Enter Lankan whales
Three years ago, Cinnamon Nature Trails Head Chitral Jayatilake and Manager Vimukthi Weeratunga who is a wildlife biologist had walked into the BBC’s office in Bristol with a video clip. A young producer who watched it had been taken by surprise and rushed off “to drag down Mark”.
It was thereafter that the “conversation” that Blue Planet II should come to Sri Lanka to get footage of the super pods of sperm whales began.
When they did arrive they had asked Cinnamon Nature Trails naturalist B. Dayaratne whether he could dive under water, swim beneath the whales and come up on the other side off Trincomalee to which he had readily agreed.
It was when Daya did just that, the Blue Planet II team had decided to include him in the clip relating to Sri Lanka on Blue Planet II.
Daya had stumbled on the super pods about three years before that following tales told by fishermen of these mystical creatures.
Having filmed sperm whales across the world, Mark gives us a ringside view of a sperm-whale family resting between bouts of feeding in the West Indies. The motherwhale, refreshed after her sleep, gives her calf which is about two weeks old a milk-feed and makes ready to dive with her family in search of food, by heavy breathing which brings about saturation of her blood with oxygen.
Off they go, for it is dive time for squid, with the mother and calf in constant communication through a pattern of clicks. At about 300 metres, the calf finds it difficult to keep up with the family as it cannot hold its breath. That’s when the calf is forced to sit out the hunt, while the adults continue to dive down.
A series of loud and rapid clicks – sonar is used to hunt shoals of squid. At 800m, a burst of clicks from the mother and then silence, for she has made a catch. The calf, meanwhile, has a long wait. The mother returns about an hour later and it is only then that the hungry calf has its milk, the richest produced by any mammal. The calf would take about six years to master the art of deep-sea diving.