Freedivers who swim with whales

Re-purposing and embellishing an old comment of mine:

Among all free diving warm blooded animals sperm whales go the deepest. They dive to depths 25 times deeper than their other equally famous and endangered cousin the blue whales. To give an idea of how deep they dive, here is a picture http://i.imgur.com/ESp2j.jpg It needs to be magnified for perspective and for the little surprise at the bottom.

They are also fast divers/risers. It is interesting how they manage to hold their breath for so long and yet manage to survive the bends (decompression sickness. They do get bends related damage but they can survive it).

The whales are challenging our assumptions about animal intelligence, empathy, society, culture and language. For a long time we believed that the primates were at the top. Search Ted talks and youtube for dolphin intelligence, dont miss the Attenborough ones. For lack of a better word they are just amazing.

Dolphins are for example known to build difficult to make toys (air bubble vortex rings) just to entertain themselves. They have to discover how to make it. Sometimes they can be quite possessive, they would break the toy if someone not so knowledgeable wants to play with it. Once a dolphin figures it out how to make one, his/her peers eventually figure it out as well. So it kind of spreads within a group like fashion, their version of the hula hoop.

This behavior has been observed both in captivity and in the wild. Dolphins in captivity try to imitate us and seem to have no trouble mapping our body parts to theirs.

A story goes that a scientist observing an young dolphin from an underwater portal had blown a cloud of cigarette smoke at it (on the human side of the glass). The dolphin promptly went to its mother and did the same to the scientist with dolphin milk ! Which BTW is almost as thick as tooth paste and is more squirted out than sucked.

It is now strongly believed that dolphins and killer whales call each other by name. Dolphins in captivity try to imitate human speech which takes enormous effort on their part because unlike for example parrots their vocal tract is not conducive for this at all. People believe this to be an indication of their strong desire to communicate with us.

And they originated from ungulates: hoofed warm blooded animals. It came as a surprise to me that that there were hoofed carnivorous animals.

@walterbell thats my favorite part of posting this. I say wait for it, a fellow HN'er will surely be here with the answer any time now....and I was right :) You saw the weird octopus headed thing right ? that's a hint.

> The gurgle of scuba equipment, submarines and robots that are normally used to study marine life tend to spook whales. To avoid scaring them, the Dare Win team have abandoned much of this technology and use freediving techniques instead, using only a mask, flippers, and a single breath of air to dive dozens of feet deep into the ocean.

SCUBA doesnt make any more noise than freediving other than the bubbles, which can be solved by using (somewhat expensive) rebreathers [1][2]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebreather

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebreather_diving#Other_advanta...

Even accepting that whales are peace-loving, gentle creatures who mean no harm - isn't this insanely dangerous? They are enormous and massive. They could accidentally crush you and not even realise it, like a dog playing with a beetle.