From the depths of the Atlantic Ocean.
A sign.
This is the breath of a giant.
And not just any giant...
but a sleeping one.
A family of sperm whales takes an afternoon nap.
They rest as tall as 40-foot trees...
and as still as statues.
But one young whale wants to get moving.
This baby is the future of her entire clan.
Their hopes rest solely on her ability to learn their ways...
their culture...
and their secrets.
Moby Dick was a sperm whale...
portrayed as a monster.
They may be more than 50 tons,
but sperm whales are gentle giants.
They have deep family connections.
Generations of females learn from each other.
And groups of families share a common language.
Their chatter sounds like Morse code.
They make these clicks with air-filled sacks
inside their enormous heads.
Their heads can be a third their body length,
and inside, the largest brains that have ever existed on our planet.
Six times the size of ours.
And now, finally,
these sperm whales reveal a little of what they're thinking...
in a very special place they call home.
Dominica marks the middle of a string of eastern Caribbean islands.
These islands are home to more than 20 sperm whale families
that never leave these waters.
This family has lost many calves
to boat strikes and entanglements in marine debris.
They've had few babies survive to adulthood.
But now, a new addition.
Just six months old, yet already 12 feet long.
Like all mammal babies, she relies on milk from her mother.
But exactly how sperm whales feed has been a mystery to science.
She has no lips for sucking and mom's nipples are inverted.
Now, at long last, we see sperm whale nursing in action.
The young calf pushes her lower jaw into the nipple cavity
and the milk is injected into her mouth.
It's thick like yogurt, with ten times more fat than human milk.
A 15-minute snooze while feeding is ample for mom.
Sperm whales sleep less than any other mammal on the planet.
The older females call nap time over.
This is no dictatorship.
Sperm whale families make decisions as a group.
Scientists have tracked whales quibbling for an hour or two
-over a change of direction.
The new baby may not get much of a say...
but she listens...
and learns.
This time, the adults all agree.
It's time for work.
Each adult must eat hundreds of squid every day.
The countdown begins for one of the most incredible feats in nature...
a sperm whale's deep dive to feed.
They suck in the air.
Their blood can hold eight times more oxygen than our blood.
The tail flukes come all the way out of the water.
That means they're headed down...
maybe more than 3,000 feet.
More than twice as deep as the Empire State Building is high.
The calf chooses to wait this one out.
It'll be another three years
before she's learned enough to feed on her own in the deep.
You might think she'd get lost in the vast blue...
but she can track her mom's hunting clicks
and she can call anyone in her family at any time.
She's learning an entire language,
passed on by generations of mothers
and shared by her entire eastern Caribbean whale clan.
She calls out
with a distinct series of clicks.
Each pattern is called a coda.
But not everyone listening is a whale.
Whale biologist Dr. Shane Gero has known this family for 16 years.
He hopes to track the chatter to the new baby.
Yeah, there's good clicks off of Morne Espagnol to the northeast.
The sperm whale world is a world of sound.
They use clicks to find food and navigate in this darkness.
And they use other sounds to talk with one another.
Alongside Shane, fellow National Geographic explorer
and world-famous photographer Brian Skerry.
He's on a three-year mission to document whale societies around the globe.
These animals only surface for brief intervals.
That means you have to be ready all the time.
But finding a female calf will really tell us how this pod is doing.
That things are going to be hopefully bright in their future.
Yeah. Yeah, they headed, uh, east?
Over the past few years Brian has spent months here...
trying to get just one good photo.
This may be his chance...
if the baby whale will allow it.
There's the little one.
The little guy is still on the surface, huh?
She's taking her time, though.
She's all by herself...
when the strange-looking creature moves in.
It's enough to scare many youngsters away...
but this baby is curious.
Perhaps a game of hide and seek.
She uses the sargassum weed like a loofah,
possibly wondering why Brian isn't doing the same.
It's a rare encounter.
This one can't be more than about six months old. So...
It's incredible, the little calf is just playing
and Brian's right there taking photos. It's amazing.
Then Brian puts down his camera to be in the moment.
Wow. That is one beautiful, generous sperm whale calf.
Oh, my goodness.
You know, in the beginning I'm just shooting, right?
But after a while, I mean, it's just like, I want to enjoy it.
I want to look at her and talk to her, you know?
And I'm saying, "Thank you. Thank you for this."
Just fantastic.
This animal that for so long has been portrayed as a monster...
to have a moment like this just shatters any of that.
It's just not at all what they are.
You know, we've spent the last 15 years trying to understand
what it's like to live as a whale family.
And their families are rich
-and experience joy... - Oh, man!
-...in the same way that we do, you know? - So crazy.
The more that we see them like ourselves,
the more empathy we have for them.
I think humans will begin to realize that we have brethren in the sea
and that we can learn a lot from them.
We got to give her a name.
Brian names her Hope...
and for good reason.
In the past 15 years,
this family had only one female survive to maturity.
And even that calf suffered terribly.
Hope's cousin was seriously injured by an entanglement in fishing gear.
Sperm whale society is based around females.
If Hope doesn't make it, we may lose her family.
And at a crucial time.
Marine debris threatens her entire clan...
about 20 families.
By 2030, we could see all of these families gone.
When you remove whales out of an ecosystem
there's a whole chain reaction.
You lose all of the wisdom of how they lived there
and how they survived in that part of the ocean.
We could lose the Caribbean culture.
Whales having unique cultures is a bold new concept...
but undeniable.
Each clan has one or two hundred animals,
has its own language, its own way of life.
Behavior is what you do, but culture is how you do it.
And just like some humans eat with forks and other humans eat with chopsticks,
sperm whale clans from around the world do things differently.
And that's not because they're different species...
but how they've learned to live is different.
If Hope can make it through the next year,
her chances of reaching adulthood dramatically increase.
Her family may prevail.
Now, Brian and Shane head out to search for different whale clans...
to discover what we would lose if an entire whale culture disappears.
Sperm whales that pass by the nine islands of the Azores are true nomads.
In between North America and Europe, they keep on the move.
Compared to Dominica, this cultural group is supersized.
Up to a third bigger.
And where Hope's family was made up of females,
this gathering is all male.
These younger teenagers grew up in a family led by strong females
who matured around 30 years old.
But males don't mature until 50.
This may be their first time hanging out with a big male.
Now, Mr. Big is about to show them how he uses size to hunt giant squid.
Sperm whale skulls hold the world's largest bio-sonar.
Like bats on the hunt, they send out a series of clicks
and listen back to locate prey.
These are different than conversational clicks.
And up to 230 decibels.
That's intense enough to rupture a human eardrum.
Down at 3,000 feet, the pressure is like having half a ton of weight
pressing on every square inch of your body.
The prize for this incredible effort is the famed giant squid.
Today, the whales share their scraps.
Yeah, got it.
Whoa. It's heavy as...
Dr. Shane Gero and photographer Brian Skerry...
It's a big bowl of jelly.
...are lucky to find some leftovers.
It's likely they just fly through and catch whatever piece they can.
-Right. -And then that means there's scraps
left behind.
It's easy to forget that they're predators, right? Because they...
-Exactly. -...what we see at the surface
is mostly them socializing or resting.
But when they go down, when they disappear from where we can see...
-Yeah. -...that's what they're doing,
and this is a bit of evidence of that.
The hunt is on.
It's not uncommon to see such scraps where sperm whales hunt...
but as the whales continue to forage deep...
Get out now.
...Brian finds something even more incredible.
I could see a couple of birds landing on what I thought was
a piece of driftwood.
Turns out it's a squid.
It's the famed giant squid...
rarely seen.
It's the best, most intact specimen that I have seen, you know,
during this kind of whale work.
Wow! That is awesome.
It's pretty unbelievable. I've never been beside a squid this large.
You have this amazing, circular scar of a sperm whale tooth having punctured it
and that may be why we were able to recover this
is that it came back to the surface with it stuck in its mouth.
We have better maps of Mars than we do of the deep ocean
but sperm whales are going down there every hour for 45 minutes
and finding these amazing animals
when it's hard for us to even get a picture of one.
Squids have beaks like birds.
And the bigger the squid, the bigger the beak.
It's really heavy.
The squid they eat in Dominica are quite small.
The beaks we're catching are very little.
These are huge!
You can see how big it is compared to me.
It's a sign that not only are the sperm whales different here,
but what they are eating is dramatically different
and so probably, the way they catch it would probably be quite different as well.
How the sperm whales of the Azores speak
may also be unique.
There's lots of codas.
Shane uses the ship's hydrophone
to tune into these nomadic families for the first time.
Have a listen.
He hears
-an entirely different language. -Wow.
The rhythm in Dominica is one plus one plus three.
-Right. -And here they're still using five clicks
but they're all regular spaced, you know, it's...
They're much more slower and deliberate here.
The series of clicks these nomads use to identify themselves
is just one of their codas.
Sperm whales use dozens of other codas to chat.
We can write entire books using only 26 letters.
Sperm whales have at least 24 different coda types.
So, it's really limitless what they might be saying to each other.
These whales are entirely different
to Hope's clan in Dominica.
And there may be even more cultural clans elsewhere.
To find out, Shane and Brian have one last stop
to check out one of the largest aggregations of sperm whales
on the planet.
Off the coast of Sri Lanka, hundreds of sperm whales,
some groups 40 strong.
These enormous aggregations are new to science.
We don't know why these whales gather like this or even how often.
It's a mystery local scientist
and National Geographic explorer Asha Devos wants to solve.
It's been shown in places like Dominica that the sperm whales have culture there
and that's something we're interested to unravel a bit more
out here in Sri Lanka.
Shane joins Asha to see how these whales may differ
from Hope's group in Dominica.
The environment has such a strong influence on the animals
and that's super important.
And we can't, you know, there's no golden rule across the board,
we can't say sperm whales in Dominica do this
so they can be protected like this
therefore, we should protect all sperm whales
in the same way or take the same measures.
Even from the surface it's apparent.
From the very first second we saw sperm whales here
it was immediately clear that things are very different.
What's common here is rare in the Caribbean.
There's so many.
If you looked at a day like this in Dominica,
I think we've had two in 15 years
-where there's this many animals. -Oh, really?
Brian hopes to find some clues as to what's going on.
-Got it? -Thanks.
Why the big party?
As soon as I jump in the water I here this cacophony of sound.
I can see between 12 and 18 whales
and some are resting like trees in a forest.
Others are sort of horizontal.
These whales aren't thrilled to have an intruder crash their fun.
They're not aggressive
but they let Brian know he's not exactly welcome...
in the best way they know how.
Whale poop.
Whales fertilize the top of the water column
boosting plankton growth.
That feeds fish...
and it even helps combat climate change.
This act is also an opportunity.
It's right here. You might actually be able to get it.
Yeah.
- It's squid, look. - Yeah.
Super cool, you can see the suction cups on the bottom of this squid leg.
Asha scoops the poop to find out what these sperm whales eat.
So, right here, we have a squid beak
that we fished out of some of the sperm whale poop.
Different clans have different dietary habits,
so, once we analyze these we'll get a bit of a sense of the differences
between here in Sri Lanka and some of the sperm whales out in Dominica.
Shane Gero's methods rely on sound.
When you put the hydrophone in the water
that's where the exciting stuff happens.
He's about to hear their live communications
for the first time.
He'll learn if Sri Lankan whales speak the same language as Hope...
and the other whales of Dominica.
That's a massive difference than what we've seen off Dominica.
Part of that is that they belong here.
and they are signaling that this is where they're from.
This is an entirely different language.
A clan with its own unique culture.
But the challenges sperm whales face everywhere are the same.
This whale is missing part of its jaw.
It's not hard to guess how it happened.
The turtles around here make it obvious.
Human debris can be a killer for any marine animal.
And make sure I get behind this debris...
The National Geographic divers save as many turtles as they can.
Yeah.
Okay, let me get the log off first.
It's lucky, it doesn't look like it's dug in anywhere.
Ready?
Okay. Okay. Okay.
- That's the third one that I've cut out. - Yup.
And if you're saying you've seen
...the same. - Yeah.
I mean, we spend a lot of time on the water
...but that's way too many. - But still.
-That's way too many, yeah. -Yeah.
Now they are anxious about Hope's chances
and her endangered clan in Dominica.
Back to where their investigation started.
It's been more than a year since Shane has seen Hope.
We sound crazy because...
She is critical to her family's survival.
If she's still alive.
But something strange is going on. Unusual commotion.
The resident groups here are usually small families,
moms hanging with their kids.
But now, females from throughout the clan have come together.
It could indicate that something is wrong.
While there's no sign yet of baby Hope...
there is a visitor.
An outsider.
And he's quite the sex symbol.
Some young males also admire this superstar.
It's rare here for a male to attract so many fans.
The ladies will decide who he gets to mate with.
Not him.
But first, the whale equivalent of a hug.
They enjoy the stranger's touch.
Bigger than a bus.
As sensitive as a lamb.
Now, they swim in formation.
This outsider is from another clan.
Maybe another ocean.
He will boost the gene pool of the sperm whales here.
But scientist Shane Gero is still concerned.
Too many have died from entanglements in fishing gear.
Baby Hope may have suffered the same fate.
All right. So you have a juvenile here, coming on the port side of the boat.
- Okay. - And then the adult's back here.
MAN: Right.
They search on.
If she's still alive,
Hope is one of the last chances for this clan's unique culture to survive.
It's definitely a sign. You seeing them, chief?
Hold on, hold on.
Are they both gonna go? Are we gonna get calf with...?
Then...
there she is.
Yeah!
Shane recognizes her markings instantly.
Hope has survived her first two crucial years.
Wow, she's so grown up.
Wow! She's huge!
The big take home that I've gotten from spending thousands of hours
in the company of sperm whales is the power of community.
Where you feel most at home and most belong
is really important to anything, whether you're a whale or a human.
If we're going to preserve life, whether it's ours or theirs,
it's really important that we protect cultural diversity
both in our own societies and the ecosystem as a whole.
We still have much to learn about sperm whale culture.
But we know from other whale species that each clan fills a vital niche.
Orca families have very specific hunting skills
depending on where they live.
Belugas use complex language
and teach their young about traditional birthing grounds.
Some male humpbacks create a new song each year
and share it around the world.
This is culture.
And sperm whale Hope, may she live up to her name.
She has the chance to pass on her family's stories...
their unique knowledge of their native waters...
their traditions...
and their secrets.
Feel the sunshine.
I've had a fair bit of experience diving really deep.
Okay. Hang on. Steady, guys. Steady, steady, steady, steady, Donnie...
But I need a sub to do it, to withstand the pressure.
This is Deepsea Challenger. Do you copy? Over.
These sperm whales are going down 3,000 feet,
and they're doing it over and over every day.
They're so streamlined. They just tuck their fins in.
One or two tail moves to keep them going.
Get them to where their lungs compress.
And then they go negative, and then they can just fall.
They can just fall after that...
in stillness.
There's a peacefulness in the way they dive.
They have to conserve their energy to get down to that depth...
two-thirds of a mile down.
Pitch black. Utter darkness. Using only sound.
Seeing the world around you only through sound.
These sperm whales can emit 230-decibel sound pulse.
I mean, that would blow
our eardrums in if we were adjacent to them
when they fire that thing off.
Wow! That is awesome.
This is what they're going down there for.
It's not a giant, giant squid.
Not a very big giant squid, but it's definitely a giant squid.
It's really heavy.
So way down in the twilight zone...
you have this incredible biomass down there.
These are huge.
And this is the great diurnal migration up and down through the water column.
You know, all that krill and all that zooplankton down there.
And the squid are feeding on that.
And then the sperm whales drop down into that territory and feed on the squid.
So, it's amazing how they're communicating with these clicks
and these complex sequences, codas which we don't know how to decipher yet...
but they could carry a tremendous amount of information.
Maybe someday we'll be able to decipher their language
and communicate with them. Wouldn't that be amazing?
(WHALES CLICKING)