Whale with Steve Backshall

Whales.

Ocean giants. Ancient mariners.

Their songs, majesty and sheer size

fill us with joy and awe.

In their vast shadow,

a human can feel very small.

They were here long before us...

..caring for their young...

..hunting...

..voyaging.

But now we are changing their world.

So I want to see through their eyes,

meeting them on their terms,

to find how their future and ours are inseparable.

'I'm exploring our kinship with whales and dolphins.

Once dubbed "devilfish",

we now know they need our help.

For the entirety of human history,

whales have been creatures of myth and legend,

shrouded in mystery, with us knowing little of their secret lives.

But now, leaps in technology are offering us

a window into their world.

We are entering a golden era

of understanding the world of the whale.

Much of that mystery is down to their ocean home.

A place that we humans can only fleetingly visit,

and rarely to the depths they can dive to.

But despite our differences,

whales are mammals like us...

..and, it turns out, we have more in common than you might think.

I'm starting my journey in one of the most remote places

in the Atlantic: the Azores...

..searching for the whale that was probably

the most misunderstood of all...

..the sperm whale.

There it is! Full breach!

Sensational!

This is one of the deepest-diving creatures on the planet,

able to get down to well over 2,000 metres in depth,

and to hold their breath up to two hours.

These astonishing animals are also our largest toothed predator.

Mariners both respected and feared them,

believing they could swallow fishermen

or even boats, whole.

The reality is perhaps even more dramatic.

These leviathans battle giant squid in the darkness of the deep,

before returning and leaping.

Our whale is breaching repetitively.

It seems to be totally disinterested in us and our boat,

completely focused on its task,

which gives us the perfect opportunity to get in

and swim alongside them.

Whales sometimes react to the bubbles of a human scuba diver.

'So, it's far better to dive as they do...

..using just the air of a single breath,

or freediving.

Swimming alongside this enormous whale,

it's hard to believe that, as mammals,

we share a common ancestor.

Its giant form is honed to life in the deep ocean,

and so different from my own.

But then our connection is revealed.

Just like me, this sperm whale must come to the surface to breathe.

And pretty soon...

..I have to do the same.

Wow!

That was incredible!

Underwater is the only time

that you get any real sense of the scale of the animal;

and also, the power, and the speed.

Being alongside them, they appear motionless,

but they can just disappear into the blue.

Their size and strength

made it inevitable that humans would fear them...

..and made it easy to treat them as just a simple commodity.

It happened right here in the Azores.

These buildings are the remnants

of the factory part of a whaling station.

This was still active when I was a kid.

In fact, the last whale was killed here in the Azores

in 1987, when I was at school.

All over the world, sperm whales and others were ruthlessly hunted.

It is said that the oils rendered from their bodies

lit the lamps of the industrial revolution.

Other parts were used for products,

from fuel to fertiliser.

For me, as a naturalist, so many of the highlights

of my life and my job have been working with animals like this...

..and seeing them like that...

..it's almost impossible to take.

Stop killing!

But over time, the brutality of the slaughter

became public knowledge

and there was uproar.

People took to the streets in protest. Governments rallied,

and whaling was banned by almost every nation.

Globally, some species are recovering.

Now the majority of nations are no longer hunting them,

we've begun a new relationship with whales,

where Science leads the way.

Whales, dolphins and porpoises are collectively known as cetaceans.

By studying them,

we've discovered how social some species can be.

Here in the Azores,

I've tracked down a small group of female sperm whales...

..hoping to see this for myself.

In some ways, male and female sperm whales are so different,

they're almost like completely separate animals.

The males lead largely solitary lives,

heading up into Arctic seas and all the way down into the Antarctic.

The females, though, are a seriously social animal.

Females remain with their birth pod for life.

So this is probably a mother and her daughters.

The rubbing of heads helps remove barnacles,

lice and dead skin.

But as with us, touch is hugely important;

for bonding, perhaps even for reassurance.

With no arms to hug,

this is the best way to give and receive affection.

It's moments like that, when you see

such tenderness between animals

that you start to feel some kind of kinship with them.

You know, even though

this is a creature that's 20-odd tonnes in weight,

when you see a mother interacting with its youngsters,

and them just enjoying the physical contact,

all of a sudden,

you can see that they have so much in common with us.

And it's actually quite an emotional thing.

The more we look,

the more we see our own lives reflected.

In some of the other 90 or so species of cetaceans,

relationships can be even more complex.

That's certainly true of the friendships,

collaborations and rivalries we see in the cetacean

we often think of as the most friendly:

the dolphin.

Since the end of the era of whaling

we've entered a golden age of discovery about whales

and uncovered an animal that has a lot in common with humans.

The remote islands of the Azores are a perfect place

for me to dive with them on their terms

and explore further.

The diversity of whale and dolphin life here is

pretty much unparalleled,

and because there are dozens of species

that pass through these waters, or that live here,

pretty much anything could turn up.

But of all the animals we hoped we might encounter here,

there's one I'm particularly excited to come across.

Look at that! What!

That can't be happening!

These large blunt-nosed dolphins are known as Risso's.

They're often spotted at a distance

but are notoriously shy.

I've never even come close to them in the water before.

This one plunge could reveal

all sorts of things about their mysterious lives.

I didn't think I would ever see Risso's dolphins underwater,

and they are a very surreal sight.

They kind of appear to be white or light grey,

but when you get up close you can see that it's scarring,

criss-crossed all over the head and the body,

and that's from fights with other Risso's dolphins,

particularly males fighting other males.

Risso's live in all male groups...

..an unusual thing for whales.

But living in an all-male gang, status is everything.

And that's where the scars come in.

It's thought they act like tattoos

that visually display an individual's status,

with the oldest males being almost completely white.

But this is something else.

On an unseen cue,

the whole group turns and comes together.

Bubbles, like touch, are tactile, stimulating.

Perhaps this is a moment of group bonding.

Like a team cheer, or a battle cry before hunting.

This form of social bonding

was only recently discovered by scientists.

Every time you delve beneath the surface of their social lives,

you see something familiar to us.

The word dolphin applies to around 40 species of toothed whale

and they're surprisingly diverse.

They range from the black and white Commerson's dolphin,

which can weigh as little as 30 kilos...

..to the Amazon river dolphin,

which lives in freshwater...

..all the way up to giant predators like pilot whales...

..and orca,

the largest members of the dolphin family.

I'm crossing the Atlantic and heading to

one of the best places to understand their lives.

The Bahamas, in the Caribbean.

Dolphins live in so-called "fission-fusion" societies.

That means that their groups are always in flux.

So, sometimes they could be flying solo,

they could be hanging out with their families or friends.

Other times they'll come together in pods that could be dozens,

hundreds or even thousands of animals strong.