Speaker #0Hello everyone, welcome back to Relax With Animal Facts. I am Steff Wolf and today I am going to be learning with you about our furry, scaly, or possibly even slimy friends. In today's video, we're going to be talking about our furry, scaly, or possibly even slimy In today's case, it is going to be a rubbery friend of ours, maybe, because we are covering the oh-so-wonderful sperm whale. This, of course, is a very special listener episode dedicated to Marcus, Hayley, Ella, Bobby, and Lucy. And just in case one or two of you very sp... special listeners requested this animal not through the website or through the email and it got lost, this is dedicated to you too. If you would like to request an animal for a future episode of the show, you can do so by going to relaxwithanimalfacts.com and clicking on the animal request section. That is currently the main way to request your animals, but if you would like to reach out to me, Steph Wolf, and send a nice word or a review along with your animal requests, you can send an email to relaxwithanimalfacts at gmail.com. Just know, if you have ever sent me a message, I have read it. It's just that... We get so many that it is difficult for me to respond to each and every one of you. Ideally, I would be doing nothing else but reading your wonderful messages and responding, but unfortunately, life is a bit tougher than that. You may have noticed we skipped a week, which just absolutely breaks my heart, and that's because the last time I recorded an episode, it was filled with technical problems. There would be areas that didn't sound quite right, as if there was humming or this or that, but the point is, I do this show for you, and I really didn't want to release an episode that wasn't perfect. You guys deserve the you best so I would rather release nothing than something I wasn't quite happy with. But here we are and on an episode that I am extremely excited to go into. There are just a couple of things to mention before we go on our journey together and become jello and all of those wonderful things. The first thing to mention is another way that you can support me in my mission in helping you relax with animal facts, and that is through Patreon. If you go to patreon.com or click the link in the description, you can get all kinds of exclusive content, all while supporting me. You can get two bonus episodes a month, intro free, and ext... extended versions of regular episodes. There are already so many to listen to that you have never heard before, so I encourage you to sign up and I will see you there. The second thing for me to mention is George Vlad's wonderful audio work that he has let us use. His audio work is linked in the description of this episode and I encourage you to check him out. And now, finally, let us begin to wind down together. If this is your first ever time listening, I would like to welcome you to the Animal Podcast family with open arms. Our family gets bigger every single day, and I'm so happy that you're here. If you are a returning listener, welcome back. this show wouldn't be quite. the same without you. And you also know I have three primary exhortations for you before we start our adventure. My first exhortation for you today is to put on some scuba gear. We are going to be needing that for where we are going today. My second encouragement to you is probably the most important. It is for you to realize where you carry tension and simply to do your best to let it go. Here on the show, we are masters at becoming jello. Bring up in your mind a color or flavor of jello that you really like. Maybe it's something you eat at the end of a large meal, maybe at a buffet. For me, I love red, so I usually end up going for the raspberry or strawberry jello. But maybe for you it is the apple, the green, maybe that is also lime, or the orange. Regardless of which Jell-O you choose, we are going to be doing our best Oscar award-winning impressions of it. It is holding itself together just enough to be a solid, and that's what we want. while we want scooby- gear, certainly for this adventure, what we don't need to take with us is all of that tension that we carry day to day. Maybe you already know where you carry tension and you can simply let go, but for the rest of us, I'd like to do one special exercise. We can start at the very tippy top of our heads and make our way down towards the bottom of our feet relaxing as we go. So for example if you are somebody that scrunches up their eyebrows you can let those go first. Maybe the muscles around your ears and your head then your neck your shoulders your arms and on and on. This is all in our goal of becoming a better world. becoming that jello. You can feel free to let me know which color or flavor you like to become. And as we give our bodies permission to simply let go and stop working so hard, we can go to the third exhortation. It is simply to give your mind that same permission, to allow your mind to drift and wander as we go. go on our journey together as we go into the Atlantic Ocean where the sperm whale resides. I don't know about you, but I love the ocean. I think it is safe to assume, if you are a frequent listener, that you love it too. The sea is a special place. It is, to me, quite a paradoxical place. It is one that is simultaneously calming and overwhelming. It is so vast and filled with... with so many of our special friends that it can make your head spin. But as we will learn in just a moment, all of this space is not for nothing. This is the home of some of the largest animals on Earth, among which the sperm whale is one. Their scientific name is Fissiter macrocephalus. as is often the case. their scientific name is a compound of Greek and Latin. The Greek portion of their name, Physitor, means blower or one who blows, while the macrocephalus one refers to something being large-headed. So sperm whales, as far as their scientific names are concerned, are large-headed blowers. Which makes sense. And these large-headed blowers are mammalian carnivores. They are both mammals and carnivorous in their diet, meaning they eat almost exclusively other animals. But listen to this. These creatures can reach up to 59 feet in length or up to 45 tons in weight. These are numbers that I think require some comparison for us to make sense of them. In our daily life, we typically don't work with things that are 40 feet in length or perhaps multiple tons. I mean, certainly many people do, but... I for sure don't. If an animal is between 35 to 40 tons, that is about 70,000 to 80,000 pounds. For those of you that might prefer kilograms, that's about 31,700 kg to 36,000 kg. That is to say that this animal is absolutely gargantuan. So let us take an adult male sperm whale that might be between 50 to 60 feet or 17 to 20 meters. That is about as long as a five to six story building is tall. It is roughly the size of a whole bowling lane. So every time you go bowling, you might think, well... This is the size of a sperm whale. By the way, that is excluding the approach of a bowling lane, but the point still stands. And that fully grown adult male might be between 40 to 50 tons, which is about the weight of 7 to 9 African elephants, roughly as heavy as 30 to 40 average... passenger cars and about the weight of two fully loaded dump trucks. Isn't that amazing? This qualifies them to be the largest of any toothed whale species and have one of the widest global distribution of any marine mammal on earth. It also has the brain to show for it. they have the largest brain of any creature that we know of. And when I mention that they have the largest brain of any animal on earth, I am talking about for all time, for any animal that has ever lived on earth ever. So they seriously deserve a medal. The wonderful thing about this animal is that they are found pretty much everywhere. In all of the deep oceans ranging from the equator all the way to the pack ice in the arctic and antarctic. They are remarkably successful. We have already learned about their scientific name and how it makes them large-headed blowers. But what is up with their common name. Why do we call them the Sp- They are named after a waxy substance called spermaceti that is found in their heads. It is unfortunate that this substance was so used by people ranging from the 1800s to almost the 2000s. Seeing as lubricants and candles are very commonly used products, the whaling industry really did a lot of damage. So when we together laud the success of the sperm whale, it is in spite of a fair bit of persecution. While sperm whales can still be found all over the world, their populations are still to this day recovering, and they are listed as an endangered animal. I think it is worth mentioning that this substance, spermaceti, in the head of the whale is not fully understood. I mean in regards to its function in the head of the sperm whale. What exactly is it doing and how does it do it? We know some things, but we haven't reached the very tip-top as far as research is concerned. We know that it helps them shape and project sound outwards, and some articles say that it may very well help with buoyancy, because these creatures are very deep divers, diving as deep as 3,280 feet in search of their favorite food, squid. Our toothed whale friends can eat thousands of pounds of fish. and squid, about one ton per day. In order for them to do these kinds of dives, they can hold their breath for up to 90 minutes at a time, which is simply amazing. I think we got a little bit too ahead of ourselves because we skipped a little bit of their appearance. We talked about how big they were, how much they weighed, and... their length, but not too much else, so let's just reverse a little bit. Sperm whales are mostly a darker grayish color, although some whales will have their own unique white patches on their bellies. Another thing that makes this creature truly unique is that they are the only living catation that has their blowhole asymmetrically positioned on the left side of the crown of their fairly large head. And I just used the word catatian, so I want to make sure I define it for you first. The marine mammals in this family include whales, dolphins, porpoises, and this family is typically defined by completely aquatic animals, which means they spend most of their time, or all of their time, I should say, in the ocean, and they can't survive on land. There are some animals that we can refer to as semi-aquatic, but they wouldn't be in the Cretacean family. These are creatures that live and breathe the ocean. They can't wander out onto the land like some other critters. And the Cotation family is typically separated into two different groups, toothed and baleen whales. Of course, sperm whales are toothed, as we have already learned, so they would fall into the former group. But there are so many cool animals in the other group. of Cotations that we can learn about together on future episodes. This group includes 11 different species, and what separates the toothed from the baleen category aren't just the teeth, but baleen whales, for example, will have two blowholes instead of teeth. They will have hundreds of rows of baling plates which look something like brushes. It is seriously amazing. But before we get too sidetracked, let's come back to the oh-so-wonderful sperm whale. I just wanted to make sure I didn't take for granted that everyone knows what a cetacean meant. I certainly didn't until about five minutes ago. After all, I am learning right alongside you. The portion of the sperm whale's scientific name that indicates they have a large head is truly there for a reason. Their heads are extremely large, taking up about one-third of their total body length. They have between 20 and 26 large teeth on each side of their lower jaws, which are fairly narrow in comparison to the upper portion of their jaws, and they have paddle-shaped flippers which help them maneuver the water with ease. They have relatively small dorsal fins that are thick, low, and oftentimes a more rounded shape. The word dorsal is referring to the back of something so when we say dorsal fins we mean the fins on the back of a sea creature In terms of their behavior as social animals, they are just that. They are quite social. I feel like on our most recent adventures, we have covered many more solitary creatures. They don't hang around with many other members of their own species, like the aardwolf, for example. But the sperm whale is a very social creature. creature. They'll hang out in groups that we call pods, often ranging between 15 to 20 animals at once. And as we are scuba diving in this wonderful ocean, as we come upon a pod of these sperm whales, what we are seeing is most likely females and their young coming together. The males may and oftentimes do roam around the ocean by themselves, moving from group to group. Females and their young calves or their babies will remain in the tropical or subtropical waters all year long and seem to practice a kind of communal child care, something that many mammalian species practice to this day. Remember that Homo sapiens sapiens, of which I am a member and you are a member, maybe your dog is listening along with us so this doesn't apply to them, but we as a mammalian species also practiced communal child care for much of our history. Although for us in many parts of the world, we don't practice as much of this communal child care, particularly in the modern West, but we even still have remnants in our phraseology when we say things like, it takes a village. Child care is a big job, and I know that speaking from experience, not as a parent, but as a former big troublemaker. And so all of this is simply to say that the sperm whale tends to prefer this it-takes-a-village kind of parenting strategy. In the pods, they will all be somewhat involved with each other's parenting, which is really cool. I think I should mention that in most of the articles in which this communal child care fact came up, the editors or the writers were careful in how they phrased it. They used words like seems like and apparently, which often indicates there isn't a current, very solid scientific consensus on a certain point or fact. And so it is quite possible we still have much more to learn about their social behaviors and how they rear their children and so take that fact as you will maybe our understanding will evolve over time the males will typically in their migration migrate to higher latitudes alone or in groups and eventually head back towards the equator. during the breeding season. What is absolutely amazing to me is how these sea creatures that can weigh tens of thousands of pounds can travel up to 23 miles per hour in the sea. That is 37 kilometers an hour. As a Canadian, I must admit that the mile measurement is really confusing to me and I much prefer kilometers, but here we want to give measurements for everyone. But let's move on to my absolute favorite kind of fact, which are vocalizations, or how these animals communicate with each other and with the world. These whales, just like many other whales in our oceans, are extremely vocal and I imagine there is still so much to learn. But what we do know is that these creatures emit a series of clangs that may be used for echolocation or for communication with other whales. In case you haven't heard of echolocation before, this is just a mechanism by which animals use sound to find out where things are. And so, the sounds that the sperm whale makes will travel underwater, hit objects, and then bounce back towards them. This will give them information like the location, the size, the shape of their target and so these sounds that they make may very well serve this dual purpose for communication with other animals, particularly with other sperm whales, and to better understand their environment. Let's move on to their reproduction and their lifespan. Female sperm whales will be able to have calves of their own when they are around 9 years of age. This is when they will be about 29 feet long. A typical gestation period for this creature is around 14 to 16 months, and in case you haven't heard that word before, gestation, we are just referring to how long they carry their young before they give birth to them. They will have a new calf about once every five to seven years on average, which to me makes a lot of sense. After all, their gestation period is definitely longer than the average creature we have learned about on this show, and so having more spread-out offspring does make sense. The mama sperm whales will continue to nurse their young for several years even though calves are able to eat solid food before they are even a year old. If we stumble upon a sperm whale that is 10 years or younger, telling the difference between females and males by their size is a bit of a challenge. The male sperm whales will typically be a bit larger than the females around this time period, but as they grow older and older, the males continue to grow and to grow. Of course, the female sperm whales will only reach physical maturity at about 30 years of age. The males by this time will be substantially bigger, so that it is pretty easy to tell the difference. On the Patreon, we are going to be exploring some of the threats to the sperm whale, so if you want to listen to the extended version of this episode, I am very happy to welcome you there. Let us move to the review portion of the episode. This is where I can talk to you guys directly. You can leave messages or comments on Spotify, as well as reviews on Apple Podcasts. And today, just like the last episode, I couldn't find any new reviews on Apple Podcasts. And so we are going to start with some Spotify comments. Today's comment comes from Beans and Cheese who left a comment on the Manatee episode. And Beans and Cheese writes, I usually listen to this not when I'm trying to sleep, but when I'm winding down before getting ready for bed. And it's really helpful. Thank you, Beans and Cheese, for your listenership and for your wonderful comment. This is what I have said, I think, from the beginning, that I am grateful to host a show that allows you to enjoy it in different ways. For some podcasts out there that might be about politics or history, psychology, generally people falling asleep, means there's something wrong. But on this show, you can choose whether to be attentive or to let yourself wind down or even, of course, to sleep. All of those uses are certainly encouraged and I'm happy to be a part of that process. No matter where you listen, whether it be on Spotify or on Apple Podcasts, leaving a review, a comment, comment, a rating, making sure you are following the show. All of these things are ways by which you can help support the show, help it grow, increase our animal podcast family, and so I thank you for all of that. If you would like to request an animal for a future episode, you can do so by going to relaxwithanimalfacts.com and clicking on the Animal Request tab. If you would like to reach out to me for any other reason to share kind words or whatever, you can send me an email at relaxwithanimalfacts at gmail.com. A huge shout out to George Vlad for the ambiance in this episode. His audio work is linked in the description and I encourage you to check him out. What a wonderful animal we have learned about today. The sperm whale having the largest brain of any animal on Earth ever. At least that we know about. Maybe there's some Godzilla somewhere, but for now we can give props where props are due. Thank you for taking time out of your day or night to join me on this adventure And I hope that next week you will do the same. I look forward to seeing you on the next episode with the next animal. Take care.
