Humpback Whales Are Blowing ‘Bubble Rings’ at Boats

There is already a thread about Whoopi

Researchers at the University of California, Davis, and their colleagues at other institutions—including the SETI Institute, which is known for focusing on the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) but is also interested in nonhuman intelligences on Earth—were looking for examples of whales’ general bubble behavior when they uncovered a striking video taken by videographer Dan Knaub in 1988. In the footage, a humpback called “Thorn” blows 19 bubble structures—including 11 rings—over a 10-minute period.

“We were just gobsmacked—like, ‘What the hell is going on?’” says Fred Sharpe, a whale biologist at U.C. Davis. “For a team that’s interested in assisting astrobiologists parse unusual signals coming from deep space, it just fell real neatly into our paradigm.... It’s so bizarre.”

Sharpe and his colleagues soon found more examples on social media and from other researchers. Study co-author Jodi Frediani, a wildlife photographer who is also at U.C. Davis, even noticed a telltale circle in a photograph a friend showed during a presentation about humpback whales. With this phenomenon on her mind, she says, “I went, ‘Gee, there’s a bubble ring!’”

For the study, the team recorded 12 events across the North and South Pacific and North Atlantic Oceans in which 11 individual humpbacks were seen blowing bubble rings. The researchers described 39 rings in total. “It’s not a lot in the world of whales but enough—and in multiple oceans,” Frediani says.

“It’s a really fun paper,” says Syracuse University biologist Susan E. Parks, who studies bubble-net feeding in humpbacks and wasn’t involved in the new study. “It reads like a detective story that’s trying to piece together information about something that’s not widely studied and happens rarely.” Parks hasn’t observed any bubble rings herself—as far as she knows, she says, “I may have seen them before and never really thought anything of them.”

Despite compiling so many examples of the rings, Sharpe still doesn’t know what to think about their purpose. “My guess is that this is what it’s going to feel like when we first make contact with aliens,” he says.

The researchers speculate that the behavior could be playful. One whale would blow a bubble ring and then swim through it or “do a spy hop right through the middle of it,” Frediani says—when performing such a spy hop, the whale would peep its head vertically above the surface, right through the bubble ring. Or perhaps the animals’ behavior could respresent curiosity toward humans: of the 12 recorded events, nine involved whales that approached the human observers more closely before they blew rings.

Could the whales be trying to communicate with us? Sharpe doesn’t rule this out as a possibility. He posits that the presence of humans seems to trigger bubble blowing and that humpbacks improve with practice. “This may be a species-atypical signal that’s crafted for people,” he says, “whales reaching out to humans ... using their own parlance, their own form of communication.”

Parks thinks it’s plausible that the animals are putting on a display for humans, but she adds that it’s too soon to tell with such a small sample size. “They’d want a lot more [observations] before they could say with certainty,” she says. Because most of the observations were made by people, this could skew the data, she notes, although there were “two observations from planes, so we know [the whales] do produce them [bubble rings] when people aren’t present, too.”

Dollface thread.

I love whales. They're adorable.

Such cute and friendly gentle giants.

Yeah, whales are adorable.

I for one welcome our new marine mammal overlords.

I find it unthinkable that humans used to mindlessly slaughter these kind and intelligent creatures.

They’re probably saying fuck off

Likely, it’s their home and they are sentient like us. It’s probably a “get off my lawn” gesture

It's about this...whale.

Whaleface thread

I wish they’d get physical with the boats like orcas

Ring Ring, why don’t you give me a call?

Will humpback whales let us pet them?