 1: be a commensal relationship or and this was the hypothesis
Speaker 1: put forward in this paper, there is actually a mutual
Speaker 1: benefit to the whales that are encrusted with barnacles because
Speaker 1: the thinking goes these incrustations with their you know, hard
Speaker 1: calcium carbonate plates actually serve as a kind of weapon
Speaker 1: or armor on the outside of the whale when it
Speaker 1: is attacked by orcas. And there's some evidence for thinking
Speaker 1: of it that way, but it's not certain, right, And
Speaker 1: I think you mentioned too that like one possibility is
Speaker 1: well a predator might think twice about biting part of
Speaker 1: a whale that's encrusted with these hard barnacles, or it
Speaker 1: might injure itself doing so. Right, So the quick additional
Speaker 1: work effect. There's one variety that excels in attacking sharks.
Speaker 1: And one of the ways that apparently this uh this
Speaker 1: ecotype is often identified is that they'll it's it's rougher
Speaker 1: food to have to depend on, and they'll often grind
Speaker 1: their teeth down, like basically to the gum line. O time.
Speaker 1: Yeah sou. So they're not about some of the killer
Speaker 1: killer whales in general not above trading off dental health
Speaker 1: for a sustaining meal if they have to. I'm gonna
Speaker 1: be thinking about that all day. Just just kind of
Speaker 1: gummy mouth whales. But anyway, I wanted to come back
Speaker 1: to this paper to more broadly explore some of the
Speaker 1: ideas it puts forward about the ways that whales, like
Speaker 1: gray whales, that billen whales have had their bodies and
Speaker 1: behavior shaped by predator pressures, a specifically pressure from orcas.
Speaker 1: And this paper was exploring the different types of survival
Speaker 1: strategies for different species of billen whales wind confronted with orcas,
Speaker 1: and the authors proposed grouping them basically into two main classes.
Speaker 1: One class of whales were the ones with flight strategies
Speaker 1: and the others were fight strategies. The flight strategy is
Speaker 1: mainly practiced by whales in the baling Optera genus, so
Speaker 1: this would include the common minca whale, the Antarctic minca
Speaker 1: the brutus whale that's spelled it looks like brye ryde,
Speaker 1: but I think it's pronounced bruta, the say whale, the
Speaker 1: fin whale, and the blue whale. And with all these strategies,
Speaker 1: their reaction to pod of orcas is basically just speedy retreat.
Speaker 1: They make a bee line out there. The direction doesn't
Speaker 1: really seem to have any consistent relationship to the shoreline.
Speaker 1: They just make a bee line away at top speed,
Speaker 1: usually speeds between twenty and forty kilometers an hour. And
Speaker 1: these are speeds that orcas I believe can typically match,
Speaker 1: but only for a short time. They usually can't or
Speaker 1: won't keep up with this speed for a long time,
Speaker 1: so they just fall back and don't catch them and
Speaker 1: a lot and we'll get into this, but a lot
Speaker 1: of their tactics often revolve around sustained attacks. Yeah. However,
Speaker 1: with these flight species, they can usually get away because
Speaker 1: they just swim fast and they get out of there
Speaker 1: and the orcas don't keep up the chase. But an
Speaker 1: interesting thing is that the all these flight species they
Speaker 1: just named, if they are overtaken by orcas, they usually
Speaker 1: are not able to put up much resistance at all.
Speaker 1: And they just sort of like submit to death. That
Speaker 1: might be overstating it, but they do not really have
Speaker 1: much close fighting capacity. On the other hand, you've got
Speaker 1: the fight strategy. And this has been observed in other
Speaker 1: billen whales such as the Southern right whale, the North
Speaker 1: Atlantic right whale, the bowhead, the humpback, and the gray whale,
Speaker 1: the ones we're focusing on in this series. And they
Speaker 1: say the authors here also say that the North Pacific
Speaker 1: right whale probably fits in this group too, but there
Speaker 1: haven't been enough documented cases of their encounters with orcas
Speaker 1: to say for sure. But the fight group encompasses a
Speaker 1: more diverse set of tactics, basically everything except for high
Speaker 1: speed one directional swimming away. So what do the fight
Speaker 1: strategies include? One, Rob, I think you alluded to this
Speaker 1: a little bit earlier, but we can get in more
Speaker 1: detail now. One is group formations. When in sufficient numbers,
Speaker 1: some fight strategy whales respond to orca harassment by grouping
Speaker 1: together to form defensive formations, for example, by placing calves
Speaker 1: in the center of a sort of shape where they're
Speaker 1: encircled by adults. One example the authors give is something
Speaker 1: called the rosette which is a circular formation with the
Speaker 1: heads of the adults will make a sort of flower
Speaker 1: pedal shape and they will put their heads in the
Speaker 1: middle around the calf and then have their tail flukes
Speaker 1: pointing out, which if you have seen the mighty slap
Speaker 1: of a gray whales tail fluke, or not just gray whale,
Speaker 1: any of these, like a humpback's tail fluke, you can
Speaker 1: imagine why that might be threatening to an approaching orca.
Speaker 1: And an important thing to point out is that this
Speaker 1: type of thing, these group formations, are not only observed
Speaker 1: in the baleen whales we're talking about in this study.
Speaker 1: Some toothed whales, for example, sperm whales have been observed
Speaker 1: to do something similar when harassed by orcas. Of course,
Speaker 1: sperm whales are predators, but they tend to prey on
Speaker 1: things like, you know, squids and stuff, and their calves
Speaker 1: are also sometimes attacked by orcas. Yeah, I've seen this
Speaker 1: defensive formation that I guess we could kind of compare
Speaker 1: to like circling the wagons, but I've seen it referred
Speaker 1: to as the marguerite formation in sperm whales, and it's
Speaker 1: something that sadly, whalers would sometimes take advantage of they
Speaker 1: realize that if you had an injured whale, it would
Speaker 1: like basically draw in this defensive formation of additional whales
Speaker 1: which you could then also kill. Yeah, and this fact
Speaker 1: of some whales coming to the aid of other whales
Speaker 1: is interesting, Like it's kind of heartwarming. The author has
Speaker 1: mentioned southern right whales and humpbacks having been observed to
Speaker 1: join in with single whales or groups that are under
Speaker 1: attacked by orcas, almost to help provide group defense. Now,
Speaker 1: we alluded to this a minute ago with the tail
Speaker 1: flukes pointing out outward, but some of the fight strategies
Speaker 1: of these whales are just physical blows. Like baleen whales
Speaker 1: will sometimes lash out and strike at orcas, most often
Speaker 1: with either pectoral flippers or with the flukes with the tail.
Speaker 1: And the authors also say that quote right whales and
Speaker 1: humpback whales occasionally also lunge or swing their heads at attackers.
Speaker 1: So it seems like throughout this paper the humpbacks really
Speaker 1: seem like the fightiest of the fight whales, like they
Speaker 1: will really put up a fight. But all of these
Speaker 1: whales are are powerful and can can swing a fluke
Speaker 1: or a flipper. Yeah, it makes sense. I guess that
Speaker 1: the gray whales or maybe not engaging and head based
Speaker 1: combat so much because their heads are just generally smaller
Speaker 1: compared to something like a humpback whale's head. But they're
Speaker 1: certainly they certainly use the flippers and the flukes. In fact,
Speaker 1: one of the things in Baja California that the guides mentioned,
Speaker 1: they're like, do not, under any circumstances attempt to touch
Speaker 1: flippers or flukes, because those are the weapons of the whale.
Speaker 1: Um you know, the only thing you're touching, and if
Speaker 1: the whale is curious and permitting it, as you're touching
Speaker 1: basically the head region. Yes, and while all these fight
Speaker 1: whales can put up a fight like they can deliver
Speaker 1: a mighty smack with the tails or with the flippers,
Speaker 1: it seems consistent that the gray whales are thought of
Speaker 1: as some of the least inclined to deliver a blow
Speaker 1: in defense and instead practice some other interesting defensive strategies
Speaker 1: more often. Yes, this is fascinating, So let's get to
Speaker 1: what some of these other strategies are. The authors one
Speaker 1: of them is environmental refuge. The authors right that all
Speaker 1: of the fight strategy whales except perhaps humpbacks try to
Speaker 1: seek refuge in the physical environment for defense, and gray
Speaker 1: whales are singled out as the best example of this
Speaker 1: of refuge seeking. When threatened, they head for shallow waters.
Speaker 1: That's kind of interesting. If you don't read any further,
Speaker 1: you might really wonder why that would be. That would
Speaker 1: I would almost imagine like, oh, whale would wouldn't wall
Speaker 1: feel kind of cornered in shallow waters. But it turns
Speaker 1: out this is helpful for a number of reasons. One,
Speaker 1: shallow waters provide potential hiding places, such as in kelp
Speaker 1: beds like forests of seaweed, or in breaking surf, and
Speaker 1: in both of these cases, these are kind of like
Speaker 1: blinds for whales. It's a place where it's harder for
Speaker 1: orcas to locate and detect them. This also makes sense
Speaker 1: this distinction when you think about say, like the humpback
Speaker 1: whale is a whale that its range includes you know,
Speaker 1: far open waters. But again, as we've discussed with the
Speaker 1: gray whale, these are whales that generally don't stray too
Speaker 1: far from the shoreline from the edge of the continent,
Speaker 1: so like this is there they really have a home
Speaker 1: turf advantage here, Yes, and Another thing the authors point
Speaker 1: out is that the gray whales can make themselves even
Speaker 1: more invisible when hiding in shallow water through a breathing
Speaker 1: technique known as snorkeling, where essentially they expose as little
Speaker 1: of their body as possible above the surface to breathe.
Speaker 1: Basically only the blowholes are exposed. Now, why would this
Speaker 1: make them harder to find? The researchers suggest it may
Speaker 1: be because this is somehow a quieter way to breathe
Speaker 1: than their normal breathing movements and orca's hunt in part
Speaker 1: by sound. But this part is really important. In addition
Speaker 1: to providing hiding places like kelp forests and breaking surf,
Speaker 1: shallow water also protects gray whales by depriving orcas of
Speaker 1: room to stage their preferred attacks. So the predators in
Speaker 1: shallow water simply cannot maneuver the way they need to
Speaker 1: to do the attacks they want, and these attacks would
Speaker 1: include like ramming the calves to try to separate them
Speaker 1: from adults. Yeah, it's worth noting here that that orcas
Speaker 1: are certainly susceptible to beaching. Granted, there are of course
Speaker 1: famous examples of self beaching attacks by orcas against against
Speaker 1: creatures you know, just just on the shore. Though this,
Speaker 1: it's worth noting, seems to be a learned tactic and
Speaker 1: not an instinctual one. So it takes even these orca
Speaker 1: groups that practice self beaching as a hunting tactic, it
Speaker 1: takes them a long time to learn it and do
Speaker 1: it properly. Yes, and it seems, at least certainly for
Speaker 1: the kinds of orcas that prey on whales, the shallows
Speaker 1: are just not where they're comfortable that it is not
Speaker 1: where they have room to make the moves that they
Speaker 1: need to make, usually to get a calf away from
Speaker 1: its mother and kill it right right. So for this reason,
Speaker 1: the authors say that in fact, orca's usually abandon an
Speaker 1: attack if the prey is able to make it to
Speaker 1: the shallows. So the gray whale gets into the shallows.
Speaker 1: The orcas, it's not like they usually will keep trying
Speaker 1: and fail. They're not even going to follow them there.
Speaker 1: They just give up. Now. I think another point that
Speaker 1: we might want to remember is that it seems to
Speaker 1: me a retreat to the shallows is not without risks.
Speaker 1: You might think, well, why would that involve risks? But
Speaker 1: the authors here mentioned quote fight species that retreat into
Speaker 1: shallow water would need good maneuverability to negotiate obstacles and
Speaker 1: prevent accidental stranding. So I mean stranding is a real
Speaker 1: threat when you're a whale, and a whale that goes
Speaker 1: into the shallows to hide, I think that could be
Speaker 1: thought of as somewhat analogous, not completely, but somewhat analogous
Speaker 1: to a land animal trying to hide from our predator
Speaker 1: by going into the surf in the ocean, like there
Speaker 1: is a chance you get washed out and drown. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: Now it does seem though the grays are quite good
Speaker 1: at navigating the shallows. That seems to be the case
Speaker 1: based on the materials we've been looking at here. But
Speaker 1: again just going back to my observation of them in Mexico,
Speaker 1: the lagoon was again reasonably shallow, you know, deep enough
Speaker 1: that the whales can maneuver easily in there and even
Speaker 1: move around at some rather intense beats when because there
Speaker 1: again there was the calving. There was there there mothers
Speaker 1: and babies, but there was also mating going on, and
Speaker 1: the mating gets a lot more frenzied. H they'll do
Speaker 1: this thing too, that's called, i think sometimes referred to
Speaker 1: as a freight training. I think it's the term where
Speaker 1: they're like just a group of whales will just start
Speaker 1: zooming through the water. And their speeds to me were
Speaker 1: quite impressive, but but still like this is a lagoon,
Speaker 1: the tides coming in and out. There were some fairly
Speaker 1: drastic changes um based on the tides. So yeah, it
Speaker 1: seemed to me like the grays really knew what they
Speaker 1: were doing. It makes sense again because the gray whales
Speaker 1: are a species of whale that don't ever really go
Speaker 1: too far from the shore and the grand scheme of things,
Speaker 1: and they're they're there. The way they feed is to
Speaker 1: go down to the bottom, so they're they're tied to
Speaker 1: kind of like the edges, the hard and soft edges
Speaker 1: of their oceanic environment. All right, So next thing we've
Speaker 1: talked about group formations, physical blows, environmental refuge. The next
Speaker 1: thing I want to mention is defensive maneuvers. So gray
Speaker 1: whales are less inclined to physically fight by striking with
Speaker 1: flukes or flippers, though they will certainly do that in
Speaker 1: cases when defending calves. They just do it less than
Speaker 1: other species such as like humpback whales. But the authors
Speaker 1: write quote Instead, they often roll at the surface so
Speaker 1: that their dorsal surface rather than their ventral surface, meaning
Speaker 1: the back instead of the belly, is exposed to attack
Speaker 1: from below. Killer whales often debilitate and kill baleen whales
Speaker 1: by ramming forcefully and repeatedly into the ventral sides of
Speaker 1: their prey. Thus, rolling upside down may protect the vulnerable
Speaker 1: underside from attack. And I've actually watched some documentary footage
Speaker 1: of exactly this and the next thing I'm about to
Speaker 1: mention happening when orcas are swimming up on a gray
Speaker 1: whale adult that she will just roll back and expose
Speaker 1: her belly up above the water and have her back
Speaker 1: down below. I guess the back is much more protected
Speaker 1: from these striking attacks by the orcas. Again, just pure
Speaker 1: observation on my part, but some of the whales that
Speaker 1: would come up to the boat would do this, They
Speaker 1: would roll onto their under their backs, And I didn't
Speaker 1: think about it at a time because at the time
Speaker 1: it's like they're kind of like big dogs. It's almost
Speaker 1: like they want me to scratch their belly in my arm. Again,
Speaker 1: we're like, you know, twenty feet long, maybe, but but yeah,
Speaker 1: like this is maybe they're kind of rehearsing behaviors as well.
Speaker 1: I don't know. This next thing is really interesting. This
Speaker 1: is something gray whale mothers apparently do when escorting calves.
Speaker 1: Not only do they roll over on their backs at
Speaker 1: the surface of the water to keep the more vulnerable
Speaker 1: ventral side or the belly up above the waterline, they
Speaker 1: will sometimes literally lift their calves out of the water
Speaker 1: up on their bellies, placing them out of reach of
Speaker 1: the orcas. So the orcas are trying to ram the
Speaker 1: calf and injure it and get it away from the mother,
Speaker 1: so the mother will flip her more protected back underneath
Speaker 1: and get the baby up on like above the water,
Speaker 1: on top of her. Fascinating. Yeah, this reminds me again
Speaker 1: like one of the behaviors you see from the babies
Speaker 1: eventually in the lagoon is that they'll start, when they're
Speaker 1: strong enough, they'll start breaching. They'll start kind of like
Speaker 1: jumping out of the water, not just sticking parts part
Speaker 1: of their head up, but actually like jumping most of
Speaker 1: the way out of the water, if not all the
Speaker 1: way out of the water. And it's thought that this
Speaker 1: may also be rehearsals for defensive maneuvers as the mother
Speaker 1: and calf eventually move out of this protected lagoon and
Speaker 1: into rather dangerous domains of the orcas, right, And so
Speaker 1: you can see how that could be that kind of
Speaker 1: maneuvering practice could be useful in both ways for these
Speaker 1: purely def inns of maneuvers, where like the calf is
Speaker 1: trying to get up on its mother's belly to get away,
Speaker 1: or for actual attacks if they're trying to slam down
Speaker 1: on the orca or something. Yeah, because these babies again,
Speaker 1: these are these are these are big babies. Now. One
Speaker 1: thing explored in this paper that caught my attention is
Speaker 1: the relationship between these different fight versus flight strategies and
Speaker 1: how that manifests as morphological differences differences in the body
Speaker 1: shapes of these different types of whales. So the authors
Speaker 1: write that flight whales the ones that just escape as
Speaker 1: fast as they can are you might not be surprised
Speaker 1: to learn more streamlined for fast movement with elongated forms,
Speaker 1: typically smaller flippers to reduce drag while swimming, and what
Speaker 1: they call high aspect ratio flukes, which they say this
Speaker 1: is a quote a measure of surface area relative to
Speaker 1: fluke length for propulsive efficiency and high speed. So you
Speaker 1: can look up pictures of this if you want. But these,
Speaker 1: these flight whales will tend to have just less chunky
Speaker 1: looking flukes, whereas the fight whales have kind of, i
Speaker 1: don't know, more rounded, thicker flukes that just have more
Speaker 1: surface area. Well, looking at this illustration you provide, it's
Speaker 1: like if you turn the fluke on its side and
Speaker 1: assume that it is a mustache, you're more the closer
Speaker 1: you are to a pencil thin mustache. Well, then yeah,
Speaker 1: that's going to be your flight your fight tho is
Speaker 1: going to be your bushear mustache. That that is a
Speaker 1: good comparison. Yeah, So flight whales are they're specializing for speed.
Speaker 1: Fight whales, on the other hand, are not specialized for
Speaker 1: speed but for maneuverability. And this is important to think about.
Speaker 1: So it's not necessarily so much for just being able
Speaker 1: to like hit and deliver a blow with the tail
Speaker 1: or the flipper, though that is part of it, especially
Speaker 1: for some of these species, but it's for maneuverability. And
Speaker 1: what does that mean. Essentially, it means being able to
Speaker 1: turn on a dime. The fight whales have larger and
Speaker 1: longer flippers and larger fluke surfaces relative to their body size.
Speaker 1: And what this allows them to do is turn quickly
Speaker 1: in tight spaces and change which direction they're facing, even
Speaker 1: if they don't have any forward momentum, so they can
Speaker 1: kind of like turn quickly at a near stand still.
Speaker 1: And I was trying to think about a good analogy here.
Speaker 1: It seems like the difference would be between like the
Speaker 1: turning movement capabilities of an airplane versus a helicopter. Your
Speaker 1: fight whales are going to be more like a helicopter
Speaker 1: and your flight whales are going to be more like
Speaker 1: an airplane. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I think that's that's a
Speaker 1: solid comparison. Of course, being able to turn around quickly
Speaker 1: is a is a clear advantage if you are trying
Speaker 1: to defend yourself or especially to defend your young against
Speaker 1: against killer whales, because you need to be able to
Speaker 1: orient your body so that the more defensible part of it,
Speaker 1: or the threatening part of it is face the nearest
Speaker 1: killer whale quickly. And this also allows whales such as
Speaker 1: gray whales to do that like rolling at the surface.
Speaker 1: And again we might think like where does this give
Speaker 1: the whale the biggest advantage? Again, it comes down to
Speaker 1: shallower waters where they can turn on a dime, but
Speaker 1: the killer whales cannot employ their three D hunting tactics.
Speaker 1: I mean, I don't know how how far we should
Speaker 1: go with the helicopter versus airplane, but it's like it's
Speaker 1: one thing to imagine say fighter jet versus attack helicopter,
Speaker 1: just you know, out in the open sky, but now
Speaker 1: imagine that that imagine combat going down like in a
Speaker 1: city scape, in a tunnel or something. Yeah. I've got
Speaker 1: one last thing from this paper I want to add,
Speaker 1: which I think should give a little bit of emotional
Speaker 1: payoff to learning all this stuff about the anti predator
Speaker 1: strategies of whales. And that is the though, of course,
Speaker 1: you know, the both the predator and the prey animal.
Speaker 1: It's not like we begrudge either one. They both have
Speaker 1: a right to live and the predators do need to
Speaker 1: hunt in order to survive. But it turns out most
Speaker 1: of the time these anti predator strategies are successful, Like
Speaker 1: in most of these encounters between orcas and gray whales,
Speaker 1: the orcas are not successful in killing one of the whales,
Speaker 1: not just gray whales, but but all of the whales.
Speaker 1: I think talked about in this paper. It's just that
Speaker 1: the anti predator strategies are pretty effective. The flight whales
Speaker 1: they swim fast and they usually get away, and the
Speaker 1: fight whales are usually able to repel or avoid an
Speaker 1: orca attack. Yeah. Basically it's like, what whatever is necessary
Speaker 1: to price yourself out of being eaten? Can you make
Speaker 1: yourself just too costly of a prey target for the predator? Um?
Speaker 1: And uh and yeah, you just have to sort of
Speaker 1: cross that line. And also always thinking about this, it
Speaker 1: always reminds me of that part and Butch casting the
Speaker 1: Sundance Kit about you know, would you would you make
Speaker 1: that jump if you didn't have to m There's only
Speaker 1: so much that the predator is going to do because
Speaker 1: ultimately there are there are other whales in the sea. Yeah.
Speaker 1: All right, Well, on that note, we're gonna go ahead
Speaker 1: and close it up for this episode. We'll be back
Speaker 1: though in one final episode on gray whales and also
Speaker 1: essentially on orcas as well. Just a reminder that stuff
Speaker 1: to blow your mind. It is a science podcast with
Speaker 1: core episodes publishing on Tuesdays and Thursdays. On Mondays, we
Speaker 1: do listener mail episodes. On Wednesdays, we do a short
Speaker 1: form artifact or monster Fact episode, and on Fridays we
Speaker 1: set aside most serious concerns and just talk about a
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Speaker 1: mentioned the name of the of the Friday episodes huge
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