Submitted by guest blogger Cynthia Mills, reporting from Portland, Oregon.

Moby Dick was a sperm whale with an

attitude, and there is now new evidence that real sperm whales may

just be smart enough to act like Moby did. New recording techniques

suggest that they use collaborative hunting techniques on the same

level of sophistication as wolves and dolphins.

The new evidence was presented

yesterday by Bruce Mate of Hatfield Marine Station in Oregon at the

American Geophysical Union’s Ocean Sciences Meeting in Portland,

Oregon.

Mate has been spying on whales for a

long time now, following the travels of blue whales, humpbacks and

greys by attaching satellite tags to them. He found that what had

always been called migration was more complicated—whales sometimes

backtracked thousands of miles, as if they’d just remembered they’d

left the oven on at the beach house.

Now Mate is getting even more personal

with his spying. The satellite tags could only transmit information

when the whale surfaced; he is now using new tags that can track not

just surface position but the depth and duration of dives as well.

And to top things off he can listen in on their conversations, too.

The new tags record the whales’

activities for 28 days, and then they fall off. They transmit their

position by GPS, the scientists pick them up and download a computer

record of the whales’ travels, dives and sounds, down to an accuracy

of 2 meters (6.6 feet).

“Each animal is acoustic – each has

its own coda – some are triplets, doublets and each animal can

track the others by their sounds,” said Mate.

This becomes important when the whales

stalk their prey, Humboldt squid. What Mate can now see is that the

whales all dive together after the squid, but not the same way. Some

dive very, very deep, as deep as 1,200 meters (3,937 feet) while the

others stay more shallow.

“We’re hypothesizing the animals

are working together, creating a bait ball of squid.”

The new recording tags have a higher

movement resolution, so that Mate says they can even detect lunges of

the whales toward their prey. Mate says they even make a special

lunge sound, a sort of up-swept tone or creak, when they do.

This is unusual behavior for these

large whales. Humpback and grey whales make bubble nets to trap

krill, but there are no special roles for each whale – they are all

doing the same maneuver over and over again. The sperm whales are

performing different tasks – some seem to even specialize deep

versus shallow diving, doing it more often than the others.

This sort of collaborative hunting is

not unheard of in marine mammals. Dolphins have been found to herd

herring, holding a bait ball in one place while their team mates dive

in for bites.

Image: Animal Planet