dguest
7 hours ago
The title of the original article [1] is a lot more clear:
Buoyancy regulation through modulation of onboard gas volume by resting sperm whales
If you've done any scuba diving (or swimming) you're familiar with this method of buoyancy control. And most fish accomplish on actively transporting gas between an internal bladder and their blood.
The difference is that whales have no way to refill their lungs while submerged, which is why their dives start deep and slowly drift up: as long as they are drifting upward the volume in their lungs is expanding in response to decreasing pressure. So the bubbles are essentially a way of pumping the breaks, which is apparently something they can do in their sleep (if they are in fact sleeping).
Is anyone else slightly annoyed by the cutesy title? Of course I recognize that the meme economy runs on this stuff, so maybe it's just nerds like me.
[1]: https://dmscdn.vuelio.co.uk/publicitem/61eae467-9527-4922-b9...
wzdd
5 hours ago
> They don't "blow bubbles" to sleep vertically, they vent gas to regulate their specific gravity. This allows them to sleep vertically
When I read this I thought you'd discovered that the whales release the gas in a form other than by blowing bubbles, or that the purpose of doing so was for something other than improved sleep.
But no, the whales literally release air through their blowhole in the form of bubbles, and, at least during study you linked, they do this while resting to maintain their vertical orientation. An orientation, the paper theorises, that enables better sleep by not being buffeted by waves.
They quite literally blow bubbles to achieve restful, vertical sleep.
dguest
5 hours ago
Oof, sorry if that was misleading.
Maybe I'm overly fixated on the "to" in "to achieve": the whale doesn't care about the bubbles, they serve no important purpose in helping them sleep, it's just what happens when you vent air under water.
It's also kind of a nitpick, but the scientists refer to resting whales, but specifically state that they don't know if they are sleeping. I guess getting a proper EEG on a sperm whale is another scientific frontier.
Edit: An awesome scientific frontier: honestly if anyone deserves my tax money it's the grad student trying to figure out how to measure brain waves in a submerged oceanic whale.
KurSix
3 hours ago
So like memey version is still pointing at the real mechanism
KurSix
3 hours ago
I think this is just the eternal tension between catchy headlines and the underlying science
dguest
an hour ago
Indeed.
This isn't a particularly bad case. I think both are often useful, and this headline isn't wrong, I just assumed the bubbles had some direct use and found the scientific title more clear there.