What's cooler than a dead sperm whale? A living sperm whale — and its poop, this expert says

A Newfoundland man made news with his creative photography of a dead sperm whale this week, but one whale expert says the viral video has more value than simple entertainment.

Hal Whitehead, a biologist and professor at Dalhousie University, says he could tell just from the images taken by Brendon Gould that the whale was at least 12 metres long.

"Pretty big, but not as big as they get," Whitehead said in an interview Wednesday.

"And it's a male. You can see the bit sticking out."

Whitehead says the whale was likely in its late teens. Around that age, male sperm whales in particular tend to move from the tropics to the cooler North Atlantic.

If the dead whale had lived long enough, he'd likely have made his way to the Arctic, off the coast of Greenland.

But Whitehead says the whale's journey wasn't some seasonal migration.

"I think he was just living his life," he said, floating around the Strait of Belle Isle or the Gulf of St. Lawrence, munching on monkfish, deepwater sharks and even squid.

But then something happened to him, the expert explained.

What happened to him?

Typically, male sperm whales travel in pods. When you see one by itself, it's likely sick or got caught in some ice.

But it could also be injured as a result of human activity: trawling and ships can kill whales, too.

Whitehead says he can't tell from the video, but says unlike other whale species, the sperm whale population isn't doing too badly these days.

An estimated 1.5 million sperm whales existed in the 1700s, before humans began hunting them for their oil, which was used for candles and lubricating machinery. Those numbers bottomed out around the 1980s before starting to rebound.

But the whales are still an integral part of the ocean ecosystem: efficient killing machines that hunt the types of animals humans don't, restoring balance to the seas.

Whitehead explains that most of the nutritionally dense plankton lives near the surface of the ocean. When those plankton die, they sink — along with the nutrients.

But sperm whales swim deep.

"All that value is lost to the ocean ecosystems unless it's brought back up. And that's what the sperm whale does," Whitehead said.

"The sperm whale goes down there and eats all these strange squid, strange fish, whatever, and then it comes to the surface and it poops. And in its poop it's putting out all kinds of important nutrients, which [would] otherwise be lost."

There's about 850,000 sperm whales in the Earth's oceans today, according to a 2022 study spearheaded by Whitehead himself.

Sadly, the one that washed up on Newfoundland's coast won't get the chance to swim back to the tropics and mate. But it's imperative that the whales do get that chance, Whitehead says, and that means examining any whale carcass that does wash ashore for signs of disease or human-caused injury.

And that means funding the scientists and groups who can make those diagnoses.

"What we need to do ... is to really look at these animals that come ashore and see if we can figure out what's happened to them, how old they are and so on," Whitehead said.

"Getting that information is very tough. But I think it's extremely important that the people who do this work be supported and helped ... both financially, and by other people telling them where the whales are."

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