From sperm whales hunting in darkness to dolphins navigating by sound: the hunters, the echolocators and the surprisingly complex social worlds they inhabit.
Work through them in order, or start wherever your curiosity takes you.
Every bottlenose dolphin has a name. Not one given by humans, but one it creates for itself: a unique whistle that other dolphins can copy to call it. What else are these "cognitive cousins" of ours capable of?
Sperm whales hunt in the deep, dark ocean, where they use their strong echolocation to find squid. They are the masters of this depth and consume 100 million tons of biomass per year!
Beaked whales are the most mysterious of all cetaceans. Most of what we know comes from tags and strandings. What takes place in those deep, dark waters?
Pilot whales remain poorly understood in many ways, but one thing is clear: they are among the most social animals in the ocean. This sociality follows them all through their lives, but may come at a cost.
If you were to watch a group of harbor porpoises from a boat, you might conclude that they barely interact. They surface briefly, scatter, and disappear. For a long time, scientists thought the same. Then they started listening.
In villages along the Amazon, a child born without a known father is called a 'child of the boto.' The boto — the Amazon river dolphin — is said to take human form at night, charming women before slipping back into the river before dawn. It is a legend, of course. But it tells you something real: these animals have lived alongside humans for so long, and so intimately, that they have become woven into the fabric of human culture.
Echolocation is a superpower that allows toothed whales to “see” in complete darkness, see inside their prey and catch unsuspecting fish. All by using sound.
A son will spend his entire life beside his mother. A pod will mourn a lost calf for days. A fad — wearing a dead salmon as a hat — will sweep through a community and then quietly disappear. To know orcas is to realize how much of being alive isn't unique to us at all.
Ready to begin? Start with the first lesson.
Start module 3