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A mother sperm whale came up from half a mile down with a giant squid still in her mouth. A diver named Ludo caught the whole thing on camera. Nobody had ever filmed this before in human history. That was last September.
A Smithsonian scientist named Michael Vecchione confirmed the species. It was an adult giant squid, an animal so hard to find alive that for a century we mainly knew it from beaks pulled out of dead whales and the occasional body that washed up on a beach.
We have known these two fight for centuries. Sperm whales kept surfacing with large circular marks on their heads that matched the suckers on giant squid arms. Their stomachs were full of squid beaks, the one part of a squid that cannot be digested.
The evidence was everywhere. The event itself had never once been seen.
This hunt happened in complete darkness. The whale was far deeper than any sunlight reaches. She found the squid the way sperm whales always do, by making sounds that bounce off things around her. Her clicks hit 236 decibels. A jet engine runs at about 150. She is the loudest living animal on earth, and those sounds are how she sees in the dark.
Her brain weighs seven kilograms. Five times heavier than yours.
For a sperm whale, this was a routine meal. One whale eats four to eight hundred squid every day. The whole species eats about 110 million tons of squid every year, more than every fishing fleet on earth pulls out of the ocean combined.
In the full uncropped video, you can see her baby swimming right next to her. Sperm whale calves do not go deep on their own. They only dive when their mothers bring them. She was teaching the baby how to hunt. That detail is the one that stayed with me.
All day Astronomy@forallcurious
SHOCKING🚨: Sperm Whale fighting a giant squid in its mouth!
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