This has been posted multiple other places but seemed interesting enough to post here. The clip is from the new Attenborough series “Life”:
This is yet another case of clever animals quickly adapting their behavior in beneficial, clever ways (see my earlier post on orcas to see another example).
Check out the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary newsletter from spring of 2002 that first reports this behavior.
Here is the video containing said footage for the BBC “Life” series, narrated by David Attenborough (one of my favorite people, really):
I’ll let the BBC news article do the excellent job og explaning this:
It is the greatest animal battle on the planet, and it has finally been caught on camera.
A BBC natural history crew has filmed the “humpback whale heat run”, where 15m long, 40 tonne male whales fight it out to mate with even larger females.
During the first complete sequence of this behaviour ever captured, the male humpbacks swim at high speed behind the female, violently jostling for access.
The collisions between the males can be violent enough to kill.
The footage was recorded for the BBC natural history series Life.
“Even though this is one of the most common of the large whales, very little is known about its actual sexual behaviour,” says Life producer Dr Ted Oakes.
“One of the most interesting things is that humpbacks have never been seen to mate.”
But what has been filmed is the epic battle between males to get mating access to the female whales.
Up to 40 males swim behind a single female at speeds of up to ten knots, each jostling to obtain a dominant position.
“It’s the closest we’re ever going to get to dinosaurs fighting. It’s the largest battle in the animal kingdom and it feels like something out of Jurassic Park,” says Dr Oakes.
It’s exciting, the regularity with which we hear of researchers discovering new and wonderful species. With all the places we’ve been and seen it is amazing to imagine there are still so many new things to be found. The majority of these findings are happening in places that may have previously been hard to reach – remote, isolated areas in rainforests; dark ocean depths.
Scientists appear to be better at finding new species (in part due to bigger and better resources?), leading to a Golden Age of Discovery. There are large scale projects, such as the Census for Marine Life, fully devoted to collaberatively finding and describing diversity, abundance, and distribution of biological life.
The driver behind many of these novel organisms seems to be the amazing ability of life to adapt to living in incredibly narrow niches and extreme environments. There are many examples of living things that exist nowhere else on earth except in an isolated swath of habitat.
Check out these two recent examples, both of which have related photo galleries:
A Bit of Stardust 