Scientists Finally Caught Sperm Whales Headbutting Each Other — And It’s Not the Whales You’d Expect

Did you know sailors have been telling stories about whales ramming ships and each other for two centuries — and until now, nobody had actually filmed it happening?

The most famous version of that story is the 1820 sinking of the whaling ship Essex, the real event that partly inspired Moby Dick. For 200 years, “sperm whales headbutt things” stayed mostly in the realm of sailor lore. Now, researchers from the University of St Andrews have finally caught it on camera — and confirmed it scientifically for the first time.

Here’s the twist nobody predicted. Scientists assumed that if this behavior was real, it would show up between huge, sexually mature males competing for mates. Using drones during fieldwork in the Azores and Balearic Islands between 2020 and 2022, the team recorded three separate headbutting incidents — and every single whale involved was a sub-adult, not a fully grown male.

“It was really exciting to observe this behaviour, which we knew had been hypothesised for such a long time, but not yet documented and described systematically,” said lead author Dr. Alec Burslem, who conducted the research at St Andrews.

So what were the whales actually doing? The footage showed a real range of contact — whales striking head-to-head and head-to-body, with underwater microphones picking up clicks and codas typically linked to social communication. Because the whales involved were young, researchers now think this might be closer to rough play or social jostling than a serious fight for dominance — something more like how young animals of many species use physical contact to figure out their place in a group. In the most forceful recorded collision, the two whales were closing at speeds up to 3.6 meters per second.

Why it’s worth caring about: Sperm whales live in tight-knit, matrilineal groups led by an older female, with young males eventually leaving to live more solitary adult lives. A behavior like this, caught on camera for the first time, opens a real window into how these animals build relationships and navigate their social world before they go their separate ways. Burslem is now calling on other drone operators around the world to send in any similar footage they capture — this may be just the first documented glimpse of something far more common than anyone realized.

Two centuries of sailor tales, and it turns out they were onto something — just not quite the something everyone assumed.

Sources: science daily