What Sperm Whales Can Teach Us About Humanity | National Geographic

I can remember my earliest memories of my parents taking me to the beaches in New England where we lived and just wondering about the mysteries that lie beneath. I think the ocean for me has always represented this place of great potential discovery. As I grew older, I just wanted to explore the undersea world to get a great picture of a whale or of multiple whales.

Many things have to line up. Sperm whales are animals that spend most of their life in the deep ocean, and they dive for foraging for squid. They are only at the surface for about 15 or 20 minutes at a time. So for this story, it's ideal to get multiple whales doing something interesting: a mom and a calf, or babysitting behavior, or socializing behavior.

There's a euphoria, I think, an exhilaration after having one of these extraordinary moments with a whale. You can go weeks and weeks and months with nothing great, and then all of a sudden something breaks.

The things I was seeing—I was seeing them opening their mouths and their giant teeth, and their playfully biting each other and rolling around together and doing all these things. But on another level, even beyond the image, it's a personal reward for the time and the patience, and you've got to experience something that you only dreamed about before.

A lot of the interesting science that's been published about whales in recent years is showing that these animals lead far more complex lives than we ever thought. That for lack of a better word, they have humanity. They're doing things much like us: they isolate themselves by language, by dialect. They babysit; they have their own feeding strategies.

All of these things are happening, and I think to the degree that you can do this with photography and good storytelling, we can help people see the ocean in a new way. Where all of a sudden, you know, this light goes on and you realize that there are these complex animals that have personality and have identity.

I think if we can get people to understand that, you begin to say, "Wow, you know, the ocean is not just this place with cold-blooded fish out there." That all animals have these interesting lives. I try to relate that humanity to these animals and help people see a different frame, to see a different view of the ocean in hopes of understanding that everything is connected.

The ocean is important to our lives. Every other breath that a human being takes comes from the ocean. So, there for no other reason than our own self-interest, we should be interested in protecting the ocean.

But hopefully it's more than that. Hopefully, we come to see ourselves as part of this really complex equation that the ocean plays a big part in, and it's in our own joy and interest to celebrate that.