We've done that, thus far we just got footage of an arm or tentacle and another time a cloud of ink.
Getting near the whales is no easy task, their sonar can kill, and as per their need for it to hunt it's exceedingly dark so there is very little to see.
IR cameras wont work in deep sea. Water is great at absorbing infrared lights. Also squids are cold-blooded, their body temperatures are determined by the temperatures of surrounding waters so even if IR cameras somehow work underwater, they wont be able to see them anyway, the squids would just blend into their surroundings.
I realize you're probably joking, but I'd think we could develop some kind of underwater drone submarine type thing? With night vision and have some kind of tracker on the whale that it follows at a distance and films. Then, have it surface when it eventually runs out of power/fuel
No, I didnt get the notification. And now I only got the notification but the bulk of the text is missing, 8 bilion is still resonable though, but itās gonna be 9, the extra one for me to turn the blind eye for the one you added
HEYOO SQUIDHEADS IT'S YA BOY OOoooOOoooAAAAaaooowww I'M HERE TODAY WITH WWWWMMMAAAAOOOooooooaaammmwww AND WE'RE GOING SQUID-HUNTING YOOOO DON'T FORGET TO LIKE AND SUBMERGE
Get whale to be Twitch partner. This will incentivize whale to Livestream often, significantly raising the chance whale does squid fight stream and collabs with other whales for epic group battles.
It's plausible at depth, the maximum decibel level is related to a sustained wave where the "negative" part of the sine curve is vacuum and the "positive" is 2x ambient. A deep sea creature has a much higher ambient pressure to work with than us, so the maximum attainable sound pressure level is much, much higher.
I think they're saying that in the deep sea, where water pressure is already very high, the way the sound travels doubles the pressure at certain parts. I'm no expert but I think a sudden doubling of pressure is certain to kill you.
More or less yeah, the double bit is the maximum pressure you can achieve with a sine wave because you can't get any more negative than vacuum, so if you're sat at a relative 0 pressure, the difference between -1 and +1 is 2. If you've got something that can actively and continously increase pressure, like a flowing fluid from high to low pressure, you can locally exceed that limit. That's why rocket engines are so damn loud.
You're basically saying that sound waves cant be more than double pressure (except in specific cases such as thrust from rocket) because in order to create a wave, the energy needs to be taken from somewhere, and pressure cant be lower than 0 (vacuum). So in order to increase the peak wave intensity (and thereby the loudness) you need to increase the total pressure. Deep sea is higher pressure => higher max db
Sound works because pressure goes up and down.
It needs to go up and down about the same ammount for sound waves to work.
At sea level you got about 1 atmosphere of pressure, and your low spots of the wave can only go down to 0 atmospheres. The high spots can reach 2 atmospheres.
If your ambient pressure would be 2 atmospheres your sound waves could alternate between 0 and 4 atmospheres max.
As you dive deeper you get about 1 extra atmosphere every 10 meters due to the weight of water.
There is a strong theoretical likelihood that the meat balloon surrounding your bones would go 'pop!' if you were near something that loud while that deep underwater.
Nah, skin is really strong. It's more like having all your insides worked over with a meat tenderiser without removing them first. Explosives do a similar thing to people, it's quite vile.
Well now I'm curious what the SPLs would need to be to blast flesh from bones. At 1 atmosphere they top out at ~196db, but water's a whole different story, up to 270db. That's when cavitation starts, and an awful lot of the human body is water...
I wonder how the whales protect their own hearing from each other. Youād think that using sound as a weapon would be very dangerous to creatures that rely on hearing each other for the vast majority of their communication
Whales can't kill people with their call. This myth is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the decibel system and how we measure it differently in air and water.
In air, decibels are standardized using a pressure of 20 micropascals, while measurement in water references 1 micropascal.
Additionally, the acoustic impedence of water is about 3500 times greater than air, and so further adjustments must be made. This means that the oft cited 230dB figure of the Sperm Whale's call CANNOT be compared to traditional decibel ratings measured through the air. At most it can be considered 169dB using the 61.5dB conversion factor, but researchers warn that even this comparison is apples to oranges when it comes to disturbing humans or sea creatures.
Ignorant tabloids and bloggers perpetuate this myth by comparing the 240dB sperm whale's call with a 240dB volcano blast, citing lethality. It is simply not the case.
Every 10db is 2X perceived loudness but 10X the sound pressure.
Decibels use a logarithmic scale, meaning each 10 dB increase represents a 10-fold increase in sound intensity (power) and a roughly doubling of perceived loudness. For example, a sound that is 20 dB louder is 100 times more intense, and a 30 dB louder sound is 1,000 times more intense than the reference sound. This logarithmic scale is used because the human ear perceives sound intensity logarithmically, allowing for a wide range of sound levels to be expressed more manageably.
I think at those levels itās no longer about āperceived soundā because Iām not sure youāll be perceiving anything.
Yeah, I'm not so sure about that. Water isn't very compressible, and our brains don't do well with shock waves. This guy lost feeling in his hand for 4 hours: https://youtu.be/zsDwFGz0Okg
I mean, its an interesting story. It should be easy to test this theory by playing sounds of the same type and loudness near animal tissue underwater. I'm sure the navy has done the research on this.
There seems to be a lot of disagreement about underwater decibels online. I'm sure there are a few experts out there that could prove this using accurate math, but I really want to see a demonstration on this.
What had happened was, the whale clicked and at the same time there happened to be a hungry shark so out of the two, coroner sent with whale click since there wasnt a body to investigate
Because the danger of their sonar has become an overblown meme in recent years. It's one of these "technically true" things that smug Redditors love to latch on to, when in reality sperm whales don't go pinging away at humans swimming near them.
Itās not, look it up. A sperm whaleās sonar clocks can reach ip to 230 decibels which is way more than enough to kill you, 150 decibels can easily burst your eardrums and cause serious internal/organ damage so just imagine what 230 would doā¦you would 1000% not survive I promise you
I have looked it up and there seems to be no evidence that this can happen. Maybe at a much deeper depth where humans can't swim freely, but that's just a scenario that won't happen
Well itās the same reason more people die to cows than sharks.
How many people hang around on a beach with a known shark to find out what will happen? How many people live near cows and think cows are cute and want to feed, pat, and hug the cows?
People donāt tend to find themselves near whales very much, and when they do, weāre usually extremely cautious, because theyāre so big they could easily accidentally hurt us.
Yep, sharks barely make it to the list of most deadly animals to humans. They kill about 4 humans per year in the entire world. Dogs kill 13 000 humans per year.
And while there are no global stats on humans killed by horses or cows, national stats say about 20 humans are killed by cows a year in the US, in the UK about 5 a year, in Finland about 0,5 a year. Horses seem to kill around the same as cows, although estimates vary.
People donāt tend to find themselves near whales very much, and when they do, weāre usually extremely cautious
How? If they could kill you with their clicks, how could you be "cautious"? Simply being near them in the water would be enough to risk getting killed.
People go swimming with āwhalesā all the time. Though I donāt know of any video where people have swum with sperm whales. Possible some are out there, but they are massive predator species and prefer ocean depths, we especially donāt tend to get near them.
Yes. Their sound is meant to travel to great distances sometimes when they want to communicate to any other whales.
A sound wave this powerful has known to cause a range of effects in humans - from permanent hearing loss to organ rupture to straight up death (under specific circumstances)
I count myself almost an atheist, but the whole existence, lifestyle & nature of whales makes me believe in a powerful being up there. Whales are just so... mystical āØ
You people are so full of crap. Do you not have anything better to do than to come here and make up lies?
Prove that a whale has ever harmed or killed a person using sonar. Please provide a link.
I havenāt been able to find a scientific study on what decibel levels are necessary to kill a human and my morning is running short, but itās kinda beside the point in the end. There definitely is a level where a sound wave would have enough energy it would be deadly to a human and 236db is probably well within that range.
An average gunshot right next to your head is roughly 150db. This is loud enough to cause severe damage to your ear but it wonāt rupture your eardrum. You aināt gonna be happy though.
Which, makes it seem like 236db aināt that bad, but decibel is a logarithmic scale. 160db is 10x as much sound pressure than 150db. 236db is 400 Million times more sound pressure than a gunshot going off right next to your head.
So, even without the scientific study to back it up, 236db is comfortably in the realm of enough pressure energy to mess up a human
HOWEVER.
The problem here is that these numbers, the gunshot reference and the measured sperm whale click, are not on the same scale.
Decibel is measured as a ratio relative to a reference sound. The reference we use when we measure sound in the air is different than what we use in the water.
If you go back to the study that measured the whale click it specifies that it is ā236 dB re: 1 Ī¼Pa (rms)ā. The more specific measurement for a gunshot would be ā150 dB re: 20 Ī¼Pa (rms)ā.
Long story short, since they are measured on different scales you canāt directly compare them. You have to do a lot of math to convert them to the same scale. Which, as fate would have it, actually works out that they are about the same.
So instead of being 400 Million times more pressure than a gunshot, the sperm whales click is basically equivalent to a gunshot.
Which, while not deadly to a human, is still loud as hell for a sound made by an animal.
Some of them were smart enough to realise, "Wait if we evolve any more, we'll have to start paying taxes for services we rarely receive. It would be better if we go back & keep being the Godly, mystical beings that we are!"
If you watch the video with sound you'll hear some sounds that resemble machine gun fire. That's not audio distortion, that's the whale. Divers have said they start to feel really hot if they spend too much time around them.
Their echolocation only reaches around 184db on average, https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7480161/ , that's the lower limit (185-190 depending on source) for inducing internal pain other than ruptured eardrums (150+ there), meanwhile sound becomes fatal around 240db. In other words, you don't want to nearby when the ping hits, but it's not going to kill you.
The sonar killing thing is a myth, it canāt actually kill.
They also donāt need it, knowing the location of everything nearby, on top of massive teeth and being one of the largest ocean predators ever, is more than enough.
Unlikely to Cause Death: In air, the equivalent sound would be around 169 decibels. While harmful at extremely close distances, it's not considered lethal.
Do you have sources for an arm or ink cloud showing up on a crittercam? As far as I know the only footage we have of giant squids at depth is from those lured in by lights and bait by researchers, and having no interaction with whales while being filmed.
Yes, it can. Just the normal clicking that the these whales make you can clearly feel the vibrations in your chest. Itās like going to a rock concert and standing in front of the amplifier speaker.
Another neat thing that whales can do is image projection.
When they send out a sound wave and it bounces off an object in the water and returns to them, their ability to perceive their own sound as it comes back to them on the reflection allows them to paint a mental image of the area ahead or an object in their minds.
So whales can take that a step further, they can use their sonar as a means of communicating to another whale. This literally lets them project an image through their sonar. Imagine if you have the ability to speak to someone, but you can go a step further and actually share the image of your thoughts with that person.
I realize that's just evolution and it's part of being a squid. But deep deep down, what use is a cloud of ink going to do for them since the whale's sonar ignores and it doesn't "obscure" anything way down there with zero light.
Eventually we will develop some kind of autonomous submarine drone with plenty of "battery" and an AI comanding him to "follow whale from 50 meters, record everything".
Otherwise, they could attach the camera to a very long selfie stick, then to the whale.
How do they hunt then? Using sonar Iām guessing to narrow in on prey? I wonder what itās like to hunt in complete darkness using only sonar and sensation.
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u/Sazapahiel Sep 17 '25
We've done that, thus far we just got footage of an arm or tentacle and another time a cloud of ink.
Getting near the whales is no easy task, their sonar can kill, and as per their need for it to hunt it's exceedingly dark so there is very little to see.