Sperm Whales blow bubbles to achieve restful, vertical sleep | Hacker News Reader

Sperm Whales blow bubbles to achieve restful, vertical sleep

news.st-andrews.ac.uk

118 pointshhs30 comments

The title of the original article [1] is a lot more clear:

    Buoyancy regulation through modulation of onboard gas volume by resting sperm whales

They don't "blow bubbles" to sleep vertically, they vent gas to regulate their specific gravity. This allows them to sleep vertically below the surface. The scientists measured the gas release by listening for bubbles, but they did a lot more: they actually modeled the buoyancy of whales and compared it with data.

If you've done any scuba diving (or swimming) you're familiar with this method of buoyancy control. And most fish accomplish on actively transporting gas between an internal bladder and their blood.

The difference is that whales have no way to refill their lungs while submerged, which is why their dives start deep and slowly drift up: as long as they are drifting upward the volume in their lungs is expanding in response to decreasing pressure. So the bubbles are essentially a way of pumping the breaks, which is apparently something they can do in their sleep (if they are in fact sleeping).

Is anyone else slightly annoyed by the cutesy title? Of course I recognize that the meme economy runs on this stuff, so maybe it's just nerds like me.

[1]: https://dmscdn.vuelio.co.uk/publicitem/61eae467-9527-4922-b9...

> They don't "blow bubbles" to sleep vertically, they vent gas to regulate their specific gravity. This allows them to sleep vertically

When I read this I thought you'd discovered that the whales release the gas in a form other than by blowing bubbles, or that the purpose of doing so was for something other than improved sleep.

But no, the whales literally release air through their blowhole in the form of bubbles, and, at least during study you linked, they do this while resting to maintain their vertical orientation. An orientation, the paper theorises, that enables better sleep by not being buffeted by waves.

They quite literally blow bubbles to achieve restful, vertical sleep.

Oof, sorry if that was misleading.

Maybe I'm overly fixated on the "to" in "to achieve": the whale doesn't care about the bubbles, they serve no important purpose in helping them sleep, it's just what happens when you vent air under water.

It's also kind of a nitpick, but the scientists refer to resting whales, but specifically state that they don't know if they are sleeping. I guess getting a proper EEG on a sperm whale is another scientific frontier.

Edit: An awesome scientific frontier: honestly if anyone deserves my tax money it's the grad student trying to figure out how to measure brain waves in a submerged oceanic whale.

I think this is tied to your own mental mapping of the term “blowing bubbles” and that it’s typically an active rather than passive action. But the headline isn’t wrong and it’s in fact doing a really good job of communicating the underlying idea in a thought provoking way while being technically correct. This is kind of a feat of science journalism.

It's more about the indirection, but it's a matter of taste. Whales blow bubbles to sleep. Humans stink to thermoregulate. We blow air to metabolize. Cars rumble to propel themselves forward. In each case there's a missing mechanism (buoyancy control, perspiration, respiration, internal combustion) which scientific articles generally put right in the title.

But I agree with you, better that scientists provide something for everyone. This is a good press release (it's not really journalism if it's coming from the university press office). The other very nice thing they did is link the original article in the first words of the release, although I would have made the hyperlink text "A new paper from University of St Andrews and Université de Neuchâtel" to make it clear that the paper is there. Hyperlinks are cheap and a lot of science is free to access, there's no excuse to leave that out.

So like memey version is still pointing at the real mechanism

I think this is just the eternal tension between catchy headlines and the underlying science

Indeed.

This isn't a particularly bad case. I think both are often useful, and this headline isn't wrong, I just assumed the bubbles had some direct use and found the scientific title more clear there.

I’m going to start referring to exhaling as “venting gas”. Thank you.

I'm amazed at Oar Fish, that are very big and very long, and apparently just hang vertically in the water column. They can go up and down very fast but not side-to-side. They feed by hanging under their prey and then move up from below to attack. Their bodies are so long and thin that they have no lateral rigidity.

https://edgedavao.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/Oarfish-2.j...

Sailors used to think they were sea serpents.

> It is particularly fascinating they are able to make these fine-scale adjustments while they are thought to be asleep, a challenge totally alien to terrestrial mammals like us humans.

While fascinating it’s not surprising. The vegetative nervous system does a LOT of things on autopilot. I think most people have no idea how many things their body regulates permanently that are actually technically difficult (orientation is particularly hard) and the lower brain stems just wing it.

For me this is a classic case of associating intelligence only with conscious awareness when there’s many other ways how we (and other animals) are “clever” even if we don’t know it at first ;)

“These crazy hairless primates are able to walk across a tightrope by using their ears!”

Technically true. And also points to interesting physiological systems that continuously “automate” seemingly complex actions.

I have a question... how many other "normal" animal behaviors are actually weird little hacks to deal with constraints we never think about?

Probably all of the behaviors. Life is resource management of inputs and outputs, and every niche has unique constraints. Pure sexual selection can lead to interesting solutions, but are still grounded in constraints.

Dolphins sleep with one hemisphere of the brain at a time.

Sharks never stop swimming because it’s the only way they can move water over their gills.

This is only true of some sharks. And of the ones that it is true there's examples of them stopping in places where the current runs enough water through their gills to breath.

Don't call it restful if you're not using hyperm... Oh wait wrong restful.

same

So they are big dreamers!

I like that.

I mean, we know that mammals with a big brain dream. People can see that when e. g. their dog suddenly seems to run while sleeping.

What happens if they have an attack of flatulence?

But seriously, this must happen sometimes!

They accelerate upwards and their bubbling metabolism will compensate. If any creatures on the surface die from inhalation of the fart then the whales become awake and feed on them immediately. Slumber resumed. It's like a background clean-up process.

This is an interesting theory but it’s not at all how sperm whales eat and doesn’t fit into their dietary habits that we know of.

It was just a muse. I wasn't being serious at all.

I know, I was also not being serious.

Yup, the old brap n' snap. Everyone who swims around whales knows and fears this.

Whale farts be deadly.

A real flatulence event would probably qualify as a minor geological disturbance

If these are rainbow bubbles, that conclusively proves the whales had ADHD therapy sessions.

It does 100%. Might also indicate use of psychodelics. Gotta go with the science.

I want to meet the clinician who can keep a 40‑ton patient engaged

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