PBS - The Voyage of the Odyssey - Track the Voyage - ATLANTIC OCEAN
In 2003, ULL and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) researched over two field seasons in El Hierro, with the objective of studying population distribution and tagging beaked whales using DTAG, an acoustic and motion recording tag attached with suction cups developed by Mark Johnson and Peter Tyack (Johnson & Tyack, 2003).
Natacha Aguilar De Soto -
"We are doing this tagging study in collaboration with Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and that is teaching us a lot about how these animals use the environment, how they are diving deep at 1300 meters - tight groups of Blainville's with the calves, with grown calves. Every animal of the group is diving together so they have a tight group cohesion."
A Blainville's beaked whale.
Watch a short video of a Blainville's beaked whale off El Hierro - 56k 200k
Video courtesy of Natacha Aguilar De Soto - La Laguna University & Wood's Hole Oceanographic Institution. Photo by Victor Otaola Genevieve Johnson -
Until now, this behavior was unknown in deep diving cetaceans.
Other deep divers such as sperm whales, pilot whales and northern bottlenose whales are known to leave their calves at the surface with another adult or sub-adult, a behavior known as 'babysitting'. It is an altruistic behavior in the sense that the females have to go down to feed and then they in turn take care of the calves of the other females. In the bottlenose whale, young males are also observed taking care of small calves left at the surface by their mothers.
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