Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Speaker 1: Works dot com. Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow
Speaker 1: your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. Joe,
Speaker 1: I have a question for you. Okay, what's your favorite
Speaker 1: sea monster from the Bible? How many are there? I
Speaker 1: mean you've got to go Leviathan, right, yeah? Is there
Speaker 1: another good sea monster? I guess there's the the whales
Speaker 1: slash great fish that ate Jonah, that's right. Yeah. So
Speaker 1: depending on how you interpret Leviathan, you could you could
Speaker 1: be talking about two whales. Leviathan for anyone who's not
Speaker 1: familiar shows up in the Book of Job. There's a
Speaker 1: lot of sort of poetic discussion of the Leviathans, such
Speaker 1: as can'st Thou'll draw out Leviathan within it with a
Speaker 1: hook or his tongue with a cord, which thou lettest down.
Speaker 1: I think the Leviathan of the Book of Job is
Speaker 1: pretty clearly a fire breathing dragon, right well, but I
Speaker 1: could never I can never really get a way from
Speaker 1: the idea that it is some sort of hideous, gigantic
Speaker 1: sea monster at least a sea serpent, if not a
Speaker 1: whale of some sort But that's just that's just that's
Speaker 1: just how I always looked to it. Well, I know
Speaker 1: a lot of times people try to explain some of
Speaker 1: the like the Leviathan and the Behemoth as being some
Speaker 1: kind of interpretation on existing animals, like, oh, maybe it
Speaker 1: was a whale, or maybe it was a saltwater crocodile
Speaker 1: or something. I don't know. Why not go with a
Speaker 1: fire breathing dragon. You got a fire breathing dragon on
Speaker 1: your plate, and you're trying to say no, no, no,
Speaker 1: I don't want it. Well, I also have to say,
Speaker 1: for Behemoth, the other massive creature that's referenced in Job,
Speaker 1: I have pretty much always imagined some sort of Warhammer
Speaker 1: battle creature from from the Warhammer table tap game, some
Speaker 1: sort of big, like armored fiery demon monster. Yeah. But
Speaker 1: of course, the question of why the Leviathan and the
Speaker 1: Behemoth are invoked in the Book of Job goes sort
Speaker 1: of to the theology of the book, right, because they're
Speaker 1: in the scene where God shows up and God's like, Hey,
Speaker 1: who's the boss? Is it? You know it's me because
Speaker 1: I can best even these top apex predators on the earth. Yeah,
Speaker 1: primordial sea monsters or land monsters or what have you.
Speaker 1: I can take them out, you can't. So I'm kind
Speaker 1: of running the whole show here. But it invokes the
Speaker 1: idea that there are some beast on earth so powerful,
Speaker 1: so so tip top of the pyramid, that it would
Speaker 1: take a god to best them. That's right. We when
Speaker 1: we think of some of our top apex predators. Uh,
Speaker 1: this is what we often invoked, these ideas, right, because well,
Speaker 1: what do you think of when you think of an
Speaker 1: apex predator. Well, maybe your mind turns to a tiger,
Speaker 1: you know, tiger, tiger burning bright. You know, you can't
Speaker 1: help but romanticize the power of this creature. Or perhaps
Speaker 1: you think of the great white shark. I always think
Speaker 1: of the shark. Yeah, I mean, it's just so powerful
Speaker 1: and intimidating. It just it haunts our our our dreams.
Speaker 1: Or perhaps you know, it's some visions of the mighty
Speaker 1: t rex, or perhaps the spina saurus if you want
Speaker 1: some prehistoric flavor, or really any of the various prehistoric
Speaker 1: land mammals that were particularly ferocious looking. So, what are
Speaker 1: the qualities that you associate with an apex predator, the
Speaker 1: predator at the tip top of the food chain? Well, generally,
Speaker 1: you think it's gotta it's gotta be bigger than us, right,
Speaker 1: I mean, it doesn't actually have to be bigger than us,
Speaker 1: but it helps for us to pass that crown of
Speaker 1: Apex Predator over to it um it. It needs to
Speaker 1: be a ferocious predator obviously, and it needs to have
Speaker 1: no enemies except for maybe us if we're particularly crafty,
Speaker 1: and generally we are crafty enough to eradicate just about
Speaker 1: anything on this planet. Come on, we're the enemy of everything.
Speaker 1: It's always got us. Yeah, Really, the only things that
Speaker 1: have a leg up in the battle against humans are
Speaker 1: the smaller creatures such as say the mosquito or various
Speaker 1: uh bacteria. Yeah, we're much more threatened to buy, say,
Speaker 1: armies of unstoppable parasites, than we are by that single,
Speaker 1: one powerful creature that that king or queen of the
Speaker 1: animal world. Yeah. And part of that has to do
Speaker 1: with the fragile nature of the the Apex throne, because
Speaker 1: that's the thing about about the mighty Apex Predator. It's
Speaker 1: rule is tentative. There's there's not only loneliness at the top,
Speaker 1: but fragility and peril and ultimately who who knows how
Speaker 1: many great apex predators have perished throughout the evolutionary timeline,
Speaker 1: So many just massive toothy you know, flesh terrors have
Speaker 1: just ultimately perished, and many of them lost to us
Speaker 1: due to the rarity of their fossils. Yeah, that's exactly
Speaker 1: the problem, right, How many t rex fossils do you
Speaker 1: expect to find? Well, actually, not that many, because there
Speaker 1: would you know, each time you go a step up
Speaker 1: the food chain, they're going to be fewer individuals, and often,
Speaker 1: especially with land dwelling animals, those fewer individuals are less
Speaker 1: likely to end up in a place where they're likely
Speaker 1: to get fossilized. So yeah, the top apex predators are
Speaker 1: underrepresented in the fossil record. Those are just the ones
Speaker 1: that leave good fossil traces. I mean. One of the
Speaker 1: greatest s apex predators of all time, which we will
Speaker 1: be talking about in today's episode partially, is the great shark,
Speaker 1: the megalodon, which, because it's you know, this mostly cartilaginous fish,
Speaker 1: it doesn't have a solid skeleton like so many other
Speaker 1: animals do, so you you rarely even find all that
Speaker 1: extensive of a trace of it. You have to find
Speaker 1: its teeth and maybe little fragments of spinal pieces here
Speaker 1: and there. You don't find whole intact megalodons, that's right. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: of course, as we've discussed, the trilobytes are everywhere. Now
Speaker 1: when we think of giant, successful creatures that that prey
Speaker 1: with impunity and uh and have few, if any enemies
Speaker 1: in the natural world, we can't help but think of
Speaker 1: of the giant whales, the great whales such as the
Speaker 1: blue whale, the finback whale, the sperm whale, the right whale,
Speaker 1: and the humpback whale. Man whales are such amazing creatures,
Speaker 1: and we are going to be focusing on one particular
Speaker 1: whale today, but also predatory whales in general. But especially
Speaker 1: when you get into the larger whales, there's really nothing
Speaker 1: on Earth like them. Oh yeah, I mean, for instance,
Speaker 1: the blue whale is not only the largest creature on
Speaker 1: Earth today, it is the largest creature known to have
Speaker 1: ever existed ever. Yeah, like we're living the peak. You
Speaker 1: can't go back into prehistoric timelines and find a bigger
Speaker 1: blue whale, because the blue whale is the is the
Speaker 1: upper limit that as least as far as we've experienced
Speaker 1: it thus far as a planet. But that's not the
Speaker 1: only whale superlative that's right. For instance, the sperm whale
Speaker 1: has the largest brain ever to have existed on Earth. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and that big brain is even there in the scientific
Speaker 1: name of the sperm whale, which is visitor macrocephalus macrocephalus,
Speaker 1: meaning big head. Now, I think there are a couple
Speaker 1: of reasons for that. One of them is that it's
Speaker 1: got the biggest brain ever, but another one is that,
Speaker 1: of course it's got this giant, bloated forehead full of sperm,
Speaker 1: the spermacetic organ and the big melon that's used in echolocation,
Speaker 1: which we'll get to in a minute, but well, focus
Speaker 1: on that brain. An adult sperm whales brain is about
Speaker 1: eight thousand cubic centimeters on average, and if you compare
Speaker 1: that to the mean human brain, which is about cubic centimeters,
Speaker 1: you'll see the difference. Like, this is a whale, and
Speaker 1: we we think of ourselves as like, wow, we got
Speaker 1: the best biggest brain on the you know, in the world.
Speaker 1: And of course brain size is not directly correlated to
Speaker 1: intelligence as we would imagine intelligence, but we think of
Speaker 1: ourselves as like the brain beast. We are the brain
Speaker 1: animal and sperm whales have a brain that is about
Speaker 1: five times bigger than ours. Now, one thing you might
Speaker 1: wonder is, okay, you've got a blue whale that's much
Speaker 1: bigger than a sperm whale, but it's got a smaller
Speaker 1: brain than a sperm whale. Why is that? What would
Speaker 1: that be due to? Well, I would hypothesize that might
Speaker 1: have to do with the different ways these animals make
Speaker 1: a living. So whales belong to the biological order Cetacea,
Speaker 1: along with dolphins and porpoises, and from there, whales are
Speaker 1: divided into two categories. You've got the billeen whales like
Speaker 1: the blue whale and the humpback, and then you've got
Speaker 1: the toothed whales like the orca or the killer whale,
Speaker 1: and the sperm whales. So you might chalk up this
Speaker 1: brain difference to the difference in the general trend of
Speaker 1: encephialization ratios for active or raptorial predators versus more passive feeders.
Speaker 1: Blue whales are filter feeders, I guess you could still
Speaker 1: say their predators in a way. They prey on microscopic
Speaker 1: organisms small not microscopic, but small organisms like krill and
Speaker 1: copa pods. Swimming through these clouds of tiny crustaceans in
Speaker 1: the sea with their mouths open and their buffet feasters. Well,
Speaker 1: another way to think of it is that they're grazers, right,
Speaker 1: They're they're not I mean, they're not herbivores, they're not
Speaker 1: eating plants. They're eating animals, but they're grazing on these
Speaker 1: vast patches of tiny animals that have no defensive capabilities
Speaker 1: or anything like that. They're just sort of drifting through
Speaker 1: their food. Yeah. Their whole approach is essentially, I'm just
Speaker 1: gonna float around eat as much as I possibly can,
Speaker 1: and I'm too big for anything to mess with me. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and it's kind of beautiful. Actually. There are videos of
Speaker 1: blue whales approaching these patches of of their food sources
Speaker 1: like krill and stuff. So you'll see a large cloud
Speaker 1: of just differently colored water essentially, and the blue whales
Speaker 1: accelerate toward it, and right as they get toward there,
Speaker 1: they just pry their mouths open. It looks like a
Speaker 1: giant machine opening up to like accept a conveyor belt
Speaker 1: or something, which in a way it kind of is.
Speaker 1: And you've just got this massive flow in of these
Speaker 1: tiny organisms to get caught in its baleen plates the
Speaker 1: mouth parts that catch the food so they can process it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and I don't want to imply that there's not an
Speaker 1: intelligence and a beauty and a strategy to the feeding
Speaker 1: practices of the baling whales, because you do find examples of, say,
Speaker 1: humpback whales employing a sort of social strategy sometimes to
Speaker 1: consume their prey. But sperm whales, on the other hand,
Speaker 1: are more active hunters, so they often i've deep to
Speaker 1: catch their prey, which is mostly giant squid, but they
Speaker 1: also hunt fish and octopus and larger crustaceans and sometimes
Speaker 1: even sharks. So all around the world I mentioned this
Speaker 1: incephialization quotation. All around the world, it's a pretty common
Speaker 1: rule that predatory hunters didn't have larger brains than the
Speaker 1: prey they hunt, and this implies a great need for
Speaker 1: processing power, not necessarily what we would think of as
Speaker 1: intelligence and the kind of abstract human intelligence that we
Speaker 1: associate with. I don't know math problems or spatial problem
Speaker 1: solving or i Q tests or anything. I think biologists
Speaker 1: tend to think that sperm whales likely need these big
Speaker 1: brains for perception, which is a kind of intelligence on
Speaker 1: its own right. Generally on land, a predator needs to
Speaker 1: have sharp senses to help it at like track and
Speaker 1: spy on prey, you know, to sense prey from far away,
Speaker 1: to stay on top of it, to be very aware
Speaker 1: of its surroundings. And on land this is very often
Speaker 1: sight and smell. But spur whales, on the other hand,
Speaker 1: hunt mostly in this dark world of sound, hunting and
Speaker 1: mapping its surroundings by echolocation, where it uses these organs
Speaker 1: in its head to slap tissues together and create these
Speaker 1: clicks that they are then reflected out into the water,
Speaker 1: and it listens for the echoes of these clicks reflecting
Speaker 1: back to it off of anything that has a different
Speaker 1: density than the water itself. So you have to if
Speaker 1: you're trying to imagine the inner life of a sperm whale,
Speaker 1: imagine yourself as a creature with a huge, powerful brain
Speaker 1: so highly tuned for sound that their internal picture of
Speaker 1: the world around them in a totally dark place is
Speaker 1: as rich and fine grained based on sound as our
Speaker 1: picture of the world is based on light. It's kind
Speaker 1: of impossible to put yourself in that headspace. But yeah,
Speaker 1: and and then I mean and also almost impossible for
Speaker 1: us as humans to imagine that this creature. Uh, it's
Speaker 1: it's ancient ancestor with some sort of like essentially like
Speaker 1: a land wolf. Oh yeah, uh, I mean that. That's
Speaker 1: one of the craziest things is that you've always got
Speaker 1: to remember with whales, these creatures were not always in
Speaker 1: the water. They evolved from land dwelling mammals. So you
Speaker 1: might wonder, once you're one of the larger whales, do
Speaker 1: you really have any enemies to worry about it all?
Speaker 1: Like if you are a sperm whale, if you're one
Speaker 1: of these powerful dark world predators that's you know, got
Speaker 1: the biggest brain in the entire animal kingdom, one of
Speaker 1: the biggest bodies in the entire animal kingdom. Is there
Speaker 1: any enemy out there for you in the wild? Not really?
Speaker 1: Probably only orcas really the worka or the killer whale.
Speaker 1: But orcas are also fascinating whale predators. I was reading
Speaker 1: article in The Guardian by a marine biologist named Lawrence
Speaker 1: Smith about how orca's will sometimes attack great white sharks
Speaker 1: to eat their livers. You ever heard about this? Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's amazing. So apparently shark livers are just like Jack
Speaker 1: Pott marine nutrition. They're packed with more than ninety three
Speaker 1: per sent lipid's triascle glycerols. And Smith compares a great
Speaker 1: white shark liver to quote a deep fried Mars bar
Speaker 1: with added vitamins. So it's packed with fat, rich, richly nutritious,
Speaker 1: but also lots of hard to come by nutrients in
Speaker 1: the ocean. So how do you get a great white
Speaker 1: sharks liver? Right? A great white shark that's a rough customer, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean that. Yeah, even as delightful as that liver
Speaker 1: is gonna be, you're gonna have to get through the
Speaker 1: great white and all those teeth to have a bite
Speaker 1: of it. But apparently orca's don't have all that hard
Speaker 1: a time at it, because orca's are highly evolved, incredibly
Speaker 1: adept apex predators, and they can even prey on other
Speaker 1: apex predators like sharks. They are pack hunters. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: so the trick, Lauren Smith explains, and this fascinating article
Speaker 1: is that you give the shark the old flip flop.
Speaker 1: So she writes a quote. During a n encounter off
Speaker 1: the Farallon Islands off the coast of San Francisco, a
Speaker 1: group of whale watchers witnessed an orca ramming into the
Speaker 1: side of a great white shark, momentarily stunning it and
Speaker 1: allowing the orca to flip it over and holding it
Speaker 1: in place ventral belly up for around fifteen minutes, after
Speaker 1: which the orca began consuming its prey, much to the
Speaker 1: surprise of the whale watchers on board. A similar incident
Speaker 1: was captured on film off Costa Rica, and this time
Speaker 1: the orcas prey was a tiger shark. And it's not
Speaker 1: just sharks. Orcas have been observed doing the same to
Speaker 1: sting rays too, So what's going on here, Like, how
Speaker 1: come an orca can ram a shark, flip it upside
Speaker 1: down and then just eat its liver with impunity. Well,
Speaker 1: apparently sharks and rays have a nervous system security backdoor,
Speaker 1: and it's known as tonic immobility. And this is a
Speaker 1: state of paralysis that alasmo bronx, which are sharks raisin skates,
Speaker 1: fall into when they get positioned upside down in the water.
Speaker 1: So you flip a shark belly up ventral side up,
Speaker 1: and it'll go catatonic and lose muscle control. Basically just
Speaker 1: goes into a coma and till it can get flipped
Speaker 1: around again. So what's the adaptive value in this? You've
Speaker 1: gotta wonder why a shark would have an exploit like this.
Speaker 1: Nobody knows for sure, but it has been suggested this
Speaker 1: might somehow be used in mating practices. Okay, well that
Speaker 1: would that would make sense. That would be like the
Speaker 1: one time where it might be important for a shark,
Speaker 1: a highly aggressive predator, to be at least mildly incapacitated
Speaker 1: by it's uh, it's it's the mating shark. Yeah, But
Speaker 1: all this to illustrate how orcas are these amazing whale
Speaker 1: predators themselves. So do they pose any threat to sperm whales? Well,
Speaker 1: pods of orca's will sometimes attempt to separate sperm whale
Speaker 1: calves from their mothers and eat them. Uh. And I
Speaker 1: actually did find one account from a paper published in
Speaker 1: Marine Mammal Science in two thousand and six about a
Speaker 1: large herd of orcas attacking a pod of nine sperm whales,
Speaker 1: including sperm whale adults and and preying on them. Yeah.
Speaker 1: It's actually kind of a a horrifying scene. They describe
Speaker 1: where the sperm whales would circle up in this defensive
Speaker 1: posture where they kind of make a ring to defend
Speaker 1: themselves and try to fend off the killer whale attacks.
Speaker 1: But the orcas were coming at them, and the in
Speaker 1: the it says that the orca has employed a wound
Speaker 1: and withdraw strategy, so they go in and try to
Speaker 1: injure the sperm whales and then back away, because of
Speaker 1: course the sperm whale is a very dangerous enemy, and
Speaker 1: you know, you could be seriously injured trying to prey
Speaker 1: on one. So yeah, there was at least this one
Speaker 1: account I found of killer whales praying on adult sperm whales,
Speaker 1: But generally it seems like sperm whales, once they're adults,
Speaker 1: they're in good health, they're pretty much unassailable in the ocean.
Speaker 1: They don't really have natural enemies except for the occasional
Speaker 1: large herd attack of killer whales. And then of course
Speaker 1: this one other enemy, this one, and that would of
Speaker 1: course be a humans, because we are we are and
Speaker 1: have been the main enemy of the great whales. Uh,
Speaker 1: certainly within the confines of human history, certainly in the
Speaker 1: last couple of hundred years, we are the apex hunters
Speaker 1: who hunted them relentlessly and drove several species to the
Speaker 1: brink of extinction. I mean you compare us to the orcas,
Speaker 1: who again are mainly going to be a threat to
Speaker 1: young whales, And there is certainly some there's some heartbreaking
Speaker 1: documentary footage out there of orcas hunting a mother and
Speaker 1: her young whale across the seas. But humans, but are
Speaker 1: whaling practice to just prey on everything? Yeah? The counterpoint
Speaker 1: to that orca hunting is if you get to witness
Speaker 1: the protective practices of the adult, like the mother sperm whale,
Speaker 1: that's pretty amazing too. Yes, But it depends on the
Speaker 1: documented is some document if it's an Attenborough documentary, I
Speaker 1: don't necessarily trust that he is not going to break
Speaker 1: my heart with some terrifying predation. Well, there's a lot
Speaker 1: of heartbreak in the ocean. Yeah, I mean, there's no
Speaker 1: denying it. But basically I end up approaching it this
Speaker 1: way because I'll watch a lot of documentaries with my
Speaker 1: son and it's it's gotten to the point where it's
Speaker 1: kind of a toss up, like how he's gonna respond
Speaker 1: to the predation Because used to like any predation, especially
Speaker 1: there's dramatic music. He would get a little upset about.
Speaker 1: But but now, at almost six years old, he's surprisingly
Speaker 1: chill with some grotesque levels of pre date predation, Like
Speaker 1: it'll be three leopard cubs feasting on a corpse and
Speaker 1: I'll come in and I'll I'll walk over and I'll
Speaker 1: see this, and we're like, are you Are you okay
Speaker 1: with this, buddy, And he says, he says, oh, yeah,
Speaker 1: they're brothers. They're hungry. That's fine, Robert. I think you've
Speaker 1: just come up with a great children's show, The Hungry Brothers.
Speaker 1: It's it's all about how you frame it right now.
Speaker 1: One of the questions that the flip flop of all
Speaker 1: this is do sperm whales ever attack humans? This is
Speaker 1: something that has been a point of controversy, though there
Speaker 1: are definitely reports, especially reports from the nineteenth century, of
Speaker 1: for example, sperm whales ramming ships. Now, it's hard to
Speaker 1: tell if these accounts are accurate, but sailors from like
Speaker 1: Simpkins ships in the nineteenth century did report it sometimes. Yes,
Speaker 1: what happened is a sperm whale rammed our ship until
Speaker 1: we sank it, like attacked us with the intent to
Speaker 1: kill us. And you know, it's hard to imagine if
Speaker 1: that's even true to begin with, It's hard to imagine
Speaker 1: what's going on in the mind of the sperm whale,
Speaker 1: though I have also read comments from sub marine biologists
Speaker 1: too think, well, yeah, it's possible that, for example, a
Speaker 1: sperm whale might ram a ship if it perceived that
Speaker 1: ship as a threat, which a sperm whale could have
Speaker 1: good reasons to do, especially in the nineteenth century with
Speaker 1: horrible whaling practices. I mean, if you read about some
Speaker 1: of the whaling practices that were in place, then it's
Speaker 1: worse than any Attenborough documentary. It's it's just the most
Speaker 1: sadistic kind of methods. One I read about was where
Speaker 1: the whalers would kidnap a calf whale, injure it, and
Speaker 1: then keep it they're injured, waiting for the parents to
Speaker 1: come and try to rescue it, at which point they'd
Speaker 1: harpoon the parents. Yeah, I mean, I mean, certainly the
Speaker 1: individuals participating this at the time, you do have to
Speaker 1: re eyes. Yeah, they were, they were participating in an
Speaker 1: in an industry, and this probably not everyone's first choice.
Speaker 1: It's true, I mean, I shouldn't judge too much. I mean,
Speaker 1: and in some cases this is also a cultural practice
Speaker 1: that I I shouldn't pass too much judgment on that,
Speaker 1: but but certainly the whaling industry, Yeah, but certainly the
Speaker 1: whaling industry did become such an industry that it is.
Speaker 1: It is difficult, if not impossible, to look back on
Speaker 1: it now and not feel a little sick about it. Like, uh,
Speaker 1: when I was a kid in Newfoundland, Canada for a while,
Speaker 1: I remember we would uh, at least on one occasion,
Speaker 1: we we walked through an abandoned uh whaling port uh.
Speaker 1: And it was it was even then when I only
Speaker 1: like really kind of partially understood everything, it was kind
Speaker 1: of haunting because you would find these like whale vertebrae,
Speaker 1: and then there would be these big rusted harpoons, like
Speaker 1: the blunt harpoons, and then the as well as some
Speaker 1: of the pointed ones as well. And these were like
Speaker 1: the later day ones, the ones that would have been uh,
Speaker 1: you know, launched off of a canon I understand, not
Speaker 1: the the romantic moby Dick era harpoons. I feel like
Speaker 1: there's another way in which whaling sort of violates our
Speaker 1: hunting intuitions, which is, I mean a lot of people
Speaker 1: would feel terrible about any kind of killing of an animal,
Speaker 1: But somehow there's an intuition that killing an animal to
Speaker 1: harvest its meat for food is kind of different than
Speaker 1: like killing an animal to melt it down and render
Speaker 1: it's fat for industrial purposes, which is a lot of
Speaker 1: what was going on with lamps, etcetera. Yeah, Now, as
Speaker 1: you mentioned earlier, uh, a lot of these stories of
Speaker 1: like whales ramming ships, We're not completely sure what happened.
Speaker 1: There's a there are there's a lot of legend that
Speaker 1: that rises up surrounding the activity of whales during the
Speaker 1: height of the whaling industry. Uh. And then there of
Speaker 1: course whole myths of sperm whales, in particular swallowing humans whole.
Speaker 1: Is that true? Did that really happen? Uh? So I've
Speaker 1: looked into this in the into the in the past
Speaker 1: stuff to put your mind. Actually did an episode on
Speaker 1: this way back in the day. Uh, and it seems
Speaker 1: like it probably did not happen. It's it's a it's
Speaker 1: an inviting idea because sperm whales, as we already mentioned,
Speaker 1: they do feed by suction, some chewing, but oftentimes they're
Speaker 1: just sucking down something whole and in fact, in nive
Speaker 1: a whole a whole, like un chewed four hundred and
Speaker 1: five pound giant squid was recovered from the belly of
Speaker 1: a sperm whale. Uh and uh in the sperm whale
Speaker 1: doesn't even have a tongue, you know, to to prevent
Speaker 1: just this absolute and inhalation of tissue. Now as now,
Speaker 1: the question, of course is has a sperm whale ever
Speaker 1: sucked down a human being which would which is also
Speaker 1: probably an inviting idea because of the the myth of
Speaker 1: Jonah and the Whale, or our stories like Pinocchio and
Speaker 1: the Belly of a Whale, or even modern retellings like
Speaker 1: the Whaler's Revenge Song by the Decembrants. Uh. There's actually
Speaker 1: a wonderful article that came out in Salon back in
Speaker 1: by author of Ben Shattuck, and he explored the question
Speaker 1: at the new Bedford Whaling Museum Search Library. So he
Speaker 1: was going through all these various accounts of of whale
Speaker 1: related deaths frequently caused by a whale on boat action
Speaker 1: and ramming a boat and yeah, or just also thrashing,
Speaker 1: you know, like the flute could hit the boat. I mean,
Speaker 1: these are massive creatures and in their struggle to survive, Yeah,
Speaker 1: they could do some serious damage to a boat. Well,
Speaker 1: that's the thing to remember. If they want to kill us,
Speaker 1: of course they could. The question is like, would that
Speaker 1: be uh, something that would occur to them to do? Right,
Speaker 1: So Shattuck says, quote, I'd like to believe in swallowings,
Speaker 1: but it's tough. There's there is no air in the stomach,
Speaker 1: for one, there are acids, and if we are talking
Speaker 1: about sperm whales, which are most of the which we
Speaker 1: are most of the time, there is the deadly passage
Speaker 1: through the thirty foot jaws and those teeth. So, uh,
Speaker 1: this is a wonderful article and I'm not gonna attempt
Speaker 1: to summarize it all here. He gets into a number
Speaker 1: of different angles and it really gets into the heart
Speaker 1: of this kind of like voar fetish, this idea that
Speaker 1: we kind of like the idea of being consumed whole
Speaker 1: by another organism because it is like a return to
Speaker 1: the womb. How weird. Yeah. So he discusses a few
Speaker 1: different stories, different accounts of people being dragged and released
Speaker 1: by whales, h maulled by whales. There's one particular story,
Speaker 1: the case of Edmund Gardner, where there's actually a photograph
Speaker 1: of this individual years later and you can still see
Speaker 1: his mangled hand because he lost some fingers uh, to
Speaker 1: the mouth of a sperm whale. There are, ultimately in
Speaker 1: the new Bedford Whale Museum thousands of accounts of people
Speaker 1: being chewed on by whales, but there's not a single
Speaker 1: one of someone being swallowed shadock. However, not to disappoint
Speaker 1: he does discuss. He does discuss what it would be
Speaker 1: like to be eaten by a sperm whale. That is
Speaker 1: my kind of exploration. Yea. Now we we did the
Speaker 1: what it would be like to get eaten by a
Speaker 1: giant spider. We could do a whole episode on what
Speaker 1: would be like to get eating by a giant whale? Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1: He goes into it in depth in the article, but
Speaker 1: basically it would go down like this. You'd be sort
Speaker 1: of chewed on or at least gnashed on those eight
Speaker 1: inch teeth. You get sucked down the throat into a dark,
Speaker 1: airless place, just water and acid, and then you'd slide
Speaker 1: into the first stomach or holding bag for twenty four hours,
Speaker 1: perhaps surrounded. He has this beautiful description of the possible
Speaker 1: bioluminescent squid that would be down there with you lighting
Speaker 1: it up for a little bit, and but then the
Speaker 1: acid would break you down and you pass through three
Speaker 1: smaller s shaped stomachs, liquidized and then reduced a whale
Speaker 1: excrement with some possible bits of bones stuck in there,
Speaker 1: and that would be your journey, pooped out in a
Speaker 1: cloud of beaks. Yes, yeah, because that being the The
Speaker 1: side fact here is that, of course the beaks of
Speaker 1: giant squid are not digested either, and they end up
Speaker 1: just passing through rest and beaks. Okay, but today we
Speaker 1: want to look at these magnificent giant predators, the sperm
Speaker 1: whales and their predatory tooth oil relatives, and specifically to
Speaker 1: follow their ancestors back through history millions of years, back
Speaker 1: to the time of something that seems to me like
Speaker 1: maybe the ultimate predator, the best apex predator I've ever
Speaker 1: read about, the Leviathan, and I think we should tell
Speaker 1: the story of this creature when we come back from
Speaker 1: a break than alright, we're back. So to be clear,
Speaker 1: we've known about prehistoric whales in general for quite a
Speaker 1: while now, and if you've ever spent much time in
Speaker 1: a in a in a paleontology museum or book, then
Speaker 1: you've seen these creatures often depicted as sort of sort
Speaker 1: of skexy faced whales. You know, now you're not pronouncing
Speaker 1: sexy in a funny way. You're saying like skexies, like
Speaker 1: in the Dark Crystal, the skexies of the Dark Crystal,
Speaker 1: where they kind of like long, slender snouted and very
Speaker 1: toothy looking vulture face. Yeah, kind of vulture faced whales.
Speaker 1: That that's how paleo artists tended to pick them. And
Speaker 1: the prime example here would be basil Osaurus. Like the name, yeah,
Speaker 1: well it's name is misleading because it means king lizard. Well,
Speaker 1: but it's not a lizard. But due to the rules
Speaker 1: of naming, attempts to name it other things have not
Speaker 1: to work. So we're stuck with Basilosaurus. Okay, tell me
Speaker 1: about basil o Saurus. Okay. So this was a genus
Speaker 1: of prehistoric cetaceans from the late EO scene that's forty
Speaker 1: to thirty five million years ago, and according to the Smithsonian,
Speaker 1: they probably reached links of forty to sixty five ft
Speaker 1: that's twelve to twenty meters roughly. Uh. Though the nine
Speaker 1: Encyclopedia of Dinosaurs and Prehistoric Animals that's a book that
Speaker 1: I grew up with and continue to like check out
Speaker 1: with my son because it has all these wonderful illustrations.
Speaker 1: That book boasted a length of up to eighty two
Speaker 1: ft or twenty five ms. I can tell they're stretching
Speaker 1: it right now. But if you want to talk about
Speaker 1: stretching it, you go back to eighteen forty five Albert Coke,
Speaker 1: who was an avid fossil collector, showman and proprietor of
Speaker 1: the St. Louis Museum. He claimed that the creature would
Speaker 1: have measured a hundred and fourteen feet long or thirty
Speaker 1: five meters, And yeah, he was a bit of a showman,
Speaker 1: and but this drew skepticism from the scientific community. Even
Speaker 1: at the time. They were like, I don't know, that
Speaker 1: sounds a bit big. I mean there's always this inflationary tendency, right,
Speaker 1: you want to make the thing as big as possible. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you're trying to sell tickets. Yeah, So this creature would
Speaker 1: have been an early precursor to the great toothed whales
Speaker 1: to follow, sharing a similar diet, but without the larger
Speaker 1: cranium size or the the evolved social behavior. And this
Speaker 1: brings us to the Leviathan, Right, the Leviathan. I'm so
Speaker 1: excited about the Leviathan. So I want to tell a
Speaker 1: fossil discovery story and give you the setting. So it
Speaker 1: was November two eight and there were a team of
Speaker 1: fossil hunters. They were exploring the desert of the Pisco
Speaker 1: Eca area of Peru. And this is a part of
Speaker 1: a long strip of desert that runs north south along
Speaker 1: the western coast of South America west of the Andes.
Speaker 1: So if you picture South America, you've got the west coast,
Speaker 1: and then there's usually desert regions stretching to the mountains
Speaker 1: of the Andes, and then have got you know, more
Speaker 1: lush rainforest or other types of ecoregions going east of
Speaker 1: the Andes. And the Pisco ecoregion is south of the
Speaker 1: capital city of Lima and Peru, but north of the
Speaker 1: Nascar region, which is known for its amazing ancient geoglyphs
Speaker 1: carved in the earth. If you've never seen the Nasca geoglyphs,
Speaker 1: by the way, you should look them up. They're great.
Speaker 1: So there's a two thousand ten New York Times article
Speaker 1: about this area in general, and though the Times focuses
Speaker 1: on one region, in this desert known as the oku
Speaker 1: Kahe Desert. So you have to picture this apocalyptically dry,
Speaker 1: dusty expanse often totally desolate, very windy, stretching to the
Speaker 1: west facing side of the Andes, and the winds here
Speaker 1: kick up dust devils and they steadily erode these old,
Speaker 1: jagged rocks. To get a sense of it from a local,
Speaker 1: the Times article quotes uh someone named Yolanda Gutierrez, who's
Speaker 1: a worker who travels into this region to harvest seaweed
Speaker 1: from along the coast in the desert, and Gautierrez says, quote,
Speaker 1: this desert is horrible. The only things a person sees
Speaker 1: are dirt and rocks and bones. But what if you're
Speaker 1: looking for bones, well then then I'm guessing you're in
Speaker 1: for a treat. Yeah. So the French paleontologists Christian de
Speaker 1: Muizon says that the desert along the coast of Peru
Speaker 1: contains what is probably quote the richest spot in the
Speaker 1: world for fossil marine mammals. And this New York Times
Speaker 1: article is interesting. It points out that this area is
Speaker 1: so rich in fossils, especially marine fossils, that local merchants
Speaker 1: in Eca and other New yorby nearby towns self fossilized
Speaker 1: shark teeth the size of a man's hand for sixty
Speaker 1: two hundred dollars. Now, the size of a of a
Speaker 1: man's hand. That's not a great white tooth, that's something else. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's that's getting into like Megalodon territory. We're talking to
Speaker 1: the beasts of old right. So, according to Peru's Ministry
Speaker 1: of Culture's Office of Recovery, in two thousand ten alone,
Speaker 1: there were more than two thousand, two hundred seizures of
Speaker 1: illegally obtained fossils that people were trying to smuggle out
Speaker 1: of the country free or sell on the black market.
Speaker 1: So this is fossil city, but especially for marine fossils.
Speaker 1: So there are many officially recognized fossil discoveries from the area,
Speaker 1: including the teeth of the megalodon, which is this giant
Speaker 1: prehistoric shark we've been mentioning that could grow eighteen meters
Speaker 1: or sixty feet long. A two thousand eight study in
Speaker 1: the Journal of Zoology by lead author Stephen Rowe created
Speaker 1: a model that predicted this animal could have had a
Speaker 1: bite force of more than a hundred and eighty thousand
Speaker 1: Newton's which is about forty thousand pounds or about eighteen
Speaker 1: thousand kilograms of bite pressure. And this has been described
Speaker 1: as strong enough to crush a car. Yes, Now, to
Speaker 1: put that in perspective with others species, the black piranha
Speaker 1: three twenty newtonts of force, the largest saltwater crocs alive
Speaker 1: today sixteen thousand, four hundred fourteen newtons, the largest great
Speaker 1: white sharks alive today eighteen thousand, two hundred and sixteen
Speaker 1: newtonts humans and seventeen But so this is ten times
Speaker 1: stronger bite force than a great white shark, and a
Speaker 1: great white shark has amazingly strong bite force. So the
Speaker 1: megalodon was was a beast. It could buy I mean,
Speaker 1: it could bite your dreams in half. They could bite
Speaker 1: a chunk out of a mountain. This this thing was
Speaker 1: the beast of beasts and a kind of creepy factor.
Speaker 1: Remember is that the megalodon existed until it seems like
Speaker 1: about two and a half million years ago. That feels
Speaker 1: too close, right it does. What if you found out
Speaker 1: Toranosaurus rex had existed until around the same time as
Speaker 1: our australiapithecen ancestors. Yeah, you would be more inclined to think, well,
Speaker 1: I might run into one. And even though to be clear,
Speaker 1: there are no megalodon left in the sea, uh, it
Speaker 1: does feel a little too close. It makes you a
Speaker 1: little more inclined to think, well, there, maybe there could
Speaker 1: be especially of the right sort of sci fi novel
Speaker 1: scenario where met yea. So, this western desert in Peru
Speaker 1: is a rich spot for ancient marine fossils because this
Speaker 1: desert was once a sea floor which has been pushed
Speaker 1: up to become dry land by the tectonic activity that
Speaker 1: created the andes the mountains there. So when you walk
Speaker 1: through this desert there are these little hills and rocky
Speaker 1: formations that very often contain fossilized creatures that swam the
Speaker 1: sea millions of years ago. And so, according to Nature
Speaker 1: News in two thousand eight, a member of this team
Speaker 1: of researchers I mentioned named class Post, a Dutch researcher
Speaker 1: who worked at the Natural History Museum in Rotterdam, came
Speaker 1: across a rocky outcropping with a monstrous toothy figure embedded
Speaker 1: within it. It was a jaw fragment about as long
Speaker 1: as an adult human, with these unbelievable teeth teeth like
Speaker 1: artillery shells, and it was what appeared to be the
Speaker 1: fossilized skull of a giant whale that it was positioned inside.
Speaker 1: As it was inside the rock, the skull was broken
Speaker 1: and upside down, and once the fossil was excavated and
Speaker 1: prepared in Lima, the researchers, including Christian de muizon Own
Speaker 1: who had quoted a minute ago and Olivia Lambert and others,
Speaker 1: published their findings in Nature in two thousand and ten.
Speaker 1: This was no ordinary sperm whale. They figured out that
Speaker 1: they had discovered a new genus and species of extinct
Speaker 1: predatory whale related to sperm whales, and they named it
Speaker 1: Leviathan Melville. Uh. So that's wonderful because they're they're drawing
Speaker 1: on the biblical tale of of Leviathan, and then they're
Speaker 1: also paying homage to uh to Moby Dick, right, And
Speaker 1: so they they cited Moby Dick is the reason for
Speaker 1: calling it that more, even more so than pointing to
Speaker 1: the Bible, because in Moby Dick Melville very often refers
Speaker 1: to the great sperm whale as the Leviathan, right. And
Speaker 1: so here we have like the ultimate sperm whale like
Speaker 1: the the prehistoric sperm whale, a sperm whale so gigantic
Speaker 1: that it may have eaten whales. Yeah, and we'll get
Speaker 1: to that in a minute. And it's not I want
Speaker 1: to emphasize that it's not necessarily its size, because the
Speaker 1: sperm whales of today are are very large. It is
Speaker 1: something more about the mouth and the teeth and the
Speaker 1: face that we'll get into that explains what exactly this
Speaker 1: creature was. So their Nature paper was published under the
Speaker 1: title quote the Giant Bite of a new raptorial sperm
Speaker 1: Whale from the Miocene epoch of Peru, and the authors
Speaker 1: identified the specimen as having lived about twelve to thirteen
Speaker 1: million years ago, which would have put it in the
Speaker 1: Middle Miocene. Its head was three meters long or about
Speaker 1: ten feet, and extrapolating from this, the team concluded that
Speaker 1: the animal's body length was at least thirteen point five
Speaker 1: meters or forty five ft and up to seventeen point
Speaker 1: five meters are almost sixty feet, putting it in the
Speaker 1: sperm whale or megalodon size category. And these teeth, unlike
Speaker 1: modern sperm whales, which just have the fully developed teeth
Speaker 1: on their lower jaws. Leviathan Melville had interlocking teeth on
Speaker 1: its upper and lower jaws. And if you take one
Speaker 1: of these teeth and measure it, it is like a
Speaker 1: too leader soda bottle almost. I mean, it is huge.
Speaker 1: You'll find it's thirty six centimeters long or over fourteen
Speaker 1: inches long, and twelve centimeters are almost five inches in diameter.
Speaker 1: Insanely big teeth. These are, in the words of Chris jondmuizone,
Speaker 1: the biggest tetrapod bite ever discovered. Now you have to
Speaker 1: add that nobody yet has has crunched the numbers on
Speaker 1: exactly how many newtonts this particular bite would pack. But
Speaker 1: Lambert in particular estimates that it that it would was
Speaker 1: probably either on par with Megalodon or perhaps exceeded Megalodon's bite,
Speaker 1: But it remains an open question. But bigger teeth than
Speaker 1: the megalodon, right, Yeah, I mean these teeth are hilarious
Speaker 1: if you look at them, and if you try to
Speaker 1: imagine them in situation as they would have been in
Speaker 1: the mouth and this mouth is coming at you open,
Speaker 1: it's the most terrifying thing you can think of. They're
Speaker 1: almost too big for us to even uh process as teeth,
Speaker 1: they're they're they're like giants to lagtites and still lagmites.
Speaker 1: You know. Yeah, they look like sharp ended dinosaur eggs.
Speaker 1: They're just gigantic. So what was the life and setting
Speaker 1: of this massive ancient hunter, the Leviathan, the killer whale
Speaker 1: of killer whales? How did it live? Well? First of all,
Speaker 1: twelve million years ago, predatory toothed whales were much more
Speaker 1: numerous than they are today today. When you think of
Speaker 1: predatory toothed whales, you've got things like the orcas, the
Speaker 1: killer whales, and you've got the sperm whales that dive
Speaker 1: deep into the darkness and mostly prey on squid by
Speaker 1: this suction action. But something to keep in mind is
Speaker 1: that not all of the toothed whales today are as
Speaker 1: we've been pointing out, biters. Modern sperm whales they do
Speaker 1: this suction thing, they suck the squid in and swallow it.
Speaker 1: But the Leviathan, based on its jaw and its teeth,
Speaker 1: has the paleontol just looking at it have said, oh, yeah,
Speaker 1: this thing was definitely a biter. It was a raptorial
Speaker 1: predator that would swim up and it would bite something.
Speaker 1: And by looking at an animal's mouth parts, you can
Speaker 1: be you often tell what kind of stuff it would
Speaker 1: have been biting, right, Yeah, because, as we've said before,
Speaker 1: nature is a cheap skate. It's not going to keep
Speaker 1: teeth around for no reason. If the teeth are there,
Speaker 1: they're serving a purpose. Yeah, if you're eating cucumber sandwiches,
Speaker 1: you don't need thirty six centimeter long teeth and and
Speaker 1: a bite force on the scale of the megalodon. So
Speaker 1: because of the shape, size and wear pattern on the
Speaker 1: teeth and the skull, the authors of the study believe
Speaker 1: that Leviathan did not prey on smaller, softer prey like squid,
Speaker 1: but was hunting large prey with tough skeletons and hard
Speaker 1: body parts. That prey was very likely other whales, specifically
Speaker 1: mid sized billen whales like likely between about seven and
Speaker 1: ten meters long, meaning the prey animals of this whale
Speaker 1: were about twenty three to thirty three feet. This is
Speaker 1: the whale Killer Whale, the Wolf of Whale Street. I
Speaker 1: love that. We're gonna have to go that with that
Speaker 1: for the title. Now in the episode, alright, know, um,
Speaker 1: at this point, I should I should, I should really
Speaker 1: drive home the reign of the basil Saurus that we
Speaker 1: discussed earlier was ancient history by the time Leviathan came
Speaker 1: to rule the seas, and as as far as we
Speaker 1: know it, it pretty much ruled the seas. It was
Speaker 1: it was pretty much the top predator of the ocean.
Speaker 1: We don't know of anything else out there to compete
Speaker 1: with it, except maybe the megalodon. That's right. The only
Speaker 1: known creature from this time frame that would have rivaled
Speaker 1: it would have been Megalodon. But it's unknown of these
Speaker 1: two species ever actually competed against each other or you know,
Speaker 1: or certainly had any kind of like a throw down
Speaker 1: epic sea monster battle. You know, I have to say
Speaker 1: it's it's it's interesting that some theorize that competition and
Speaker 1: threats from the likes of Megalada Megalodon may have led
Speaker 1: to the development of pack hunting behavior and toothed whales
Speaker 1: such as the orca, and to the gigantic size of Leviathan.
Speaker 1: And of course it's also argued that Leviathan's hunger may
Speaker 1: have led to an increase in size among the baleen whales.
Speaker 1: You know, get big enough to where you're no longer
Speaker 1: uh gonna be as as easy of of a prey
Speaker 1: species for the apex predator, and this may have led
Speaker 1: to the humpbacks and fin backs and the great blue
Speaker 1: whales that we know today. I do have to add, though,
Speaker 1: that more fossil evidence is needed to fully support uh
Speaker 1: this notion. Though that's an interesting concept. I hadn't heard that,
Speaker 1: but uh, that kind of makes sense that they would
Speaker 1: evolve to become larger in order to better defend themselves
Speaker 1: against these horrible ancient predators or yeah, or it just
Speaker 1: becomes a you think about what what sort of animals
Speaker 1: is the apex predator preying on? You know, what size
Speaker 1: is what? What you know particular strains of the genome
Speaker 1: are falling to it, and then how is that affecting uh,
Speaker 1: the the the the the surviving sizes among the species.
Speaker 1: I mean, as an animal keeps getting bigger and stronger
Speaker 1: than you, it's harder and harder to prey on it rightly.
Speaker 1: And even an apex predator is not going to say, yeah,
Speaker 1: I feel like a challenge. I'm gonna go after this
Speaker 1: big boy here, and no, you're gonna go after what
Speaker 1: what is easiest? You know, of course they don't want challenges.
Speaker 1: I mean again, the animal nature is a cheap skate,
Speaker 1: and animals are cheap skates that they don't want to
Speaker 1: take unnecessary risks. I mean this goes back to this
Speaker 1: question you brought up. Everybody always wants to know once
Speaker 1: they find out about Leviathan Melville did the did the
Speaker 1: Leviathan and the Megalodon fight? Who would have won in
Speaker 1: a fight? And I am, of course not above a
Speaker 1: little bit of fantasy monster showdown thinking myself, but from
Speaker 1: what I've read, there's probably not a good reason to
Speaker 1: think that the adults of these species would have fought
Speaker 1: one another. They might have, like tried to prey on
Speaker 1: the young of the other species, but once they're adults
Speaker 1: in good health, these are both very large and very
Speaker 1: powerful predators, and for either one to start some trouble
Speaker 1: would have been a risky move, right. Remember, actual fighting
Speaker 1: is rarer than you probably imagine. In the wild. Animals
Speaker 1: don't like getting hurt, and when they pick on something
Speaker 1: their own size and strength or bigger, they're likely to
Speaker 1: get hurt. And animals are much more likely to go
Speaker 1: after smaller, weaker prey that you know when you see
Speaker 1: predators attacking a herd of antelope or something like that.
Speaker 1: They're very often trying to get the young, or trying
Speaker 1: to get a sick, weakened animal, not to get a
Speaker 1: strong animal in its prime that might kick him in
Speaker 1: the face. Though I do hear that megalodon liver is
Speaker 1: just just delicious. Well, I want to come back to
Speaker 1: that in a minute. So, though Olivia Lambert has suggested
Speaker 1: that these species uh may have tried to pick off
Speaker 1: one another's young, I haven't come across any evidence that
Speaker 1: there's there. There are fossil records of them fighting one
Speaker 1: another as adults, and it doesn't seem like it would
Speaker 1: have made a lot of sense for them to do that.
Speaker 1: Only humans really are stupid enough to to to go
Speaker 1: after the impossible dream, you know, And we we and
Speaker 1: we idolize it too. We we look at someone like
Speaker 1: say Werner Herzog and we say, you know, in his decision,
Speaker 1: I'm going to I want to film the movie about
Speaker 1: about about dragging a boat over a mountain, and we're
Speaker 1: going to actually drag a boat over a mountain to
Speaker 1: do it. Megalodon is not going to do that neither.
Speaker 1: That's human folly. So here's another curious observation. We talked
Speaker 1: earlier about the gigantic foreheads of sperm whales. These big
Speaker 1: heads contain what's known as the spermaceti organ, right, which
Speaker 1: is a collection of these chambers holding oily waxy material.
Speaker 1: And it's not known for sure exactly what this is for,
Speaker 1: but there are a couple of main hypotheses that have
Speaker 1: been put put forward over the years to explain it.
Speaker 1: The first that it has been used in echolocation, and
Speaker 1: from what I understand, I think this is the favorite
Speaker 1: hypothesis now. But a second that has been put forward
Speaker 1: is that the spermaceti organ was an aid in regulating
Speaker 1: buoyancy to help the whale in in managing its deep dives.
Speaker 1: So Leviathan also appears to have had a spermaceti organ
Speaker 1: in its head. But if there's any truth to the
Speaker 1: second hypothesis, you might wonder why a whale like Leviathan
Speaker 1: would need something like that, right, Because the hypothesis of
Speaker 1: Leviathan's life is that it didn't need to go down
Speaker 1: and deep dive for squid, that it was a shallow feeder,
Speaker 1: was a shallow hunter. These other predatory whales, now, one
Speaker 1: kind of crazy hypothesis to explain what's going on here
Speaker 1: has been leveled at this from the University of Utah
Speaker 1: evolutionary morphologist David Carrier, who we've mentioned on the show before.
Speaker 1: I think was he the fist punch theory guy. Oh
Speaker 1: my goodness, I think he was. Yeah. So he said,
Speaker 1: quote spermaceti organs could be used as battering rams to
Speaker 1: injure opponents during contests over females or I think he
Speaker 1: also mentions it could have been used to incapacity to
Speaker 1: mobilize prey. So Carrier sites the fact that, as we
Speaker 1: mentioned earlier, people have told these stories from the nineteenth
Speaker 1: century that their boats were sunk after being rammed by
Speaker 1: sperm whales. So it's being imagined for this ancient predator here,
Speaker 1: the giant toothy whale, the biter Leviathan, is that you've
Speaker 1: got a one to punch. The world's largest marine predator
Speaker 1: speeds out of the darkness, smashes into you at full speed,
Speaker 1: knocks you senseless, and then just bites you in half
Speaker 1: with teeth the size of two leader soda bottles to
Speaker 1: surge up from the depths. I like it. Now. Who
Speaker 1: knows if this is correct, but there's another way actually
Speaker 1: in which this ramming theory does seem kind of plausible
Speaker 1: to me, because the leviathan is more often cited as
Speaker 1: a relative of the sperm whale due to its mouth
Speaker 1: structure and possible hunting patterns. But it might be helpful
Speaker 1: to imagine what would happen if you basically had a
Speaker 1: gigantic orca a killer whale the size of a sperm whale.
Speaker 1: Remember the story from earlier about how Orca's got the
Speaker 1: shark liver. That's right, They needed to hit him in
Speaker 1: the belly, right, So the orca would ram the shark
Speaker 1: to stun it and immobilize it, then flip the shark
Speaker 1: on its back, which would send it into this this
Speaker 1: catatonic state, the tonic immobility, where it would go into
Speaker 1: a go into a frozen paralysis, and then the orca
Speaker 1: could dine on its liver at its leisure. And so
Speaker 1: now I'm imagining this exact thing, but instead of an
Speaker 1: orca in a great white, it's a leviathan and a
Speaker 1: megalodon twelve million years ago. Because one there's certainly as
Speaker 1: sort of a prey hacking tactic involved with with using
Speaker 1: it against sharks Uh, it would probably work pretty well.
Speaker 1: It's a whale too, a monster like this just ramming
Speaker 1: into its prey. Now, of course that this is just
Speaker 1: a hypothetical scenario I'm imagining. Once again, there is no
Speaker 1: direct evidence I'm aware of that the Leviathan ever preyed
Speaker 1: on adult Megalodon. But it's is fun to imagine, isn't it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we can't help but imagine these uh, these these these
Speaker 1: ancient battles that I just read an entire book to
Speaker 1: my son where each each page, each spread, was one
Speaker 1: dinosaur against one prehistoric beast and you had to compare
Speaker 1: stats to see which one would win. And we did
Speaker 1: spend a lot of a lot of time explaining, well,
Speaker 1: these two would never actually battle, you know, these they
Speaker 1: would have never met, and if they had, why would
Speaker 1: they have messed with each other? But we still love
Speaker 1: a good, good tear down fight. Well, if it came
Speaker 1: down to it, the Megalodon is no sloush. But one
Speaker 1: thing you got to remember, the Leviathan's got bigger teeth
Speaker 1: and a bigger brain. Yeah, I mean, I'm gonna have
Speaker 1: to show my mammalian bias and and root for the
Speaker 1: Leviathan no matter what like, I just feel more more
Speaker 1: of a kinship to the Leviathan. Yeah, you've got to
Speaker 1: That shark's got black eyes like a doll's eyes. All right, Well,
Speaker 1: on that note, we're gonna take a quick break and
Speaker 1: when we come back, we're gonna we're gonna get to
Speaker 1: another press in question. Where did all these monsters go? Thank? Alright,
Speaker 1: we're back, So Robert, I want to come back to
Speaker 1: this thing we discussed at the beginning about the apex
Speaker 1: predator and how it seems in our mind versus how
Speaker 1: it is in reality. Because apex predators seem so individually
Speaker 1: powerful the tiger, the great white shark, or even the
Speaker 1: ancient megalodon or the Leviathan, it's difficult for us to
Speaker 1: imagine how a beast this powerful would disappear, whatever, have
Speaker 1: any kind of vulnerability, or go extinct, Like what could
Speaker 1: wipe them out, what could pose a challenge to them?
Speaker 1: They were top of the pops, right, But while individually strong,
Speaker 1: ape ex predators are just as vulnerable to extinction as
Speaker 1: any other species, and in many cases actually much more so.
Speaker 1: That's right, because your species may become king whale, but
Speaker 1: it doesn't mean that it's going you're going to remain
Speaker 1: king whale, because what will happen to thy prey or
Speaker 1: great great eater? Will you eat them all and in
Speaker 1: doing so steal your own extinction with theirs? Or will
Speaker 1: you eat the ones that you can easily catch, and
Speaker 1: in doing so encouraged traits in your prey that will
Speaker 1: one day outwit you, or encourage specificity and laziness in yourself.
Speaker 1: That's right, Yeah, you you become dependent on this one thing.
Speaker 1: You become great at this one type of predation. So
Speaker 1: you eat only the small uh, and so the species
Speaker 1: grows larger with time because larger specimens are more likely
Speaker 1: to evade your bite. Meanwhile, those who compete with you
Speaker 1: for your prey adapt with time as well, perhaps growing
Speaker 1: larger or craftier. The smaller predators become pack hunters, perhaps
Speaker 1: using their tactics against you in your own precious young again,
Speaker 1: a strategy employed by varieties of Orca to this day.
Speaker 1: And there is a lot of evidence that social behaviors
Speaker 1: tend to win out over time. Yeah. So I have
Speaker 1: a I have a fun example I'm going to throw
Speaker 1: out here. Uh So I just ask everyone to roll
Speaker 1: with me on this. But let's consider Jason vorhees as
Speaker 1: as a sort of apex predator. Okay, is he more
Speaker 1: the Megalodon or the Leviathan. He's maybe more Megalodon. I
Speaker 1: think more Megalodon. He has more of that like shark
Speaker 1: brain going on. I think so. For whatever silly reason,
Speaker 1: he's he's very adapt at praying on promiscuous or otherwise
Speaker 1: morally suspect teenagers. Right. He hears that beer can cracking
Speaker 1: from far away, and he's on the march. But it's
Speaker 1: the solid moral characters who prove difficult prey as well
Speaker 1: as the of course psychically potent teenagers as well. Okay,
Speaker 1: so you're invoking the rules of horror and slasher movies,
Speaker 1: which are that the good kids tend to be the
Speaker 1: only ones who can out with the killer. Right, But
Speaker 1: then the added rule for Jason, if there's a kid
Speaker 1: with psychic powers, that one's going to be difficult prey
Speaker 1: as well. Well, the kids with psychic powers tends to
Speaker 1: be the good kid. True. So, over time, perhaps vorhes
Speaker 1: predatory habits advanced the genetic tendency of moral and psychic
Speaker 1: prey until his natural habitat of Crystal Lake is just
Speaker 1: overflowing with psychic virgin honor students that best in every turn,
Speaker 1: or maybe he's just so good at his job that
Speaker 1: slashers with less robust franchises, like say leather Face, they
Speaker 1: have to become more social or intelligent in order to
Speaker 1: earn their kills. So Leatherface has a whole family helping him.
Speaker 1: Exactly it kind of it kind of writes itself, doesn't it. Robert,
Speaker 1: You've taken this into profound territory. Now, speaking of species
Speaker 1: becoming smarter uh and and uh and having better brains
Speaker 1: that that are social abilities to compete. We touched on
Speaker 1: the encephalization quotation earlier. That's the e Q and this
Speaker 1: is UH to be clear, the the actual brain size
Speaker 1: of a creature versus what would be expected on mass alone. Now,
Speaker 1: often this is taken as a measure of the intelligence
Speaker 1: of an animal, and there is there does appear to
Speaker 1: be some correlation, but it's not a totally direct correlation.
Speaker 1: There outliers with bigger or smaller brains relative to their
Speaker 1: bodies that don't seem to be totally in line with
Speaker 1: how intelligent we think they are. So the pack hunting
Speaker 1: orcas they boast a two point five Now that's small
Speaker 1: compared to the human seven or the bottlenose dolphins four,
Speaker 1: but it rises above the baileeen whales one. They boast
Speaker 1: the processing powers and necessary to hunt as a social unit. Well, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean the billeen whales. They probably don't need much
Speaker 1: more of a brain than like a grazing herbivore would need. Now,
Speaker 1: it's also possible that environmental factors contributed to the downfall
Speaker 1: of the leviathan. A cooling climate during the late Neo
Speaker 1: scene around ten millions to eleven million years ago, giant
Speaker 1: active predators simply wouldn't be able to function anymore. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: smaller predators could have fared better, including sperm whales that
Speaker 1: depended on deep sea prey like the giant squid. Now
Speaker 1: why would they do better, Well, because you have the deep, dark,
Speaker 1: cold ocean. This is more of a stable environment, less
Speaker 1: vulnerable to climate change. So so there's climate change on
Speaker 1: the surface that's affecting what prayer available. But you know,
Speaker 1: you can always go down into the dark world to
Speaker 1: get you some squid, right the squid. The squid remain
Speaker 1: constant down there. So those that can dive down and
Speaker 1: and and eat that meal, they have stability that the
Speaker 1: way leaders are just not going to have. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: fascinating to contemplate what happens to these powerful creatures like
Speaker 1: the Mega Ladon and the Leviathan. Uh. You know, we
Speaker 1: we've got these different theories about what happened to them,
Speaker 1: but ultimately a lot of things could have happened to them.
Speaker 1: Because even though the individual aprex apex predator is strong,
Speaker 1: the apex predator as a species depends on an awful
Speaker 1: lot going right. In order for it to survive, it
Speaker 1: has to have access to its prey. If the prey
Speaker 1: thins out, dies off, or migrates somewhere else, the apex
Speaker 1: predator can starve. Apex predators also tend to have low
Speaker 1: reproduction rates and large bodies with powerful brains and muscles,
Speaker 1: which need lots and lots of food to grow and sustain.
Speaker 1: The apex predator business, you might say, in some ways,
Speaker 1: is a very successful one, but it's also a high
Speaker 1: initial investment organism that requires a lot of incoming cash
Speaker 1: flow in the sense of a business. Right. If you
Speaker 1: can't keep the flow of resources streaming to it, it
Speaker 1: quite quickly gets into desperate circumstances. It can't feed itself,
Speaker 1: can't reproduce and raise healthy young, or in some cases
Speaker 1: might even turn to cannibalism, which is not good for
Speaker 1: a species in the long run. The genetic economics of
Speaker 1: cannibalism do not pay off. Now, some sort of apex
Speaker 1: predators have managed to survive many ecological crisises or crises
Speaker 1: and just keep going right, like sharks are a good example.
Speaker 1: The megalodon isn't still around, but sharks in general have
Speaker 1: been pretty top of the food chain predators for more
Speaker 1: than four hundred million years. But of course, the megalodon
Speaker 1: is still extinct and the deep diving squid sucking sperm
Speaker 1: whale still exists, but the leviathan is now extinct. So
Speaker 1: where do these giant apex predators come from in the
Speaker 1: first place? That might kind of help us explain where
Speaker 1: they go. Well, one thing is that there's this informal
Speaker 1: principle in evolutionary biology known as Copes rule, named after
Speaker 1: an American paleontologist named Edward Drinker Cope. Where where are
Speaker 1: all the drinkers today? I don't know. I don't run
Speaker 1: across that name. Very cops real states that over geological time,
Speaker 1: a lineage of related animals will tend to increase in
Speaker 1: body size. And this is an informal rule because it
Speaker 1: doesn't always hold at every taxonomic level or every type
Speaker 1: of organism, but it is very often true. It's true
Speaker 1: on average. Just as one example, in February, a study
Speaker 1: published in Science found that if you track the size
Speaker 1: of marine animals on average over the past five hundred
Speaker 1: and forty two million years, they have increased a hundred
Speaker 1: and fiftyfold in size. So why does this appear to happen? Well,
Speaker 1: I did find an interesting study on that. So there
Speaker 1: was a study in the American Naturalist in called ecological
Speaker 1: specialization in Fossil Mammals explains copes rule. And what this
Speaker 1: study think that what they think they find is that
Speaker 1: one possible way of explaining copes rule is that evolution
Speaker 1: favors animals with bigger bodies, like if you're bigger, you're
Speaker 1: stronger and harder to kill. Right, But the authors of
Speaker 1: the study looked at evidence from five hundred and fifty
Speaker 1: four extinct mammals over the past sixty million years, and
Speaker 1: they found a couple of interesting trends that got more
Speaker 1: specific than that. It's not just that bigger bodies are
Speaker 1: adaptive or that they're always better. These authors found that
Speaker 1: the increase in body size was correlated with quote increasing
Speaker 1: ecological specialization, meaning you're zeroing in on one more and
Speaker 1: more unique way of surviving in the ecology around you,
Speaker 1: with maybe a particular prey to type, or a particular
Speaker 1: hunting strategy or particular type of habitat that you're finally
Speaker 1: adapted to. As you get really good at one thing,
Speaker 1: on average, animals tend to get bigger, so the increase
Speaker 1: in body size was linked to that, But it was
Speaker 1: also linked to another interesting thing, periods of global cooling.
Speaker 1: And this tends to go in accordance with another informal
Speaker 1: biological principle known as Bergman's rule, which says that the
Speaker 1: colder a climate you live in, the more your body
Speaker 1: mass increases. So that's interesting. These bigger bodies tend to
Speaker 1: correlate with the world getting colder and with animals that
Speaker 1: tend to get more and more specialized to become less
Speaker 1: and less of a generalist survivor. But there's a downside
Speaker 1: that comes with this, right, increased extinction risk when averaged
Speaker 1: over time. In other words, heavy lies the crown so
Speaker 1: you want to be the king, the queen, the mob boss,
Speaker 1: the CEO. If you focus really hard on a very
Speaker 1: particular strategy for success, you might be able to make it.
Speaker 1: But you will be wearing a target on your back
Speaker 1: the whole time. Everybody wants to take you down. And
Speaker 1: in a metaphorical way, the same is true for a species.
Speaker 1: If you want to be the master of the sea,
Speaker 1: the megalodon, the leviathan, the king or the queen of
Speaker 1: the water, you will get crushed when your main food
Speaker 1: source disappears. It is hard to be a generalist when
Speaker 1: you're that big and that powerful and on the top
Speaker 1: of the pyramid. Wow. You know, I'm tempted to make
Speaker 1: some comparison here between between the diets of apex predators
Speaker 1: such as this and uh humanities dependency on fossil fuels,
Speaker 1: which of course ties in rather nicely with the history
Speaker 1: of whaling as well the harvesting of these creatures for
Speaker 1: industrial purposes. You know, when you but when you become
Speaker 1: dependent upon this one thing, what happens when that that
Speaker 1: source shrivels up? Yeah, And of course this isn't gonna
Speaker 1: be this true in the same way about all apex
Speaker 1: predators are all larger animals, right. This is something that
Speaker 1: appears to based on this study, be true on a ridge.
Speaker 1: So there are definitely going to be some predators that
Speaker 1: are more resilient and I think in most cases going
Speaker 1: to be more of a generalist survivalist than others. But
Speaker 1: the ones where their increase in in size and food
Speaker 1: chain dominance correlates to this very direct specialization in a
Speaker 1: certain way of making a living, very often that does
Speaker 1: make you vulnerable. You lose your individualism as a survivor. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Like one of the exceptions that comes to mind is
Speaker 1: of course the bear, particularly the larger bear species that
Speaker 1: are certainly large and ferocious and have no natural enemies
Speaker 1: be beyond man. Oh, think of the polar bear. Polar bear,
Speaker 1: very powerful apex predator actually though it has a it
Speaker 1: has a pretty particular ecological niche though um and when
Speaker 1: say climate change happens, that does not work out well
Speaker 1: at all for the polar bear. Right. But meanwhile, you
Speaker 1: also look at something like a black bear which will
Speaker 1: eat just about anything, or grizzly grizzly bears that that
Speaker 1: go through through sort of varying stages of of dietary consumption.
Speaker 1: But but it's largely based on what is available. Yeah, exactly,
Speaker 1: more generalist and thus a little bit more resilient, a
Speaker 1: little bit harder to go extinct. Yeah. Of course, then
Speaker 1: you have the panda bear, which is which is certainly
Speaker 1: a specialist in its own right, and is therefore in
Speaker 1: a kind of fragile place as well. It's true if
Speaker 1: you're bamboo, you know, the panda bear is the most
Speaker 1: terrifying predator of all, you know, I'm always I'm always
Speaker 1: astounded when I remember that the cave bear was probably
Speaker 1: a herbivore, you know, the ferocious bear that is depicted battling, Yeah,
Speaker 1: that early man. Yeah, this would have been This would
Speaker 1: have been a nerbivore. This would would not have been
Speaker 1: out there actively trying to eat humans. That's fascinating. I
Speaker 1: didn't know that. Yeah, we could do a whole another
Speaker 1: episode on bears basically, and there's plenty of content to
Speaker 1: discuss there. Well, I don't know. I mean, I I've
Speaker 1: really enjoyed this look at apex predators because it's so
Speaker 1: counterintuitive to think of them as so evolutionarily fragile. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yet again, not in every case, but so many of
Speaker 1: them yeah, we tend to think of that if if
Speaker 1: you're the top predator, then you were there the king
Speaker 1: of the hill. You were in a privileged position and
Speaker 1: you're not susceptible to these various extinction threat threats, but
Speaker 1: you were still vulnerable. Last thing I want to encourage today,
Speaker 1: look up the picture of the Leviathan's teeth. Yes, oh
Speaker 1: and sorry, I should say one more thing about its name.
Speaker 1: They had to you know, again, earlier today we mentioned
Speaker 1: something about the weirdness of taxonomy. Yeah, this was with
Speaker 1: the basil Osaurus. That means that that means king lizard,
Speaker 1: even though it is a whale. But we can't change
Speaker 1: it because that was the first name, the Leviathan whale.
Speaker 1: They had to change the spelling because there I think
Speaker 1: there was already some other organism that had the Leviathan
Speaker 1: genus as spelled in English Leviathan, so they changed it,
Speaker 1: I think to the Hebrew spelling of Leviathan. So now
Speaker 1: would be like Leviaton has y in it, right. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: It's like if you were going to name your band
Speaker 1: Leviathan and then you realize there was already a Leviathan,
Speaker 1: so you just you just add some funny characters in there,
Speaker 1: and you're good to go to to do a weird
Speaker 1: spelling on it, all right, So, so there you have it.
Speaker 1: If you would like to reach out to us about
Speaker 1: this episode discuss some ancient apex predators, then we encourage
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