(light music) (water bubbling)
We can barely imagine a whale's life,
let alone what's in their mind.
(water splashing)
One man is ready to try.
It's a journey into the deepest thinking.
He'll find intelligence,
(lively music) (whales grunting)
and capacity for emotion.
(whales squeaking)
There's ingenuity, risk, and reward.
(whale grunting)
We see tenderness and curiosity.
Whales have loving families, rivalries and music.
(whale singing)
Putting it all together, what emerges is the unexpected.
(birds squawking)
(jolly music)
Alaska calls humpback whales from the warm Pacific
to feed together in its rich deep waters.
(plane rumbling)
Filmmaker, and marine biologist, Rick Rosenthal's journey
into the whale mind begins here.
It looks like a good day to spot whales.
He's on the trail of a particular humpback
that's defying all expectation.
(animals twittering) (whale blowing)
He finds his whale alone, patrolling a rocky shore.
Every April she comes to this one bay.
There she is, right next to the rocks.
(water splashing)
Right through here, I'm looking through the spruce trees.
I'm in a forest and she's in the rocks right below me.
What's she thinking?
It's dangerous for her to come into the shallow water.
Animals often act on instinct.
They may also be thoughtful and creative.
One way to separate invention from instinct is
to get to know an individual.
This whale has a reputation for having a mind of her own.
(light music) (water splashing)
Rick follows in his stealth kayak for a closer look.
(whale blowing)
She ignores Rick.
She's bubble-net feeding.
Humpbacks trap a school of fish by blowing a wall
of bubbles and imprisoning them inside.
(water sloshing)
Rick puts on his dive gear to join her in her world.
I've never hidden in tree branches
before to film a whale, but this might be my chance to see
what she's actually doing in the shallow water.
Underwater, something is strange.
She's unusually silent.
She's made a discovery that she doesn't want to share.
Bite-size baby salmon.
Humpbacks are not salmon eaters.
She's alone, not afraid of people,
and trying new tastes.
(water bubbling)
This humpback is up to something.
Her secret is just around the headland.
(exciting music)
There are 10s of millions of juvenile salmon
in the Hidden Falls Salmon Hatchery.
She times her journey perfectly.
She's come thousands of kilometers,
yet each year she arrives just
before the salmon release begins.
(tense music) (water bubbling)
Her scars show she's already had close encounters
with cables and boats.
(exciting music) Baby salmon are
reared in closed nets, suspended
from pontoons anchored in the bay.
As the young smolts grow, some escape and feed a few locals.
(seagulls squawking)
The salmon, still in their nets are now ready
for life at sea.
The side nets are dropped and two million fish swim
out of each pen.
(water bubbling)
(water splashing)
The hatchery has varied the time of the first release,
but she has always arrived ahead of them.
This year they tow some of the pens
out of the bay away from the greedy eyes of the whale.
The salmon are intended to augment the wild stocks
which have been declining.
Their plan underestimates the whale.
She has silently followed the pens.
(whale whooshing)
There's little the team can do.
It's illegal to harass or harm a whale.
The fact that a huge calculating brain is at work here is
no consolation for Jon Pearce, the manager of the hatchery.
(whale blowing) (whale groaning)
Livelihoods are at stake.
It's a battle of wits, whale versus man.
(suspenseful music)
Investigating whale ingenuity takes Rick to arctic Norway.
Under the northern lights are some
of the richest seas on Earth.
Here, sunrise and sunset meet for a few hours
between long nights.
(exciting music) (wind blowing)
Rick and Captain Andreas Heide are looking
for killer whales or orcas.
Yeah, you see where the big mountain go down?
Yeah. Right at there.
Right down. Yeah.
(water sloshing)
Killer whales feed on the huge shoals of herring
that over-winter in these waters.
A family pod coordinates a search
with their own repertoire of clicks,
whistles, and pulsed calls.
(seagulls squawking)
The calls can be heard from far away,
and help keep the family together.
Once they find the herring the whales corral them
into the shallows using high-pitched sound.
(whales squawking)
The fish crowd together.
The family uses this to their advantage.
(water rushing) (whales squeaking)
It looks chaotic but it's a coordinated attack.
The herring are in panic mode,
and dozens of whales are now sharing the feast.
The whales now fire an intense short-range sound
that jams the herrings' nervous system, stunning them.
(suspenseful music)
The family delicately pick off disabled herrings one by one.
They're so successful they can afford to be fussy.
Only the tender, middle part of the body is eaten.
Few animals on land hunt with such sophistication.
On the other side of the world, Rick finds killer whale
ingenuity under very different circumstances.
(tense music)
Off the coast of Mexico, predators are
in a constant quest for food.
Prey is spread out and difficult to come by.
(whale blowing)
This ragged band of transients wear the scars
and parasites to prove that it's tough here.
These killer whales work undercover, silently.
Prey is weary.
(water sloshing)
(light music)
Possible food appears from below.
Whiptail stingrays are armed and dangerous.
Stingrays sometimes are coming right towards me.
I don't want that on my chest.
I'm pushing them away.
I don't want that stuck in me.
The killer whales too, seem to know to be careful.
That whiptail stingray has quite a spine,
and it's venomous.
If they get that in their tongue or their mouth,
there's gonna be some serious pain there.
The whales must have recognized this ray
from the several species without a poisonous spine.
They take time to consider.
It's valuable food, but dangerous.
(suspenseful music) (water bubbling)
(whales squeaking) (whales clicking)
The whales are working out how to deal with the stingray.
They softly chirp to each other in whispers.
These whales are stalkers.
They work quietly.
The lead female would come in to check it out,
then pull back to let the other one smash it with its tail.
(tail booming) (exciting music)
That really looks like they're passing on that information,
that knowledge, how to stun a stingray
and take it as food.
(whales chirping)
You don't want to get between an orca's tail
and the stingray or you're busted up.
The family tries the technique in turn.
(whales squealing)
(water swooshing)
The lead whale takes her ray to share
with the rest of the pod.
This is not instinct.
It's creative.
Whales can see a problem and think of a solution.
(whale honking)
Our humpback in Alaska is a lone inventor, an original.
She's waiting for the next batch
of salmon to be released.
(whale clicking)
She's daring to push the limits,
swimming confidently around the nets
and boats while she waits.
The hatchery staff are planning their next move too,
plotting to outwit the silent leviathan lurking below.
(boat horn honking)
The manager has chartered a commercial fishing boat.
The little salmon are sucked up
through a specially designed pipe.
Two million fish will fit in a live well on the boat.
It's incredible that one whale's pressuring them
to go through all of this.
(water trickling)
There's no way for the humpback to sense
what's inside the pipe or the boat.
(Rick and Jon chattering drowned out by engine)
The ship with one pen-load of salmon,
heads for a release point far off shore.
There's no sign of the humpback.
It's a win for the hatchery, or so it seems.
A proportion of the salmon returns to the bay.
Our humpback whale patrols the shoreline
and soon finds them.
Dozens of pens remain.
Removing the rest of the fish will take too long.
Meanwhile, crowding is bringing disease.
There's a new plan.
Instead of opening the nets on all four sides,
they drop only one side of the enclosure.
The salmon swim out, but can dart back
into the pen in case of danger.
Our whale wants more than just a few stragglers.
He wants them all.
She swims below the net that lines the bottom of the pen.
Then she blows a massive bubble under the pen,
(water rumbling)
in a brilliant attempt to flush the fish out.
She understands the problem perfectly.
(light music)
Rick is hoping to see the whale swim beneath the net.
(water trickling)
I know she's down there somewhere,
but the water's so dark it's hard to see anything.
(water rumbling)
(air blowing)
No one could have imagined what happened next.
(water rushing)
She slipped unnoticed into the pen with Rick,
not a ripple, not a sound.
(water rumbling)
12 meters of whale in a 12 by eight meter pen.
That's a giant whale in a little swimming pool.
(whale squeaking)
(water rushing)
She hasn't got in by chance.
She's daring enough to maneuver through the small opening,
again and again.
In this game of strategy,
a wild whale has clearly beaten us,
one to one, brain to brain.
(seagulls squawking)
(light music)
Most whales appear briefly, magically, take a breath,
and then return to their world.
(waves crashing)
The Azores are fringed by canyons running deep underwater.
There, over a kilometer below,
live sperm whales and giant squid.
(whales clicking)
Rick listens with his hydrophone to the morse code
of clicks and calls of the sperm whales far below him.
I can hear them.
The whales are clicking away.
(light music)
Sperm whales call in phrases
with specific meanings that maybe,
even amount to a language.
They certainly have family dialects.
They're moving off down the underwater canyon.
I can hear that they're getting further away.
Rick needs to get back to the support vessel fast.
He can't afford to lose them.
Once we're at the surface,
we can't lose visual contact.
They're masters at slipping out of sight.
(whales clicking) (exciting music)
Sperm whales spend most of their life
cruising the abyss in darkness.
Coming up from below, how different the world
of light and air must seem.
(waves crashing)
They'd been holding their breath for about an hour.
They need to recover.
Rick uses his kayak to approach the whales quietly.
Pedals drive fins that move in the same way that fish swim.
(water sloshing)
(whales clicking)
This is a family pod.
Sperm whales live in matriarchies.
The females are in charge.
Grandmothers pass on 80 years of wisdom.
They can see me, but they zap me
as well with their sonar.
They're making a sound picture of me.
Here in the Azores, whaling was banned in 1986.
The older generation of sperm whales
are veterans from that war.
Now, after 30 years of protection,
trust, perhaps, is starting to return.
It's not like Moby Dick, the big whale
that sunk the whaling ships.
These are really tender, sensitive animals.
The female glides along on her back.
The family caresses, belly-to-belly.
It's not courtship or mating.
It's more like hugging but without arms.
As they rub together, they groom each other,
removing dead skin.
It must feel good when you don't have
anything solid to scratch on.
A youngster seems to delight in the moment.
He appears to close his eyes.
Their sensitivity to sound is phenomenal.
They can hear each other's heartbeat through the water.
A family splitting up,
so I need to make a quick decision
about which group to follow.
(exciting music)
Three teenagers swim off together.
Once of the youngsters makes a beeline
for a small ball-like object covered
in barnacles floating at the surface.
He rolls on his back and feels the texture.
Maybe to understand what it is.
In a liquid world, any solid object is worth investigating.
(whales clicking) (water swishing)
The sperm whale's mouth is a precision weapon.
They can grab fast-moving fish and squid,
and hold onto them in total darkness.
It takes practice.
The three youngsters pass the ball between them.
There's an enthusiastic chatter of clicks.
Seeing the whales playing ball and having fun,
I knew that this was something very special.
A sperm whale teenager probably has the longest
and most complex education of any animal.
They have the biggest brains, five times the size of ours.
There's a massive mind here as well as a playful heart.
Sadly, they only give you a short time
to look into their lives, and then they're gone.
(waves crashing) (tense music)
Off the Atlantic coast of Patagonia,
killer whales hunting strategy is also hard
for them to learn, and has huge risks.
(whales blowing)
As orcas cruise the shallows, they must judge the tides,
waves and underwater contours perfectly.
Experience killer whales charge up
onto the beach to grab a seal.
(seagulls squawking)
Others watch and learn.
(dramatic music)
It takes years to master this hunting technique.
Any mistake can mean stranding or even death.
It's worth the risks.
(birds squawking)
Sea Lion Island is a nursery for elephant seals,
and a seasonal hunting ground for their predators.
(exciting music)
(seal grunting)
The mothers left the pups on their own weeks ago.
These elephant seal pups don't seem
to have a clue about what could be waiting
for them out in the water.
Seal pups live by their instincts,
rather than by thinking about things too much.
That's probably for the best.
(seal honking)
Some elephant seal pups are swept off rocks
and forced to swim before they're ready.
(waves crashing)
Along the shoreline, dodging a three ton male elephant seal,
(seal gurgling)
Rick finds grizzly evidence of how dangerous
these beaches can be.
(birds chirping)
I thought I was here to film killer whales
and their dramatic attacks on elephant seals.
That's not what I found.
It's a dorsal fin of a killer whale,
buried under tons of sand.
It looks like this orca paid the price
for coming in too close.
Rick is hoping biologist, Giulia Ercoletti,
can shed some light on the buried whale.
She's part of a research team studying
elephant seals and killer whales.
Giulia tells Rick that under the dorsal fin are the remains
of a large whale that the researchers named Leo.
Each spring for years they had seen him
and his pod mates hunting elephant seal
pups in shallow water.
A few weeks ago something went very wrong.
(somber music) (water crashing)
(birds squawking)
The first thing I thought was,
okay, we've got to save him.
So, just go into the water and, I don't know,
push him away back to the sea.
I want to save him, I don't want to, you know,
I don't want to watch him dying
because he was dying, you could tell.
The pressure of his weight out
of water forces up his last meal.
Oh my-- The worst part of that
is that we kind of realized that we're,
nothing much we could do about it.
Okay, okay, roll him. Can we roll him?
While we were trying to put him back to the sea,
we saw the other two mates.
They used to go in three.
There was Leo, Penone and Tupon.
Was the pod? That's the pod,
three males.
And while Leo was stranded and crying,
Penone came several times.
The rescue team heard him calling.
His pod mates stayed close despite the dangers
and all the researchers being in the water.
And I remember there was a fin of Penone
just right in front of Leo, just resting in front of Leo.
Many hours later, Leo's pod mates were still there
beyond the surf line, waiting.
(somber music)
Leo died in the dark.
Towards dawn, the surviving killer whales left
and were away for many months.
Whales and dolphins are famously sensitive
to distress, even from other species.
And sometimes seem to want to help.
What struck me was the other pod mates calling
to him, and waiting nearby and watching.
They knew what was happening.
They realized that they were losing
someone they cared about.
There's an emotional wisdom there.
(waves crashing)
The strongest bond of all
is between mother and calf.
At Rarotonga in the Cook Islands,
a humpback mother and newborn arrive.
(light music) (whales singing)
The calf is less than a month old.
Born on the 8,000 kilometer journey from the southern ocean.
Over the next year, she must teach him
everything he needs to know to be on his own.
Attending her is a young male, a suitor.
He's ahead of the other males,
and hoping to catch her eye early.
He wants to escort her on the next leg
of her journey within Polynesia
as a protector and mate.
(whales squawking)
Her only concern is for her calf.
She shields the youngster from the advances from the male.
She helps her baby to the surface to take a breath.
The suitor remains attentive.
She ignores him.
Time is running out for this gentle approach.
A possie of rival males is about to arrive.
To understand humpback whale courtship,
Rick joins Nan Hauser who's been studying humpbacks
for over 20 years.
Nan and her colleagues have discovered
that relationships whale style are complicated.
Blow, blow right here, can you see those?
It's the gang of rival males.
(exciting music)
(water splashing)
(whales blowing)
The newcomers have a much more physical strategy.
Their breaches and tail slaps are intimidating
to other males, and a chance to show off to females.
(tails thumping)
They move in on the mother and compete to push closer.
The suitor tries to keep them at bay.
The gang's assertive tactics are no more successful
than the gentle courtship of the suitor.
Mother and calf move on and leave the islands.
(whales blowing)
The males all stay.
More females will arrive soon.
And when they do, the gang has a new plan.
Courtship in most animals is about strength or display.
With whales, everything is a bit more subtle,
a bit more individual.
(light music)
Gray whales come to Magdalena Bay in Mexico to breed.
The males wait for the females to arrive.
Instead of competing with each other,
this small gang entertain themselves.
(water whooshing)
They roll on the bottom.
When the surf comes up, they head out
to the break, and catch some waves.
(rock and roll music)
Even for whales, surfing can take some practice.
You need just the right wave if you weigh 30 tons.
There's a sideways move that doesn't always work well.
Upside down is another way.
The spin maybe.
Lift your tail, and you nail it.
They must be having fun.
They're riding the waves, over and over again.
After they catch a ride, they turn
and head back out to the surf break.
(light music)
This is just a magic moment.
The female whales could be watching
from a discreet distance, admiring the best surfer.
They could be choosing a partner, but they're not.
They are far away at the other end of Magdalena Bay.
There they approach small boats and solicit human attention.
They even bring their newborns along.
This is a wild mother approaching people.
There's no obvious benefit.
Scientists have different theories as to why gray whales
here seek human attention.
The whale's curiosity and tactile affection maybe a clue
to what they think and feel.
Like the sperm whales, they seem to enjoy being touched.
I've watched these interactions
for a number of years.
But it still amazes me how the whales are so trusting.
This was first seen in the 1970s,
and slowly more individual mothers took up the idea.
For the tourists on the boat,
it's a wonderful fleeting moment
of direct contact between human and whale.
(water rumbling)
(waves crashing)
(whales squawking)
The sound of singing encircles Rarotonga
back in the South Pacific.
The courting gang of humpback males
is practicing their new tactic.
The gang has become a choir.
Our frustrated suitor has joined three other males
on the reef to sing.
They've decided it's better to work together.
(boat rumbling)
Nan Hauser works with other scientists
throughout the South Pacific to record humpback whale songs.
The songs are some of the most complex
in the animal kingdom.
Patterns of calls make up phrases.
The whales repeat each phrase
like verses forming a longer song.
(whales singing)
The concert can last for hours.
Oh oh oh, this is right below us.
Nan takes Rick to an area over the coral reef,
where she's frequently recorded the singers.
(ladies laughing)
The songs are part of courtship.
Yet scientists also believe that there is data here
about their long distance travels,
from the pole to the tropics.
The song is so intense,
I can feel my entire body tingle from the vibrations.
The whales often sing the same song
with individual variations.
But every year or two, a new song reaches the island.
I can hear two singing. Yeah.
You know, so, awfully cool, you know.
Some competition. They're right together,
and there are two songs going on.
Far out. And very special, huh.
Yeah. We better see
if we can get on top of them again.
Okay, let's go.
Back in Nan's office,
Rick and Nan study the day's recordings.
We actually hear one whale teaching
the other whales the song.
And they mimic it.
So for instance, if they start a phrase
with (whale mimicking) you hear the first whale singing
that song very loudly and then you hear
the second whale copy it.
So it's almost like an echo.
And some days it's really fun
because they're singing two different songs.
And then after listening to them for
about half an hour, an hour, you see them,
or at least one of them incorporating the song
into his song.
So they actually have this transfer of phrases of songs.
It's beautiful.
(whales grunting)
A new song ripples across the Pacific,
passed from whale to whale.
He can travel 6,000 kilometers
from Australia to French Polynesia.
Then, a year or so later, a new humpback hit emerges.
Humpbacks it seems are dedicated followers of fashion.
What is extraordinary is that
the song is communal and personal.
it contains information and emotion.
It reveals something of their inner world.
There are clues into the whale mind,
if we're luck enough to know where to look.
(whale singing) (exciting music)
After filming whales in many oceans,
over many years, I come away with a feeling
that although they're different from us,
they're also a lot more like us than I ever thought before.
They have families.
They play.
They're curious.
They can learn.
They pass this knowledge on.
They have a deep wisdom.
Each insight, though, raises many more questions.
The truth is, we've only just touched the surface.
(dramatic music)