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Radio Lab. From? WNYC. See? Yeah. Um, you guys want to introduce yourself? Uh, sure. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I'm Lulu Miller. My name is Egg McMuffin, and I had a yogurt for breakfast. Okay, never mind. Okay. Latif. Lulu. Radio Lab. All right. And producer, Annie McEwen. Where should I begin? So, we're heading out into the Antarctic Peninsula, which is the arm of Antarctica that kind of like sticks up north. Oh, sure. You know?
We're on a boat, nosing along the icy coast, and on the boat with us... Hi, Annie. Hi. Is this grizzled, mustachioed sea guy? Are you Robert or Bob? Bob is good. Okay. Name Bob Pittman. I'm a whale biologist with the Marine Mammal Institute at Oregon State University. And what was Bob's first love? Boobies. Hmm. Hmm.
are a favorite bird of mine. Ah. Sea birds. I can talk booby anytime. He was down in Antarctica to study something a little bigger. Yeah, so there's a type of killer whale down there that feeds predominantly on seals. And the way they hunt these seals is kind of amazing. They'll swim around looking for one that's lying in an ice flow. When they find it...
all together. Shoulder to shoulder, furiously beating their flukes. They charge towards that seal and just before they hit it, they dive under it, kick their tails up, create a perfect little wave and wash the seal off. And then the seal's in the water and they eat the seal. Clever. Wow. Yeah. So that's like this kind of amazing thing that Bob is down there to see. Yeah. But during that trip, Bob also saw something else. And it was just something else that I called him up about.
Because while at first glance, it just seemed to be one of those animal stories that we've all heard before, what it was actually hinting at was this whole universe. This epic throwdown, these deeply complex lives lived completely beyond our gaze. And the whole thing just set me wondering, like, freshly wondering, what the hell is going on in the ocean? Ooh. Whoa.
Okay. All right. Okay. This actually evolves over three separate encounters. So... Encounter one. The first time we saw something that got our attention... Bob and his team were on their boat. And we had located our killer whales. He could see their tall black dorsal fins poking up out of the water, flashes of their white eye markings. They have an amazing paint job. And it looked like there were about 10 of them sort of hanging out in this little pod. But as the boat got closer... Uh...
Bob saw that in their midst, there were two very large humpbacks. Humpback whales. Hmm. These guys are sort of darkish gray, about twice as long as the killer whales with these giant knobbly barnacled fins. And for Bob, seeing them hanging out with killer whales, especially the mammal-eating kind, was weird. Because killer whales eat humpbacks. ♪
Usually only when they're smaller, like when they're calves or juveniles. But still. Just like nomenclature wise, like I thought they were now or like that they were rebranded as orcas because killer whale feels like too mean to them. But is that? Well, do you know what orca means? No.
I learned this recently. It actually means whale from hell. Like, loosely speaking, it means whale from hell. What? Or jar from hell. Jar from hell? Or vessel from hell. Like, it's a... You know, it is... Maybe... Is that better than killer whale? Maybe. But also, like, these animals are amazing at hunting. Like, they're very good at killing. They're killing it, you could say. Why are we judging them for something that they... Why are we judging them for killing it? Yeah.
You know? Yeah. Wow. Anyway, so humpbacks and these whales from hell hanging out together. It's a weird gathering. Yeah. The humpbacks were clearly agitated. Slapping the water with their tails. Hitting the water with their flippers. And kind of growling. Well, bellowing. Bellowing. Like, vroom. And Bob and his crew watching this commotion from the boat deck get kind of excited. Because they think, hey, maybe these killer whales are attacking these large adult humpbacks. Nobody's ever seen that before.
But as we got in a little closer, we could see that the killer whales were swimming right around them, but seemed a little bit distracted. There didn't seem to be any attacking or threatening going on. And then the killer whales just swam off. Right. And Bob was like...
It didn't make any sense to us. But then the film guy on the boat who's been filming this whole thing, he comes up to Bob with his camera and he says, Hey, take a look at this. And in his footage, you zoom in amidst all the splashing and the fins. You can see this little silvery head poking up out of the water. A weddle seal that was there between the two humpbacks.
Once we saw that, it's like, oh yeah, now this makes sense. Bob thought the killer whales must have just been trying to get at the seal. And the seal was hiding out among the humpbacks. Smart seal. Right. And the humpbacks were just annoyed the killer whales were bothering them. They may not even have known that the seal was there. And so with the mystery of that sort of cleared up. Kind of tied it together for us. Bob and his team catch up with their pod of killer whales. And about 20 minutes later. Hello?
We had our next encounter. Encounter number two.
We found them with another seal, a crab eater seal. This one was lying on an ice floe. And the killer whales were using their heads to push that ice floe into the open and were getting ready to wave wash this guy. So Bob's like watching from the deck, like, ha ha. Like the camera's on. And he's like, what I've longed for. Yeah. Okay. So yeah, like he's about to see what he came down to Antarctica to see. Okay. But as the killer whales are closing in... All of a sudden...
The two humpbacks that we left 20 minutes earlier are right there among them. They just kind of appear out of nowhere, making a huge commotion. Swimming around the ice floe. Slashing their flippers and slapping their tails. And bellowing. And soon after... The killer whales tired of this pretty quickly and just left.
And hearing this, I thought, oh my gosh, this really sounds like the humpbacks are rushing in to save this seal. Yeah. But Bob was like, you know, not so fast. They still may not have known that the seal was there. And that actually, this looks a heck of a lot like something that... It's a young raven. He's after a nesting. A lot of birds.
do. I think everybody has seen small birds chasing a hawk around their neighborhood. The field fairs, screaming with anger, converge on their enemy. They mob him. What's called mobbing behavior. The smaller birds just basically pestering the bigger bird. And now they bomb him with their droppings. Until it leaves. So I figured that's what these humpback whales were doing. They were just trying to drive these killer whales out of the neighborhood. And Bob thought, that's cool. And he sort of closed the book on the whole thing.
Until a few days later, the third encounter. So we're back on the boat. Once again, following their killer whales. And once again, they had a wattle seal on an ice floe and were circling around and getting ready to make a wave. Bob and his team were ready. Their cameras were rolling. And then out of the corner of his eye, Bob sees another pair of humpback whales. Different ones? Different ones. Just kind of on the periphery of the scene.
But he doesn't have much of a chance to think about it because at that moment... The killer whales... ...charge together at the seal and as one dive under the ice, creating a wave that knocks the seal into the water. Now, what the seal should do and what Bob was expecting it to do at this moment is pull itself back up onto the safety of the ice. But it doesn't do that. Instead...
It starts swimming out into open water. Which is what the killer whales hope for. And they charge after it. In a hundred meter sprint, who wins, a killer whale or a seal? 100% a killer whale. So this is like certain death. Oh yeah. But then Bob notices that that seal...
Heading straight toward these humpbacks. And... In one fluid motion as the seal reaches them, one of the humpbacks... Rolls over on its back and as the seal was starting to swim over it... The humpback drops its flippers, arches its back... And lifted this seal completely out of the water. And it just holds it there, out of the reach of the killer whales. Wait, what? Wow. Wow.
And after a few moments of this, the seal, its eyes, these two giant black circles in its head. It's freaked out about being lifted up out of the water on the chest of this humpback. Yeah. Starts to try to get off. It was flailing around. And it begins to slip off the whale belly. But then, very gently. The humpback lifts this one-ton flipper up against the seal and nudges it back up into the middle of its chest to keep it from sliding off.
And watching this, Bob cannot deny that these humpbacks are trying to protect these seals from these attacking killer whales. The killer whales broke off and left. And the seal slides off and swims over and hauls out on some nearby ice. And Bob, the other scientist on the boat, the boat captain, no one has ever heard of this. No one can explain it.
When we got back to the United States, Bob gets home to San Diego, California. Started poking around, talking to some colleagues and doing some literature review. He wrote up a short article about what he'd seen. Posted it on a marine mammal listserv. Along with the question, has anyone out there ever seen an interaction like this? And over the following days and weeks, Bob's inbox was flooded with over 100 accounts saying yes. Yes.
Hmm. Hmm. People had seen humpbacks fighting off killer whales from their prey up and down the west coast of Canada and the United States. Also reports from Australia and Africa, South America and, you know, Antarctica. This is the humpback community of the world. Yeah. And there were some interesting patterns that came out of it. They learned that more often than not, it was the humpbacks starting the fights. They were the ones initiating the interactions with the killer whales. And
And in just about every case, the killer whales eventually moved on. They just gave up. There was no way around these humpbacks. Bob learned that it was both female and male humpbacks doing this rescuing thing. They would sometimes do it alone, sometimes in groups.
But the wildest part of these accounts that flooded in was that what these humpbacks were rescuing. Only 11% were other humpbacks. Only 11% of all this work they were doing was for the benefit of their own species, meaning that a giant 89% of the time they were saving something else. ♪
What were they saving? Well... So many things. Two species of whales. Gray whales. Mickey whales. Porpoise. Dolls porpoise. Seals. Weddle seals. Crab eater seals. Harbor seals. Northern elephant seals. Sea lions. Stellar sea lions. California sea lions. And one very large fish, an ocean sunfish.
Here was something that was quite remarkable. Behavior had been witnessed quite a few times, but nobody had ever pulled them together and tried to make sense of it. Are humpback whales really vigilante sea beasts that guard the world from killer whales? They're the heroes of a grateful ocean. All right, so Bob's paper got some traction in the pop science world. And the word that started getting kicked around, sort of the same word that always gets kicked around, was altruism. Altruism. Humpback whales.
humpback whales may very well be altruistic. We define altruism something like a behavior of an animal that benefits another at its own expense. And what the humpbacks are doing is technically altruism. If they go in and save a seal, it costs them time and energy and they get absolutely nothing out of it.
And hearing this, I'm tempted, along with a lot of other soft-hearted folk, to attribute this to, what else? Compassion. We all love it when someone stands up to a bully. But Bob says... Are these gentle germs? Nope. The same thing that's always said. Biologically, it doesn't make sense. Animals don't go out of their way to help other animals. And...
If you see an instance where it looks like they are, there's probably something going on there that you haven't accounted for. So then the question is, what are they getting out of it? What is in it for the humpback whales? Yes. And for me, I thought, surely the case of a seal hovering on the belly of a humpback whale would be kind of a tricky one for a scientist to pack neatly away into a box. But actually, Bob was like...
This is pretty simple. Yes. What we're seeing here is kin selection. We think that kin selection is probably what's behind this apparent altruism in humpbacks. The idea is, if you're a humpback, swimming along, hear a killer whale attacking something, rush to the defense, and it turns out it's a humpback calf,
It might be a grandson of yours or it could be a niece or something. So this habit of saving stuff from killer whales, it's worth it to them in the long run because they might be saving the life of a relative. And therefore some of their own genes. Right.
But wouldn't they know that the thing they're saving is one of them pretty quickly? And wouldn't they just stop and turn around if it was just a seal and not maybe their cousin? Well, I think for the humpbacks, all they have to know is when you hear those mammal-eating killer whales calling, it's time to go over there and break up the party.
And that means regardless of the species being attacked, if they do this enough times, then they're going to end up possibly saving a relative of theirs. So individually, these cases can be altruistic, but in the long run, they're doing it for their own self-interest.
Oh, and that was it? It was like end of interview? It was like, Annie was charmed by this phenomenon and he was just like, kin selection. They think it might be their baby. Bye. He did, pretty much, it was like a bit of a smackdown, but I was like, gosh, how magical. He's like, it's not about magic. And I was like, that's right, sorry, love. It's about poor eyesight. It's about, there's a 10% chance it's your baby, go save it. Okay. Yeah, yeah. It's about genetic perpetuation. Yeah, altruism by accident is kind of how he says it. Hmm.
But I think somehow it's hard getting the image of the seal on the belly of the whale out of my head. And then I talked to these two other marine biologists about something that they saw a few years later. Yes. And if in the last story we heard the standard battle play out, in this next one... That was an absolutely mind-blowing experience. We blow the whole framework apart. That's coming up next.
right after the break.
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All right. Latif. Lulu. Radiolab. We're resurfacing back from the break. Hi there. Okay, now you're on my ear. All right. With producer Annie McEwen. So I reached out to these two marine biologists. Nancy Black. Elisa Schulman-Janeker. Because a few years after Bob saw the whale lift the seal down in Antarctica, they both saw a very, very different showdown between humpbacks and killer whales.
This one off the coast of California. Yeah. In Monterey Bay. So maybe just paint the scene for me. Where are we? It was an absolutely gorgeous day. Flat, calm seas. Sunny. Nancy and Elisa are on one of their whale-watching boats. And what they're watching are humpbacks eating the heck out of krill.
You know, those teeny tiny animals. Small shrimp-like organism. That hang out together by the billions and humpbacks. They look to find great swarms of these. And they have to eat a lot of these, as well as some other types of small fish. It's like a joke. Like, if you were to have the biggest creature on Earth...
or thereabouts, eat the smallest creature on Earth or thereabouts. Like, it feels like a joke. I know. Wait, I've got to tell you just really quick, just two cool things I learned about humpbacks and krill. Sure. Okay, so because humpback whales eat so much krill, their milk can be tinted pink. Oh my God, really? Strawberry milk. Strawberry milkshake. And it apparently tastes like fishy butter, but also...
This is how they get their water. Because I was like, one day I was like, how do we drink? Oh my gosh. They can't drink the ocean. And so I was like, how do they get it from their food? Like they get it from the little bodies of the krill. It's like each one is a tiny water bottle. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Anyway, so these humpbacks that Nancy and Elisa are watching are just bulking up on krill because they've just traveled from the south where they've spent the winter up to Monterey Bay and
during that journey, they lose almost a third of their own body weight. It's so crazy. Because they don't really eat while they take that journey. So they're like, it's spring. There's so much food around for those humpbacks and they were doing nonstop feeding. And Nancy and Elisa are trying to ID them. Photograph individual humpback whales to see who all was there. And they do this for a few hours until...
About five minutes after 12 that day, they get a call over the radio from another whale watching boat. And they said, we have killer whales and it looks like they're attacking a gray whale mom and calf. A pod of killer whales are attacking a gray whale calf and trying to separate it from its mother.
And we weren't that far. So, of course, we, you know. May 3rd, got attack on a gray whale cow-calf pair. Dashed over there. And as soon as they arrived, they began filming. Females are the 216s. I haven't gotten a good look at the male yet. Basically, you see this sort of like a roiling knot in the water. Lots of splashing and lots of commotion going on. There were 10 different killer whales there. It's the jagged fin female. There are black fins popping up to the surface where they take a breath, dive back under.
And somewhere in that knot is the gray whale mom and baby gray whale that the killer whales are just trying to pummel with their heads. And hold it down to drown it. Whenever the gray whale calf could, it would break the surface, take a huge breath. So it's really kind of hyperventilating and I'm sure was very tired. And in the midst of this... There's two humpbacks interfering with the attack. Are these two humpbacks? Wow. Humpbacks at trumpet blow. And they're charging around. Lots of slashing.
One humpback positioned itself next to the calf, trying to keep the killer whales away. Humpbacks are real upset. Nancy and Elisa watched this for a few minutes. And then... Where's the calf? The calf went down. I don't see the calf. There was absolute quiet. No one was at the surface. I'm sure the killer whales were drowning the calf at that moment and keeping it from coming up. And then in the video... I just saw the mom. You see the gray whale mom leaving.
And typically, moms don't leave calves unless they're dead. Aww. So her dead baby is in the water and the killer whales just eat it? Actually, no. Because they can't. Because weirdly, the humpback whales did not take off.
Even though the calf is dead and the battle's over, they stayed there and they were not quiet. The hemp acts are really moving around and rolling, flashing. They were staying very close to where the killer whales were and repeatedly diving where that gray whale calf had gone down and died. Whoa. They continue this for about 10 minutes
And then... Charging in from the distance. Oh, boy. Three more humpbacks arrive. Whoa. Coming into the area. Got right in there. Slashing their fins at any killer whales that would come near the carcass. And then a couple more humpbacks arrive. What? Charging over in this big, agitated state. And then more come.
Flipper to flipper, side by side, facing the killer whales. And a lot of these are the same ones that Nancy and Elise were watching eat earlier that same day. They actually left the feeding. They were feeding on krill. Some came from three miles away or four miles away. And the gray whale calf is definitely dead. There's nothing left to defend. But the humpbacks just keep coming. And the killer whales are just trying to deke around them and get a bite of the carcass. But at this point, there was just so many humpbacks.
Ultimately, a total of 16. At least 16. Wow. That had rushed in from near and far to join the fight. Wow. How much time goes by? Well, we ended up being there until sunset. Seven hours later, the back wheel is still right with the killer wheels. They've been going strong for seven hours. Oh, my gosh. Wow.
When we finally left, there wasn't any more light to really get good images. And even as we were leaving, there were still humpbacks. Just, woohoo, just really loud exhalations. They were still tail slashing and still extremely loud vocalizations. It was crazy. So you don't actually know how long they did it for? We don't know how long they were there. I mean, they could have been there for hours more.
It's wild to imagine, did they just like keep defending this body, this carcass into the moonlight? I know.
So what are they doing? I mean, it sounds like you're just more, like, what was your feeling? Well, I was just pretty much blown away by everything that was going on because there were some, again, there's so much food around and the humpbacks were, during their prime feeding season, ignoring the prey and really focusing on what looked like trying to keep the killer whales from feeding.
Are there other examples of that in the animal kingdom? Of rather than feeding yourself, you're going to prevent your enemy from feeding? Yeah, not that I know of, no. So wait, the idea, it seems like, is that it's not about the victim that they're protecting in the first place. It's just that they don't want the killer whales to eat. They just hate killer whales so much. Like, it's like, let's just forever make life miserable for them. Like, let's like...
Like, annihilate them. Right. Which seems like the opposite of what instincts honed by evolution should do. Yeah.
But according to Elisa, several of the humpback whales that we were with had killer whale tooth breaks on their flukes, which definitely show that they had survived a killer whale attack and have experience with either being attacked as a calf or being a mom who is trying to protect her calf or being another humpback whale that was with that mom and calf trying to protect it. Yeah.
Do you mean to say that they've either lost a calf of their own or they have themselves been attacked as a calf and they remember this? Oh, absolutely. They'd remember that. It almost feels like in this case, lived experience was beating out or at least joining with evolution. And I was like, so is this revenge we're looking at? Like, is that what we're seeing here? Oh my God.
Could it be that instead of humpbacks swimming through the ocean saving helpless animals, they're actually scouring the seas, carrying with them battle scars of their own near-miss, or the memory of losing their calf, ignoring their own hunger pangs, and trying to prevent their enemy...
From feeding? I mean, this is like the classic definition of revenge. Like, revenge ruins your life too because you are so focused on hurting the other, you know, your enemy, that your own life is falling apart. Yeah, that's interesting. But Nancy and Elisa, and rightly so, were kind of like, revenge? Revenge? I don't think we know enough. We just, there's no way for us to know that. Yeah, like, I couldn't even guess about that. Right. Yeah.
Okay, so admittedly, the revenge thing is too far. But I think just, you know, at this level of sacrifice, it's difficult to imagine it all just boiling down to self-interest. Right. Anyway, at this point, I don't know, I guess I kind of found myself stuck in the middle. You know, there's this sort of cold, hard science on one side, and then there's this sort of dreamy whales are benevolent on the other side. And I was just sort of floating between those two. Yeah.
So, but there's a whole lot going on that we don't know. Then Elisa told me one more story. Really just a scene. This time the humpbacks are left alone to just be humpbacks.
And hearing it did make this middle place feel different. There was an attack of killer whales on a gray whale calf. It was a similar situation. Killer whales killed a gray whale calf. Humpbacks were there to prevent the killer whales from eating the calf. But what was fascinating is that the next day, we went back to that area where the attack had occurred on the 22nd of April. It was gray with billowing fog. Hmm.
kind of coming toward us and breaking away a bit. And we found killer whales circling around the gray whale calf carcass. And then we saw a couple of humpback whales. And then the killer whales left in the fog.
And those two humpbacks, they didn't follow the killer whales. They didn't chase them. And we decided to stay with the humpbacks that were staying near the gray whale calf carcass to see what would happen. And what they did with that calf carcass is something that nobody's ever seen before. Everything was extremely slow motion, turning upside down and looking at the calf, touching it with the flipper very gently, pushing their head against it.
moving the carcass between them. The motion, the slowest motion you could imagine. It was surreal. It was like a dream. It was just one of the most amazing things I've seen in my life and looked a lot like what we associate with grief. There was a couple of the accounts that people talked about a carcass of a seal would be there and a humpback whale would come up next to it.
and lift its flipper up out of the water and just touch the seal with the very tip of it. And I have to admit, you know, when I read that myself, it kind of makes you wonder what might be going on there. But you're always better off to go with the idea that these animals are acting in their own best interest. So how would you explain that? I'm not sure. I'm not sure what was going on there. You know, I just put it out there.
You know the blind man and the elephant? Uh, no. You don't know the blind man and the elephant? Okay. It's an old, I want to say Buddhist parable. And it's a little bit ableist actually now that I think about it. But basically the blind man and the elephant, it's like, I don't know what, like five blind men walk up to an elephant and
They're all using their hands to try to figure out what the heck is this thing in front of us. One of them feels the tail and he's like, oh, it's like a rope. It's like a rope, basically. And one of them feels a leg and they're like, oh, no, it's like a tree. It's a tree trunk. It's clearly a tree trunk. And then one of them is feeling the, you know, the actual trunk and is like, oh, it feels like a kind of like a hose maybe?
So they're all ones touching the ear and being like, no, no, no, this is like a... It's like a giant leaf or something. So each one of them are touching it and they're right. Like, they're right based on their horizon of experience. But they're just...
by sensation, incapable of seeing the whole picture. And I think that's all of us. Like, our sensations are so limited. And it does feel like, you know, the pictures that we have, the parts of the elephant that we've groped enough times to know is like, we know the nature red in tooth and claw, the nature, the savage nature, the killer of the killer whales. We know that story, right? We know the like, oh,
oh, nice and altruistic, like doing a thing. Like we kind of know that story. But then there's a story like the third one that's so bizarre. It's like we touched a new part of the elephant. We're like, what the hell? Like we don't even know what this thing is anymore. Like maybe this thing we thought we knew, we actually don't know. And the whale is just, it's so big and it's so complicated. And we're only seeing it this tiny fraction of the time when it's on the surface.
So like when we do see another dimension of it, it just reminds us how like how we really are just grasping a tiny fraction of the whole portrait. Right. It reminds us like how much we still don't know. Yeah. And I feel like those moments where I see that the thing I thought I knew I really don't know. Like that's when the universe gets big again. Like I just want to not know more.
This episode was reported and produced by the amphibious Annie McEwen, who also contributed original music and sound design. Special thanks to the many marine mammals of various species for their contributions.
Sonic contributions. Special thanks to Eric J. Gleski and Brendan Brucker at Media Services Oregon State University. As well as Colleen Talti at Monterey Bay Whale Watch and California Killer Whale Project. Special thanks also to Doug McKnight and Juliana Mayo. That'll do it for now. Thanks for listening.
Anna
Anna Raskwit-Paz, Sarah Sandbach, Arianne Wack, Pat Walters, and Molly Webster, with help from Bowen Wong. Our fact checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, and Natalie Middleton. ♪
Hi, this is Finn calling from Storrs, Connecticut. Leadership support for Radiolab's science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. ♪
