Why Orcas Are Terrified of Sperm Whales

This is the orca, the blackfish, the killer whale, the undisputed apex predator that kills everything. Seals, great whites, entire blue whales. But the only thing they don’t kill is this thing, the adult sperm whale. But if killer whales are designed for killing whales, then why are these the only whales they’re avoiding? Why are the ocean’s most feared predator avoiding a slow, awkward-shaped hunk of blubber? Well, the most obvious answer that usually comes to mind is just size.

 I mean, look at these guys. They’re beefy. So, you might think that the sperm whale is simply too massive for a pod of orcas to deal with. And to be fair, that is actually a large part of it. These guys look like giant boulders, and they basically are. And nearly 50-ft long and weighing around 30 tons.

 That is a lot of animal. Compare this to an orca, which weighs around 7 tons. You wouldn’t expect it to be challenging anything that much bigger. But if you actually look at the math, this assumption doesn’t make any sense. Because remember, orcas hunt blue whales, and a blue whale can weigh over 150 tons. That’s over four times the weight of a sperm whale, and nearly double the length.

 [music] So, if an orca pod will rip apart a 150-ton behemoth, a 45-ton sperm whale should honestly be light work. Weight classes clearly aren’t the main problem for orcas. The real issue is what these whales actually do when they get attacked. When a blue whale gets jumped by orcas, its only real defense mechanism is to just swim away, fast.

 They are built for speed in a straight line, so their entire survival strategy relies on outrunning the predators until the orcas just give up and leave. They have massive size, but they don’t actually use it as a weapon, because they can’t. Blue whales can go pretty fast, reaching nearly 30 mph, and they’re much better than holding it over long distance than orcas because, well, you can imagine how much momentum this guy is carrying. He’s chunky.

 Sperm whales are built completely differently. They are slow. They have zero chance of ever outrunning an orca, and even though they’re big, they’re not built for speed endurance over long periods. And because they know they can’t run, they don’t. If you look at the anatomy of a sperm whale, you’ll immediately notice something is deeply wrong with their proportions.

 A full third of their entire body is literally just head. And I know what you’re thinking. Sperm whales are known for having a large brain. And yes, they do have the largest of any animal on the entire Earth. But, the brain is not that big. So, no. If you ever see a diagram like this, the anatomy is just comically [music] wrong.

That enormous head is actually holding something called the spermaceti organ, which is, yes, related to their peculiar name. And this organ is filled with hundreds of gallons of a special oil. For a long time, scientists actually had a theory about why they evolved this way.

 They suspected that sperm whales could actively control the blood flow around this organ to drastically change the temperature of the oil, literally cooling and hardening it on command. The idea was that they were turning their own faces into solid biological battering rams. And physically, this is based off some truth. The structural integrity of their skull is absolutely insane.

 If an orca gets rammed by a 45-ton block of dense oil and bone moving at full speed, they’re getting hurt or completely, utterly, absolutely, diabolically obliterated. But realistically, we never actually see this. Ramming is incredibly rare because it’s not very practical. An orca is going to see that big sperm whale [music] coming from multiple miles away.

Most of the time, sperm whales aren’t head-butting anything. They do something a bit more tactical. Let’s say a pod of orcas decides to push a juvenile sperm whale. Normally, this is exactly how orcas hunt bigger animals by just targeting the babies. If they’re hunting a massive baleen whale, they will just harass the mother relentlessly for hours until she is physically too exhausted to protect her calf anymore.

 Once she gives up, the orcas move in. Sperm whales don’t travel alone, though. They live in complex matriarchal societies, which means a sperm whale mother isn’t just relying on herself to protect the baby. She has an entire squad of 40-ton aunts, sisters, and grandmothers ready to lock in.

 When a pod of sperm whales realizes they’re being targeted by orcas, they make a military defense maneuver called the Marguerite formation. The adult females will tightly group together in a perfect circle, placing all the young, vulnerable calves in the absolute center. Then, they just stare at the calves, facing completely away from the orcas.

 And when the orcas approach, the sperm whales start thrashing their tails, surrounding the calves in a giant meat blender. Orcas are incredibly smart, but sperm whales match them in social intelligence and completely outclass them in raw violence. So, trying to fight them at the surface is basically a death sentence. But what happens if an orca manages to find one alone? Well, we have to understand a few things about these guys.

 Orcas are surface-level predators. Their bodies are highly optimized for speed, agility, and hunting in the light. But they’re mammals, and they need air. Orcas can usually only dive for a few minutes at a time. The deepest an orca can realistically go is a few hundred meters, and even that is pushing it. Sperm whales, on the other hand, are really weird whales.

 They routinely dive thousands of meters into total darkness, not to escape anything, but to hunt for their own deep-sea food. Their bodies are built for going into what most surface animals see as the death abyss below. So, if a solitary sperm whale gets ambushed by a pod of orcas and doesn’t have its family around to form a meat grinder defense, it can just dip, literally dip, and dip straight thousands of meters below the surface.

The orcas can try to follow it, but after a few hundred meters, they hit an absolute wall. Their lungs start screaming for oxygen, the pressure is starting to collapse their bodies, and they know they’re cooked if they go any deeper. Sperm whales can hold their breath around five times as long as any orca, and since it’s so dark below, the orcas usually lose sight of the sperm whale when at the surface, and realistically, there’s no way around this.

 What are you going to do? Fight the ocean? If your top predator will literally die where you live, then you’re effectively immune to them, even if you can’t actually defend yourself. Up until now, we have mostly been talking about female sperm whales. The females are the ones that stay together in those tight defensive groups to raise their young, but the adult male bulls do not live in pods.

 They do not form defensive circles, and they don’t even escape to the shadow realm of the abyss. Sperm whales have extreme sexual dimorphism, which basically means the males and females look like entirely different weight classes. A female sperm whale is huge, but a full-grown bull is just incomprehensible.

 They can reach 60 ft long and weigh up to 65 tons. They can be nearly three times heavier than the females. Yeah, they’re alone, but they’re just monstrous. You can have a pod of 10 fully grown adult orcas, and the bull sperm whale is still outweighing them by tens of thousands of pounds. Imagine Eddie Hall fighting a bunch of third graders.

 The fight is just completely unfair. They’re way too dangerous to attack, and they’re the largest predator on the entire Earth. And in reality, literally nothing in the world right now is capable of even remotely challenging a healthy adult bull sperm whale, well, besides us. But we fight even less fair than orcas do. So, knowing all of this, do orcas ever actually try? Obviously not against the bulls, but what about against the other sperm whales? Well, nature doesn’t really have absolute rules.

 Orcas are insanely smart predators, but they also get hungry. And when they get desperate enough, there are extremely rare, documented cases where they actually do engage. But again, they never fight fair. Unless you have a really stupid orca, they will never just swim up to a healthy, fully grown pod of female sperm whales and pick a fight.

 They scour the ocean looking for sperm whales that are already severely injured, completely isolated from their group, or as I mentioned before, young and unprotected calves that somehow wandered off. Even with a good match-up, a normal orca pod of five or 10 individuals has basically zero chance of pulling this off against an even somewhat weakened adult.

 Orcas are forced to merge pods together into massive super pods of 30 or more. They have to fight for hours on end. They have to constantly rotate their attackers in and out, and they can take heavy casualties in the process. Even landing a completely successful bite on a sperm whale is often doing very little damage.

 Sperm whales carry an incredibly dense layer of blubber that wraps around their entire body to keep them warm. And in some places, this blubber is up to 14 inches thick. You have a maximum of 4 inches of orca tooth trying to bite through 14 inches of heavy, rubbery fat. The teeth physically cannot reach any vital organs.

 They can’t hit any major blood vessels. They just stop in the fat. Again, orcas aren’t stupid though, and they’ll target the weaker spots, like the fins or sides, [music] or try to prevent it from surfacing. But there’s no world where five, 10, or even 50 bites will just completely end the whale. It’s relentless attacking until it goes down, and your only option is to inflict a death by a thousand cuts.

 Is that what the Taylor Swift song was talking about? Sperm whales? It can be a giant feast, but it’s very often just not worth it. Compare these guys to something like a blue whale or a humpback. Sure, they have large brains, but they are essentially just massive filter-feeding machines. They swim in straight lines and swallow clouds of tiny shrimp.

 You don’t exactly need tactical processing power to eat krill. Since sperm whales actually have to hunt, they’re actually smart. They’re battling squids, fending off orcas, and they have real social pods. It’s not genius orca versus stupid Hulk. It’s more like genius orca versus smart Hulk. Oh, maybe they based the guy in the movies off the sperm whale.

 Most of the killer whale’s threat is the combination of being decently big, but also insanely smart. And sure, studies show that killer whales are likely a bit smarter than sperm whales, but not by much. The truth is, sperm whales didn’t evolve these insane defenses to fight orcas. Orcas are actually a relatively new problem in the ocean.

 If you rewind the evolutionary clock a few million years, the ocean was a completely different, much more terrifying place. The ancestors of modern sperm whales were sharing the water with actual sea monsters. We are talking about Megalodon and also Leviathan, who was pretty similar to a sperm whale, just a lot more terrifying, because it ate other whales.

 Sperm whales have dealt with scarier things than a couple of black and white dolphins. But, I want you guys to understand that the point of this video is not to say orcas aren’t powerful or that they aren’t apex predators. They are. My only point is that even though we hype them up to be the kings of everything, they aren’t some sort of unstoppable beings.

 No, a sperm whale isn’t going to be able to hunt down an orca, because they’ll never catch them. But, that doesn’t mean an orca will be able to hunt the sperm whale either. It’s not that orca pods are running away from sperm whales shivering in their pants, but they are very cautious, which you won’t really see them being towards almost any other animal. It’s a smart move.

 And why would you ever want to challenge a fight you You a 42% chance of winning when you could just hunt some delicious great whites and seals with a 100% win rate instead. A sperm whale is not worth the effort. It’s not like humans boxing where you get a broken rib, but you still knock out your opponent so you can claim I won.

 A broken rib means the orca will eventually die, too, or be permanently weakened for the rest of its life, which essentially also means it will die. A shattered jaw means you can no longer bite. A crushed spine means you can no longer swim at top speed. And if you can’t swim or bite, you can’t hunt. And then again, you’re dead. They haven’t invented dolphin hospitals yet.

You can claim it’s only bullying on weaker opponents, but you can also say it’s actual discipline. There isn’t really grand glory and honor in nature. There’s just eating all the kids so you can win your fight and move on. But anyways, I hope you guys enjoyed.