Standing at the bow of the 40-foot catamaran, on a rolling sea off the Caribbean coast of Dominica, Shane Gero barely felt the rain. He refused to take his eyes off the ocean until someone else made the call to head back to shore.
He’d just observed what few humans have ever seen, the kind of once-in-a-lifetime moment that marine biologists spend their entire careers chasing.
He watched a sperm whale, one of the largest, most remarkable creatures on the planet, bring her baby into the world.
Michael Lees/The Globe and Mail
A gift from the ocean, even if the story stopped there.
But this was not just any whale. This was Rounder.
There are roughly 600 sperm whales living in the Eastern Caribbean waters and Dr. Gero, a scientist-in-residence at Carleton University and one of the world’s leading whale experts, has encountered many of them at least once.
But Rounder’s family, known as Unit A, is one of the most familiar to him. Dr. Gero watched her grow up, protected by her mother, Lady Oracle, babbling until she learned to make the unique clicks of her clan’s coda, or language, properly. Click. Click. Click-click-click.
He can recognize the unique nicks and notches of her tail fin, or flukes, from a distance and identify her cousins, sisters and aunts the same way.
He was there floating at sea off the Dominica coast when the 12-year-old whale appeared with her first baby, Accra, in 2017. On a gray morning, on July 8, 2023, thanks to perfect luck, he would see her deliver her second.
The first peer-reviewed papers about the birth were published this week in the journals Science and Scientific Reports, providing evidence, the authors say, of sperm whales, both related and not, attending to the mother and baby much like how humans come together for childbirth.
Project CETI/Supplied
Project CETI/Supplied
Dr. Gero’s biology team was on the water that day with Harvard robotics engineers and MIT computer scientists, all members of Project CETI, a non-profit interdisciplinary research group trying to decipher sperm whale communication.
They happened to be test-flying new drone cameras, another stroke of good fortune. From two boats, CETI-1, a catamaran, and CETI-2, a rigid-hulled inflatable, they captured 600 hours of footage over more than five hours from the sky and at the surface, while hydrophones recorded sound underwater – unprecedented detail of the most essential milestone in any social animal’s culture: the beginning of life.
Endangered sperm whales now have their first protected area in the Caribbean island of Dominica
For Dr. Gero, this was the answer to many questions about whale behaviour, a long-sought puzzle piece revealed after 20 years of waiting and watching – and yet too close to a miracle to be contained to science.
On that day, he was also Shane, the seven-year-old kid landlocked in Ottawa, with a curious passion for whales. The eager twentysomething grad student who went searching for them, despite being nervous on boats and choppy seas. The amateur philosopher who sought to learn the wisdom contained in the largest known brain in the universe.
The father who’d deliberately ensured his children were raised near their grandparents, in the manner of the amazing creatures that he devoted his life to studying.
The human, humbled.
Dr. Gero, founder of the Dominican Sperm Whale Project, has spent 6,000 hours observing whales since 2005.Project CETI/Supplied
What he witnessed, and has learned since, further shatters what’s left of the idea of our own exceptionalism; this notion – already challenged by humanity’s tumultuous history – that we are wiser, kinder and more principled than all the other animals on earth.
To travel with the whales, and call them by name, as Dr. Gero knows, is to experience, in the depths of your human soul, the wonder, responsibility and sorrow at the heart of a meaningful life. For two decades, the whales have been telling Dr. Gero a deep and complex tale of love and community. And once you hear it, the world – and your place in it – are forever changed.
Whales gather
When Dr. Gero first sees the whales that July morning, they are huddled together at the surface, gleaming curves of steel gray, camouflaged by the rolling waves. Even at a distance, he recognizes that they are behaving oddly.
Sperm whales – as the famous Canadian whale researcher, Hal Whitehead, has written – have the most sex-segregated culture in the world. The young males are sent packing, to roam the world like invincible Casanovas on a perpetual gap year, hooking up as they go. Female whales remain in close-knit families, usually no larger than ten members. Rounder’s family has two matrilineal lines, flowing from the grandmothers, Lady Oracle and Fruit Salad.
Usually, a family spreads out across kilometres in small groups of blood relatives. Larger gatherings are noisy, playful affairs, with lots of rolling and splashing. Yet today, all 11 members of Unit A have converged on this one spot in the ocean at the same time – as if they’d answered the same all-hands-on-deck sonic telegram.
And they are silent and still.
The world’s most famous sperm whale is Moby Dick, the fictional monster who toyed with Captain Ahab and sunk his ship.
Reality, however, is nothing like that famous story of revenge. Sperm whales are indeed massive, ancient creatures of great power. But far from monstrous, they live gently, learning from their grandmothers, playing with their siblings, cuddling with their moms and tending to those in need.
Any whaler who was met with misfortune while trying to carve up a mammal as large as two school buses had only one reckless and cruel animal to blame. The whales, as a group, paid the higher price however, often dying in multiples when they refused to abandon a harpooned sister – demonstrating a social bond so strong that, according to anecdotal reports, whalers could use an injured whale to lure in the rest of the family.
The wise, languid gaze of a sperm whale, whose ancestors go back roughly 25 million years.Amanda Cotton/Project CETI/Supplied
From the early 1800s to 1987, nearly one million sperm whales were killed for the oily tissue in their spermaceti organ, which was used to make products such as candles and machinery lubricants. This organ, located in their square heads and spanning up to a third of their body length, facilitates their extraordinary ability to echolocate across hundreds of kilometres in the dark of the deep sea.
The sperm whale’s global numbers, now estimated at 300,000, only began to recover after commercial whaling was banned worldwide in 1988. But humans remain their most deadly neighbour, endangering their population with pollution and climate change, ship strikes and fishing nets.
If whales fight amongst themselves, Dr. Gero has never seen it. But they are fiercely protective of their families. While male sperm whales have no known predators, pack-hunting killer whales can ambush a smaller female – though only if the predators can get past the slamming tails and merciless head butts of her whale family guardians.
Checking in on Rounder
Dr. Gero and the other scientists cannot clearly see what the drone footage will later show: One at a time, the whales are diving under Rounder’s dorsal fins with bellies to the sky and their heads pointed toward area where the baby will emerge.
This is also strange. Whales like to rub bellies and touch heads; they don’t typically inspect genitals. Maybe the whales are simply curious. But it looks a lot like the female members of Rounder’s family are checking on her progress in the manner of midwives.
There’s an abrupt churn of white water. Rounder is moving, flanked by the other whales, with her mother Lady Oracle at her side, in a Canada geese formation.
From his perch on the CETI-1, Dr. Gero spots a gush of blood in the water near the centre of whale activity. An hour earlier, they’d motored past a pod of pilot whales, who are known to snatch young sperm whales. “Oh no,” he thinks. “The pilot whales have attacked.”
Dr. Gero at sea in 2005, during his first year observing the whales residing near Dominica.Project CETI/Supplied
Dr. Gero met his favourite whale, Fingers, during his first research trip to the Caribbean in 2005.
In January that year, he was among a crew of young Canadians scientists who sailed south with Dr. Whitehead to the deep, soup-bowl sea off the coast of Dominica.
They expected to see a few whales for hours at a time. There are roughly 500 whales in the Eastern Caribbean clan, but about 200 have made this relatively contained part of the ocean their permanent home. The scientists discovered they could follow one close-knit unit for many weeks.
They were soon assigning them into family units and giving them names. Early members of Rounder’s family were named after characters in Margaret Atwood books, such as Lady Oracle. Fruit Salad was named after the snack a researcher happened to eating. Dr. Gero came up with Rounder because her tail was shaped a little rounder than the rest.
They encountered a family of whales they eventually called Unit F. Dr. Gero, then working on his master’s thesis, was assigned to follow a calf named Thumb, whose mom, Fingers, was almost always close by.
Project CETI/Supplied
Project CETI/Supplied
Project CETI/Supplied
From the surface, you can see only about two-thirds of a whale’s length and 10 per cent of their width. The scientists don’t swim with the whales, preferring to observe them undisturbed from a distance.
But that first winter, Dr. Gero went snorkeling to get an underwater view of Thumb nursing, keeping a careful distance and wisely climbing back on the boat when they turned leisurely in his direction. Few experiences teach humility faster – or deliver greater awe – than treading water near a powerful animal five times your size.
Dr. Gero went home that winter with his path decided. Not long after, he co-founded, and now runs, the Dominica Sperm Whale Project, and in 2021, he officially joined Project CETI as head of the biology team.
At least once a year over two decades, Dr. Gero has returned to this same sea to watch and listen. As of today, he has spent 6,000 hours with the whales, formally identifying over 30 family units. His research, along with other work around the world, has steadily built the case for a complex, caring and intelligent whale culture.
The birth
This is what Dr. Gero missed from his imperfect view on CETI-1.
Still surrounded by family, Rounder rolls over in the swirling water, lying on her back. Half of a small body becomes visible; the baby’s head is still inside.
At that very moment, Lady Oracle makes an unusual flip on top of her daughter. She is positioned so one eyeball on the side of her head has a fix on the baby’s progress. And as Lady Oracle rolls off, the baby slides out, face down, head forward, in swimming-ready position.
Pure coincidence? Maybe. But this mysterious, seemingly random action by a mother to her daughter in the last moments of labour spins around in Dr. Gero’s mind, unsolved. What if it wasn’t random?
Back on the boat, Project CETI’s long-time captain, an islander named Kevin George says, “I think it’s a birth.”
“Oh-my-god, oh-my-god, oh-my-god,” Dr. Gero chants from the deck.
Project CETI’s annual budget is in the millions; studying whales is complicated and expensive. Finding them requires patience. Their deep-sea habitat prevents uninterrupted observation. Their clicking conversations sound like popcorn to human ears.
But over many decades of increasingly high-tech, and ever-patient whale-watching, we have acquired a limited view into their lives.
We know that whales sort into female-led units, or families, travelling loosely in larger clans, and visited by the occasional, amorous bachelor, passing their way.
Like human babies, newborn sperm whales babble until they perfect their distinct family and clan codas, the clicking pattern whales use to communicate. While steering clear of whales from other clans, they can recognize a fellow clanmate by their coda – the same way, Dr. Gero suggests, a Canadian in a foreign country may recognize another Canadian. This rare ability to distinguish us-versus-them requires higher level cognition and an awareness of cultural membership.
Dr. Gero uses a hydrophone to locate and record sperm whale clicks in Dominica in 2024.Michael Lees/National Geographic/Supplied
PROJECT CETI/SUPPLIED
Scientists believe that the sperm whale’s communal society evolved to protect their offspring in their early, vulnerable years.
Sperm whales need to spend much of the day eating squid in the ocean, diving 2,000 feet deep. When mom goes for dinner, someone else must keep watch of her kid, usually a grandmother or aunt, but not always a direct relative.
According to Dr. Gero’s work, those who aren’t yet mothers appear to do more than their share – perhaps to practise for parenthood, the most important, culture-defining role in a female sperm whale’s life.
Family support
The baby slides into the sea, a delicate, glistening bean already weighing 1,000 kilograms and stretching roughly four metres. It’s limp in the water, too weak to swim. And its tail is too soft and droopy to assist – the muscle and cartilage will take many months to fully harden and mature.
But family help arrives. In groups of three and four, aunts and cousins cluster around, squeezing the newborn between their bodies, lifting it out of the water, touching it with their heads. Their actions support the slippery baby at the surface as it gains strength. It looks a lot like the scene in a hospital maternity room when everyone wants to hold the new arrival.
To Dr. Gero, whales are individuals. Life happens to them. Their family role evolves with time. Take one member away, and that family is also changed.
In 2006, when he returned to Dominica, Thumb was gone. Dr. Gero has no way to know what happened to him. But another baby, Enigma, had already been born, and Fingers, though only distantly related, had stepped up as her primary babysitter – just as Pinchy, Enigma’s mom, had done for Thumb.
Over the years, Dr. Gero has seen more babies vanish than he can count. In 2016, he co-authored a paper estimating that one in three whale calves didn’t make it to their first birthday. After that, the scientists stopped naming newborns in their first years of life, which is why Rounder’s baby is still only known as “the newborn.”
Young whales die from natural causes, but also human hazards. In 2023, Finger’s second baby, a young whale named Digit, was tangled in a fishing line. For three years, Dr. Gero and his team watched her slowly strangle as she grew, and the line tightened around her body, while Fingers nursed her to keep her alive. They had no way to safely help, no way to get close enough to cut the line. And then, in 2018, they returned to find Digit healthy and mysteriously free of her shackles.
While the whales have captivated his life, Dr. Gero is under no illusions that they know or care about him. But every so often, something happens to suggest the observed are also observing.
After the families dive away, the scientists routinely collect skin tissue and fecal matter from the water. For a year, a whale named Can Opener would pop up after faking a dive, and turn his body to appraise the humans on board, with a single, seemingly all-knowing eye.
Locking eyes with a whale, says Dr. Gero, is perspective-altering, like falling into history; you can conceive, but not fully comprehend, how deep the world truly goes.
That a sperm whale might play “gotcha” for the fun of it is deeper still.
Whales have wisdom to share about human life, Dr. Gero says, if we are willing to listen. Fingers taught him about parenthood before he was a father, and about finding purpose after loss. She’s now an older aunt to the youngest whales – the wise, graceful elder drifting on the periphery ready to help when needed. When she dives, Dr. Gero says, she has the most picture-perfect tail sweep he’s ever seen.
The burden he feels to protect her, and all the whales, is enough “to crack his heart open.”
A celebration
Within ten minutes, the baby is propelling itself through the water, squirming out in front, until an elder nudges it back. At other times, the newborn wiggles across a kind of whale mosh pit, held completely out of the water by the tight family huddle. The youngest ones slip in beside the new addition, splashing and rolling. There are so many large bodies wedged together that the baby is pushed underwater at least once.
Suddenly the whales turn, as group, toward CETI-1, swimming so close that the scientists can hear the coda coming out of their blow hole. Dr. Gero races across the netting of the catamaran, leaping to get his first clear view of the baby.
“She’s alive. Yay, little one!” he shouts.
On the boat, the humans are cheering, or weeping. The whales swim on, unperturbed. “They just went about their celebration,” Dr. Gero says. “Passing us by.”
A skeptic might ask: Did the whales attend the birth to assist or were they simply checking out something new? Are they actually supporting the newborn, or just splashing around it? And here’s a real mindbender: If Fruit Salad and the others knew that Rounder was having a baby, did Rounder know they knew?
The CETI scientists continue to analyze the footage and sound recordings of the birth, using machine learning and custom-made software, and relying on Dr. Gero’s knowledge to identify the whales and their relationship to each other.
There is much more to learn, especially about the codas heard during the birth. But the results so far, Dr. Gero says, confirm what he has long believed – that whale families practise reciprocity and co-operation. They help each other knowing the time will come – even years into the future – when they need help themselves.
“This is like a cherry on top of a much larger sundae that has been built for the last 20 years,” Dr. Gero says.
Arriving more than 40 minutes early to attend to a pregnant family member, co-operating and guarding her through a delivery, and then caring for the baby afterward is a level of birth attendance that has not been observed outside primates – at least yet, Dr. Gero says.
Still, we are cautioned not to leap. Don’t confuse instincts with conscious thought, or behaviour with feeling. Don’t anthropomorphize.
But isn’t anthrodenialism, as Dr. Whitehead has written, equally misguided? It leads us to underestimate the fullness of life. And what good has ever come from that?
A curious onlooker
Later, when they are counting the whales, someone asks: “Who’s the extra one?” There’s an interloper lingering on the edges, as if trying to get a peek of the baby. Dr. Gero recognizes Allan, a 15-year-old male, who was pushed out the family after his mother, Lady Oracle, had another baby, and sent off to begin his more solitary adult life.
The scientists knew he hadn’t gone far yet; they’d spent an afternoon, watching him play in seaweed months before the birth. But since leaving, he no longer socialized with Unit A.
“So how did he know?” Dr. Gero asks. “Allan’s appearance is one of the bits of magic.”
As the baby gains strength, Uncle Allan slips closer for a brief look and a quick touch, before swimming back the outskirts.
By 90 minutes, the newborn is definitely swimming on its own, its whale guardians ever watchful. They have an audience. A harmless pod of Fraser’s dolphin drift on the sidelines. The pilot whales are still circling, at one point getting so close that the newborn’s protectors open their jaws and shake their tails to scare them off.
The whales linger together for another hour, playfully rolling around the baby and each other, their codas overlapping like cocktail party conversation.
Dr. Gero feels the weight of responsibility kicking in, the privilege of presence. “Now,” he thinks, “we have to make it mean something.”
Since 2023, they have seen glimpses of the baby. If Dr. Gero gets a good look this summer, the not-so-little whale may even get a name.
As a species, humans spend a lot of time thinking about how animals can help us, measure up to us, matter to us – excited to imagine that some day, thanks to initiatives such as Project CETI, we might actually be able to converse with the whales, because, of course, they’d be fascinated by what we have to say.
But Dr. Gero is content to mindfully bear witness to life in a part of the world we still know less about than the surface of the moon. He is devoted to a different question: What matters to the whale?
And what appears to matter to sperm whales, he says, is connection and community. If whales were human, we’d call that love.
