Sperm whales discovered to practice babysitting

As the largest predator in the world, the massive, ocean-roaming sperm whale is able to live its life without many worries.

However, as with all child-bearing mammals, they share a common concern: the well-being of their children. Taking a page from homo sapiens, sperm whales have recently been found to employ a babysitter-esque service for their children while the adults were off at “work” ­ hunting prey. While adult males go off to hunt, the calves are left behind in pods of three or four with a female guardian.

Although full-grown sperm whales can remain underwater for up to two hours, younger calves that still require suckling are less independent and only are able to dive for a fraction of the time.

“Calves start to feed themselves at around three or four years,” said João Quaresma, who accompanied the scientific expedition into the Azores, an archipelago in the Pacific Ocean. “But they’ve found whales up to the age of nine still suckling.”

This latest revelation is only a small part of what has been discovered so far about whale intelligence, the Guardian reported. Sperm whales, which have the largest brain size of any mammal, also have the ability to organize themselves into complex structures and communicate through a primitive language system which consists of clicks and chirps.