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Comment by wzdd | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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

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