Whale Nation (Les Gardiennes de la planète)

1960 - The first recording of a whale singing.

1997 - Aboard the Voyager probe, that song travels across the galaxy.

The whales are communicating.

They may have something to tell us.

To this day, no one's been able to interpret their message.

The very first sound we hear when we come into this world is a song.

Our mothers lift us to the surface in music

for our first breath of air.

Here, in this amniotic paradise,

we play.

We do somersaults,

like angels or birds.

You know,

it all began 50 million years ago.

One day, in search of food or sanctuary,

our ancestors left the land

and walked into the sea.

Freed from earthly pressures,

freed from droughts,

sheltered from earthquakes,

from Ice Ages,

from volcanoes,

from fires and famine,

our bodies adapted to life in suspension.

We learned to hold our breath.

Our hind legs disappeared, buried deep within our flanks.

Our tails turned into boomerang-shaped tail-flukes,

enabling us to fly, almost weightless, through oceans.

Our skin thickened.

Smooth,

silky,

freed of all obstacles.

Yielding to our movements,

gliding through water

in perfect hydrodynamics.

Naked,

with skin like oiled silk,

we move at fifty miles an hour.

A velvety energy.

One morning,

playing with the echoes in the depths,

we began to sing.

Communicating with one another,

exchanging information underwater.

And over tremendous distances.

Melodies traveling through oceans

five times faster than the speed of sound through air.

Interconnected to one another,

we wove an elegant web of cetacean music.

The very first social network, which we created in the ocean,

45 million years ago.

Notes... clicks...

Different phrases, different dialects...

Sung in different cadences

and modulations.

Just like you,

to send different messages to different individuals.

Each clan has its own accent. Each of us, a different song.

Varied enough to express complex emotions.

We sing for the planet Earth.

In harmony with the frequency of the stars.

We all come from different regions,

and rarely cross paths.

But sometimes,

a few of us meet in secret places.

To enrich our repertoires

and play one another's compositions.

The great whale karaoke!

Our world is not a "silent world."

We glide through a sea of sounds.

Our planet's oceans are a concert hall,

where operas swell.

A light massage of sound

caressing our skin permanently.

Focused, we listen,

analyze,

scan...

Millions of musical notes, mysterious sounds,

memorized and passed on from generation to generation.

Preserved in our mighty cortex,

with no need for computers or hard disks.

We record everything.

And share everything.

The past, the present,

culture and history.

We pick up

every frequency in the world, and always have.

We are the guardians of the Earth's archives.

Two probes and an ultra-sophisticated vision system

allow some of us to see in the dark.

To reach greater depths,

sperm whales

use lower frequencies.

Rumbling like generators,

with a wavering transoceanic throb,

they scan the inky submarine relief.

Holding their breath, sperm whales plunge almost 3,000 meters deep...

dropping their heartbeat, collapsing their lungs,

and contracting their ribs

to stave off the bends.

Their jaws become fluorescent to attract prey.

They happily slip through the pressure of 500 atmospheres,

a quarter of a million tons of water

exerted on their bodies.

With oxygen reserves buried in their muscles,

they can disappear for over an hour

in the black night of the depths...

their Abyss Kingdom.

The oceans are home to our planet's most spectacular reliefs.

Our highest peaks are found underwater.

Far higher than Annapurna or Mount Everest.

The widest valleys,

the deepest canyons on this planet.

Landscapes we've been exploring for millions of years.

All our life, we're guided by the same ritual.

We spend winter where we were born,

in the warm waters where we'll mate.

And summer, in cold waters, with the promise of nourishment.

Each family has its own route,

which every generation has taken.

Each hemisphere has its tribes and their paths.

During our travel,

whenever a storm arises,

despite the vigor of currents and the violent waves,

in the underwater calm,

we stay our course.

Surfing and sliding with joy.

To find our way,

we use the rhythm and temperature of the tides,

the contours of the seabed,

the mountainous summits of the mid-Atlantic ridge,

the rotational forces of the planet, and the azimuth of the sun.

Guided by the position of the moon and its tidal pull,

navigating with a lodestone disc made of polarized magnetite...

a GPS in our huge brain,

sensitive to the geomagnetic flow of force fields...

we orient ourselves under phosphorescent seas.

Thanks to the position of the stars,

we find the path of the Poles,

the route of the icebergs.

Like us, icebergs sing their songs.

Like us,

they migrate and cross our path.

Like us,

they roll and tumble.

Their immersed bodies surging up with a mighty splash.

And their souls appear.

Antarctica!

For us, southern hemisphere humpback whales,

here ends our summer migration.

We're not compulsive eaters.

We can go eight months without food.

We don't work to eat.

We play!

By making bubbles.

We draw spirals in the water.

We release bubble nets!

Nets that rise to the surface

and burst in the open air...

trapping shrimp and krill

in a hissing, almost perfect circle.

Which we dive into, our mouths wide open.

Imagine blowing soap bubbles and food drops from the sky!

After a season of bubble-netting,

tracing evanescent contours in the sea,

we leave our ice palaces and find our way back to warm waters.

The lagoon route, where we were born.

Sometimes accompanied by a distant sound.

The most powerful in the animal kingdom.

A song that can be heard over a thousand kilometers...

the song of a blue whale.

The most imposing of us all.

170 tons.

The weight of 2,700 people.

Larger than a dinosaur.

It has seven stomachs and consumes over a million calories a day.

Its tongue outweighs an elephant.

Arteries you could swim through.

It's the largest creature ever to have lived upon this planet.

It, too, is on the trail to equatorial waters.

8,000 kilometers and several months later...

Reaching the land of love,

sealed off from the outside world by riptides...

all is pleasure and play, song and seduction.

In warm water,

we roll over,

undulate.

We glide past each other with a contemplative murmur.

Testing our feelings, evaluating the flexibility of our movements.

We humpback whales

are known for our long, melodious love songs.

When a female leads the dance,

she's followed by a trail of admirers.