DARYL HANNAH: The oceans are the source of all life on our planet.
Without healthy oceans, no life,even on land, can continue to exist.
Cetaceans, better knownas dolphins and whales,
have been roaming the oceansfor millions of years.
Yet in only one century,
we have slaughtered many of themclose to extinction.
Despite some efforts to protect them,
human activity has forcedthese weakened populations
to face the greatest danger of all,
the destruction of their habitatand food resources.
We live on land. They live in the oceans.
But we all breathe the same air.
We share the same planet,
yet only a few of us have hadthe privilege to meet them underwater.
Let's share their worId for a whileand meet these tribes of the oceans,
the dolphins and the whales.
Cruising through the sparkling watersof the Azores Islands,
these sperm whales can reach 60 feetin length and weigh up to 45 tons.
They are the largest of all the toothed whales.
(SOFT INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC PLAYING)
Sperm whales are social creatures,enjoying companionship.
They take care of one anotherand even look after the injured.
The females raise their young in nurseries,
one female caring for another's babywhile she dives into the abyss to feed.
The sperm whale, like all marine mammals,
must surface regularly to breathe.
(INHALING)
They also have the ability to diveup to 7,000 feet for as long as an hour
while searching for their favourite food,the giant squid.
The scars on his head were most likelyreceived during fights with his prey
or from an encounter with a jealous rival.
Sperm whales once roamed the Earthin vast numbers.
They were hunted almost to extinctionduring the last century,
mainly because of the precious oilthat fills their huge square heads.
This creature, while hunting,used to lead fishermen to squid,
thus becoming commonly knownas the pilot whale.
At only 1 5 feet,this toothed whale is relatively small.
These social creatures live in small,very organised pods
and will, in turn, join larger podsheaded by one leader.
They will blindly follow that leader anywhere,
sometimes to their own detriment.
When one strands on a beach,the others will follow.
Why? We don't know for sure.
Sadly, still slaughtered in some places,
only about 1 85,000 pilot whalesremain in the world today.
They seem to be smiling at us,the spotted dolphins.
Of all of the tribes of the ocean,they've become our best friends.
(DOLPHINS SQUEAKING)
Like the sperm whale,dolphins are actually toothed whales,
grabbing and tearing at prey with their teeth.
(DOLPHINS CLICKING)
These spotted dolphins were greywhen they were born and spotless.
Very social, they, too, live in pods.
Dolphins love to interact with each other.
They play, touch, fight, hit and caress.
Check this out.
Displaying amazingly intelligent behaviourand a wonderful facility for teamwork,
these adults have intentionally picked upsome algae from the sea floor
to start a game.
They play for fun, not fighting for the piece
but cordially passing it aroundlike a game of catch.
One of the great mysteriesof the animal kingdom
is the spine-tingling humpback whale song.
(SNORTING)
(SCREECHING)
(SQUEAKING)
The male humpbacks create eerie,hauntingly beautiful tunes.
Are they mating calls to femalesor warning calls to ward off other males?
We don't know for sure.
(VOCALISING)
These complex communicationscan be heard from great distances
and may be repeated for several hours.
(VOCALISING CONTINUES)
This graceful and elegant underwater balletis one of the most beautiful shows
we will ever seebelow the surface of the ocean.
The humpback is a baleen whale.
Instead of teeth, they have baleen platesthat filter food out of the water.
They have an appetite to match their size,
eating an average of 5,000 pounds of krilland small schooling fish every day.
With a life expectancy of 50 years,
a humpback whale can reach over 60 feetin length and weigh up to 50 tons.
Humpbacks are nomads,
migrating to the icy polar watersfor the summer where they feed.
Summer's gone, they will make the 3 month,3,000 mile journey
back to tropical waters to breed and calve.
Today, despite some recovery,
the humpback whale is still a victimof human activity,
and its future is precarious.
The beluga whalelives in the frigid waters of the Arctic.
Born grey, they don't turn whiteuntil six years of age.
(SQUEAKING)
It is also called the sea canarybecause of its bird-like sounds.
The beluga is the only whalethat can move its head in all directions.
This friendly-looking creaturecan appear to have very human expressions.
Human activity has resultedin massive pollution of their habitat
and has put some of these tribesin great danger of extinction.
The beluga whale may soon becomea ghostly shadow of the Arctic,
a mere memory.
(SQUEAKING)
Now, here's a very difficult tribe to approach.
Risso's dolphins are fairly large,weighing up to 1,100 pounds.
Their battered look comes fromthe numerous scars that cover their bodies.
The older they are, the more scars they have,
and over time, their naturallydark grey bodies turn nearly white.
They get those scarsduring rough social play.
As belligerent as they can be,
these fascinating dolphins will remainin a tight-knit social structure
enjoying strength in numbers.
(SOOTHING INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC PLAYING)
In the shallow coastal waters of Floridalives the most peaceful of marine mammals,
the manatee.
It may look something like a cetaceanbut this is a sirenian.
Manatees, much like dolphins and whales,evolved from land mammals
and later returned to the sea.
The curious-looking manateesare more closely related to elephants
than any other living animal.
Despite the corpulent look,
their layer of blubber is so thin
that it cannot protect themwhen the temperature drops.
They won't survive in waterbelow 68 degrees,
so in winter, they will seek out warm springs.
The manatee is also called the sea cow.
In fact, it's the only marine mammalthat eats vegetation.
The manatee's diet causes fIatulence.
(CHUCKLES) Look at aII those bubbIes.
A manatee calf will live with its motherfor five years.
They'll nurse from the long teatlocated at the base of her pectoral fins.
Just to keep their bodies warm,
they have to eatmore than 100 pounds of water plants a day.
The 3,000 manatees left in Florida
are one of the last survivingsirenian tribes in the worId.
But for how long?
Every day, human developmenttakes a little more of their habitat.
Soon, they may have nowhere left to live.
The orca, or killer whale,is the king of the ocean.
It is the largest of the dolphin family.
It can reach 32 feet in lengthand weigh up to 10 tons.
(SCREECHING)
They will spend their entire livesin pods as large as 25 individuals.
The eldest female will always lead.
Mother knows best.
This extraordinarily intelligent animal,
probably the smartest of them all,
exhibits highly sophisticatedsocial behaviour.
(WHISTLING)
They have their own dialects,varying from pod to pod.
They will work as a team,
and are able to adapt their hunting strategywhen faced with new situations.
The orcais the greatest predator of the ocean
and will even attack the great white shark.
Their frightening nickname, killer whale,
derives from the fact that they arethe only whales that kill other whales.
Orcas, too, are suffering from pollutionand depletion of their prey.
At the head of the food chain,
they have become one ofthe most contaminated of all the cetaceans.
They are slowly being poisonedby the polluted prey upon which they feed.
Another tribe losing ground.
The fin whale is one of the largest creatureson Earth.
Only one, the blue whale, is larger.
Looking at these dolphins,
it is easy to imaginehow big this fin whale is.
It can reach up to 88 feet in length,and weigh up to 70 tons.
Are these spotted dolphinshunting with the fin whale?
After a large school of fishhas been herded into a tight ball,
many predators appear.
The large bait ball of fish
is first being attacked from aboveby shearwater birds.
Now, the spotted dolphins from below.
And finally, here comes the giant fin whale,taking its turn.
In one fantastic gulp,
it takes the entire school of fishinto its enormous mouth.
Look how the ventral groovesbelow its mouth have expanded,
like a giant balloon, to hold the catch.
The water will be filtered outthrough the baleen plates,
and the entire school of fish, trapped inside,
will become this fin whale's dinner.
They will eat up to 3 tons of krilland small fish each day.
Although supposedly protected,the fin whale is still hunted today
and is extremely vulnerable.
In addition to modern commercial whalingand collisions with ships,
the fin whale is now alsobeing impacted by climate change.
Indeed, krill, its primary source of food,depends on the cover of sea ice,
which is now melting.
The common dolphin,
creature of legend, art, poetry,
from ancient times to the present.
Why this mystical appeal?
What about these magical tribesso captures the human imagination?
(DOLPHlNS CLlCKING)
The clicks we hear are used for echolocation,
a sixth sense that allows them to see,so to speak.
They use it to detect objects,track down prey,
locate one another, avoid predatorsand orient themselves.
They use squeaks as a form of language.
These sounds enable themto communicate with each other
when hunting, playingor keeping track of their young.
Today, common dolphinsare still hunted for their meat,
and around 300,000 dolphins and whalesdie every year entangled in fishing nets.
Eight hundred a day.
A mother right whale and her baby,
nurturing, nurtured,a bond formed over several years.
She will have one offspringabout every three years
and will nurse it with her rich milkfor roughly 12 months.
The right whale's mouth containsabout 250 baleen plates,
enabling it to filter tons of zooplankton.
The huge, pale growths on the headand the lower jaw,
called callosities, are home to whale lice
that tint them with white, pink,yellow or orange.
Unique formations,their own kind of fingerprint.
Looking into the eye of a whale
is said to belike looking into the window of one's soul.
For the few humanswho have come this close,
the whale's gaze has provideda moment of true emotional connection.
Whalers dubbed this creature the right whalebecause their entire body could be used.
In addition to their long baleen platesand their blubber,
they were also slow swimmers, easy to catch,
and once dead, kept floating at the surface,so it made their processing easier.
Thus, they were the right whales to hunt.
Most southern right whales are born dark,
but this one is white, a rare occurrence.
There are very few right whales left.
Southern right whales have shownsome signs of recovery
thanks to protective measures.
However, we can only remaincautiously optimistic
about the futureof these last 9,000 individuals.
As for their cousins,the Northern Atlantic right whales,
it is estimatedthat a mere 300 are left in the worId.
They are very, very close to extinction.
The bottlenose dolphin.
This tribe of dolphins is usually nomadic.
Sometimes, though, they preferto reside in one location,
like these,swimming in the waters of the Bahamas.
Dolphins stick together.Their pods are tight family groups,
well-structured, and comewith an established hierarchy.
(WHlSTLING)
The remarkable bottlenose dolphinsare able to develop
and teach their young different individualand group hunting strategies.
They can then adapt these strategiesto varying situations.
They can chase through schools of fishin the open sea
or corner a hapless prey against a sandbar.
A hungry adult bottlenose may consumeup to 30 pounds of fish,
squid and crustaceans each day.
Their brain is proportionally as large as ours.
They communicate with a complex language
and, amazingly,have individual signature whistles
they use the same way we use namesto identify one another.
Dolphins, when in the intensethroes of passion, become very playful,
swim in an agitated mannerand mate indiscriminately.
It's quite common for the bottlenoseto scratch each other with their teeth
during courtship and mating.
Time to play again.
(SQUEAKS)
Catch it.
(SNORTING)
A year has gone by.
This female is back in the tropical watersof the kingdom of Tonga.
Here, sheltered from predatorsand bad weather,
she will give birth to a beautiful1 4-foot baby.
This newborn baby is so youngthat his eyes are still closed.
His body doesn't yet knowhow to stay in balance.
Every four minutes,for several days and nights,
the mother will gently nudge her babyto the surface to breathe.
During this period,mother and baby are extremely vulnerable.
Even a big storm can be fatal to a newborn.
A few days have gone by.
This calf can finally swimand breathe on its own,
though it still takes shelterunder its mother's large fin.
Weeks have gone by.The baby has grown stronger.
Its skin is darker.
From this point on for about two years,
the mother will teach her youngsterhow to survive in the ocean.
Mother and babywill often touch one another
in what appears to be a gesture of affection.
It will take about eight years
before this young calf will be old enoughto produce offspring of his own.
Will he survive that long?
Hope this young calf will grow old enoughto sing his own unique and lovely song.
Hope his songwill not be the last one we hear.
Dolphins and whalesare one of the Earth's living wonders.
Some assume they have the right to destroyour children's heritage.
We can stop vandalisingand plundering the oceans.
We can change our way of life.
Make no mistake, it's not too late.
If we all join together,
we have the power to savethe dolphins and the whales,
the tribes of the ocean.
(GRUNTING)
(CALLING)