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.
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.
But I agree with you, better that scientists provide something for everyone. This is a good press release (it's not really journalism if it's coming from the university press office). The other very nice thing they did is link the original article in the first words of the release, although I would have made the hyperlink text "A new paper from University of St Andrews and Université de Neuchâtel" to make it clear that the paper is there. Hyperlinks are cheap and a lot of science is free to access, there's no excuse to leave that out.
https://edgedavao.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/Oarfish-2.j...
Sailors used to think they were sea serpents.
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.
While fascinating it’s not surprising. The vegetative nervous system does a LOT of things on autopilot. I think most people have no idea how many things their body regulates permanently that are actually technically difficult (orientation is particularly hard) and the lower brain stems just wing it.
For me this is a classic case of associating intelligence only with conscious awareness when there’s many other ways how we (and other animals) are “clever” even if we don’t know it at first ;)
Technically true. And also points to interesting physiological systems that continuously “automate” seemingly complex actions.
Sharks never stop swimming because it’s the only way they can move water over their gills.
I like that.
I mean, we know that mammals with a big brain dream. People can see that when e. g. their dog suddenly seems to run while sleeping.
But seriously, this must happen sometimes!
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...