I’m so excited! I’ve wanted to give a TED talk for a long time. So here we are, it’s great and thanks to MIT for having me. So I spend 200 days or so a year in the water with whales, frequently with killer whales or orca, which are the world's most widely distributed whale. They're in every ocean on the planet, and they exhibit complex social behaviors which are powered by their 15-pound brain. And their brain has spindle cells and a neocortex, which are structures associated with memory and higher level thinking. In fact, the neocortex in the orca brain actually has a greater surface area than the neocortex in the human brain. And as we continue to learn more about them, I think you can’t help but wonder if orcas had been born with opposable thumbs instead of fins, if they’d evolved that way, would they be competing with humanity to be the most dominant species on the planet? Or, given their collaborative nature, perhaps they’d be working alongside us. And then I worry if we continue on our current path with what’s happening in the ocean, will orca need to develop their own space program really, really quickly to avoid going extinct in the near future? Hopefully, not. So I’ve studied orca in the sea off Norway for 11 consecutive seasons and some of them stay on shore or near shore for a lot of the year. But the vast majority is following the herring migration, which spends most of its time out in the mid-Atlantic and only comes near shore for a couple of months in the midwinter every year. Herring is a small fish that aggregates in really large schools, and their aggregations and migrations are not static. In fact, over the last 25 or so years, the herring migration has chosen three distinct fjord systems off the coast of Norway to spend their winters. And each of these fjord systems has a very unique and different geography and also biomass. And that’s given us a really excellent opportunity to study orca adaptability and intelligence. In the late nineties, early 2000s, the fjord system that the herring chose was called Tysfjord. And Tysfjord is quite deep. And as these herring would pack into Tysfjord, a lot of them were quite deep in the bottom of the fjord. And so in order to get a meal, the orca had to dive down to the bottom and work quite hard. So they developed a group hunting strategy where a part of the pod would go down and carve off a piece of the herring shoal and force it to the surface. And once that herring shoal was trapped against the surface of the ocean, the orca would all work together and have a certain role to play to keep it there. Some would swim around the edges of the ball, some would swim under the ball to make sure that it couldn’t escape back down into the depths of the ocean. Then it made it much easier to get a meal when they were hungry, because the herring were all there and ready. And then the orca would send in their most valuable player. This was the designated hitter. So the designated hitter would then go over to the herring ball, cup its tail and swing its tail through the ball of herring with such force and velocity, it would create a pressure wave that would actually knock the herring unconscious and then make it easy to just swim over and slurp up the stunned herring. So just a note on that, think about how powerful these animals are. If you were to cup your hand and swing it through the water, how fast can you swing your hand through the water? Not very fast. Certainly not fast enough to knock a fish unconscious. And now imagine your hand is the size of an orca tail, which is bigger than most average human beings. How fast could you swing something that size through the water? You probably couldn't swing it through the water at all. So it just gives you an idea of, in addition to being intelligent, they're incredibly powerful animals. So this technique worked really, really well. But unfortunately, the story doesn’t end there, because the herring migration didn’t stay in Tysfjord. A few years later, it moved and was much further north around a fjord system called Tromso. So the orca were used to this bait balling technique, and they started to employ that around Tromso in 2011 or so when the herring migration moved there. They would corral them, chase them around, get them up to the surface, try to trap them there. But Tromso has a unique problem that Tysfjord did not have. Humpback whales. So humpback whales are also very smart and they don’t want to work any harder than they have to. So the humpback whales would just hang out in the background and wait for the orca to do all the hard work: Corral this ball of herring, force them up to the surface, trap them against the surface. And then once they were there, the humpback would sneak down deep, get some momentum going, and come rocketing up through that ball of herring and try to gulp as many of them down as they could, which obviously is very frustrating for the orca, because then all their hard work gets destroyed. Now they have sonar, you know, echolocation. So they would know the humpback whales are coming even when they’re down deep and they can’t see them. And they would clear out of that ball of herring. The problem is it’s a very indelicate process because the herring would then often escape back to the depths while the orca cleared out of the way. Now, as a human cameraman who's there to document and film this behavior, I found out the hard way that my echolocation and sonar is actually not nearly as accurate as that of... “A close call for a diver in the sea off Norway, when a 35,000-pound humpback whale nearly swallowed him. Patrick Dykstra was out filming killer whales and despite the shock, he says he didn’t feel that he was in much danger at all. He says the humpback knew exactly what he was doing and moved to avoid him. He called it perhaps the most thrilling millisecond of his life. - I’d say too close for comfort for most of us. - Oh yeah, I will echo that.” So, that was terrifying, but it happened in a very brief moment. And what you're seeing there is actually the bottom throat of the humpback whale as it came lunging through the ball of herring. And their leading jaw is made of really thick pieces of bone. So had it actually impacted me and that was with an ultra wide angle lens, so it was about a foot away when it came up. And then with its mouth fully extended like that, it then landed on me, thankfully, with the soft part of the lower part of its throat. And I’ll show you a couple of images here in a second, where you can see the throat of the humpback whale extended out. So that caused me to think, what would have happened if I’d gone in the throat? And thankfully they can’t swallow you because their throat is only the size of a basketball, even though their mouth is bigger than a car. But it would still be a bit of a struggle because you’d go in there, they get all that water and herring in their throat, close their mouth, use the muscles of their throat to push the water through their baleen plates, which act like a strainer like toothbrush bristles, and all the good stuff gets trapped against the back of those baleen plates, they use their giant tongue to then sweep along the plates and try to swallow everything. And it’d be then they’d realize I was in there and that they couldn’t swallow me. And I don’t know what it looks like when a humpback whale gags, but it would be a process like that and you can imagine how long that takes. And I can hold my breath for a little while, but not after just being swallowed by humpback whale. So you probably wouldn’t be in great shape when it eventually did spit you out. So my captain was there and he could have come over to pick me up. But what happened, the humpback whale goes through the herring ball, they all get out of the way, I look back in terror and I have a three minute swim or so back to the boat because we were just out in open ocean there. And herring, like most fish, seek protection in structure and they want to go around any kind of structure, whether it be a board floating in the ocean. If you see a board in the ocean, there’s often a bunch of little fish underneath it because they like a bit of structure for protection. Unfortunately, the only structure in the ocean at that place was me. And so when the herring got out of the way from the whale, they all then congregated all around me and I'm swinging and kicking my feet and trying to get them away from me while still trying to make progress towards getting back on the boat. But they figured to take their chances with me versus the humpback whale. That whale went down three more times and came rocketing through that ball, just missing me every time before I eventually made it back to the boat. And so, as I was mentioning, my captain could have come and picked me up. But he thought a better use of this time would be to take photos of this happening (Laughter) and then laugh at my expense. So these next pictures are the mouth of the humpback whale. And you’ll see in the second photo my little yellow snorkel just outside of where the mouth of the humpback whale is. In this second picture, there's my little snorkel running away from this whale and my face after it happened. So, you know, the moral of the story is choose your co-workers very carefully on any project. (Laughter) This was terrible for the orca, right? It’s hard work, they get all balled up, it goes to the surface and these humpback whales come in. So in a fascinating adaptation within that same season, rather than make bait balls, they started, they did it a bit, but much less and instead they started pushing the herring up against these shallow beachy areas. So in this next image, you’re going to see all the black in this image is herring. So instead of making balls, they forced the herring up against the shore in these shallow beachy areas where they could then still continue to feed and keep them there. So they still use their same designated hitter technique, they had to modify it a bit for the very shallow water, but they would corral it all, push it against the shore. And while this still did benefit the humpback whales, it was much less destructive to what the orca were trying to do because the humpback whales could swim through that herring still and they could lunge and try to get a few. But when that happened and the humpbacks went into the herring, the orca would just move out a bit but still keep it on the beach. They would just go to the edge of the shoal and keep the herring pushed up against there. Now we can’t talk to orca or we can’t talk to orca yet. That’s important. So I can’t ask them, “Did you change your strategy because these humpback whales are there?” But I can say from my many years of observation, it certainly seemed that way. And the reason it’s important to note that we can’t talk to them <i>yet</i> is because there are several really exciting, really important studies going on to try to decode whale language and actually talk back to them. So I think within our lifetime we are going to achieve it. And so it’s interesting thought exercise to wonder what exactly they would say to us. We do know that they’re incredible at collaboration and teamwork. So perhaps they would have some important lessons for humanity, if we eventually do get there and get to ask them these important questions. But again, not the happy ending we were hoping for, because the herring migration in 2017 moved again to where it currently is today, which is again much further north, this time in an area called Skjervøy. The issue with Skjervøy is you still have the humpback whale issue to deal with, but Skjervøy’s fjords do not have nearly as many shallow, beachy areas as Tromso. So you’ve got the humpback whale issue, you can’t drive the herring up on shore. So they had to devise a third strategy. So this time the orca decided to target a less advanced species to do the hard work for them - human beings. So there’s a lot of purse-seining that goes on around Skjervøy, this is a purse-seine boat. They put their neck down deep, put it around the herring, corral it, pull it up to the surface, drop a pump in and pump the herring into the hold. But that’s not a perfect process. Some herring falls out of the net, some falls off the deck of the boat, some out of the pump. So if the orca do this and just hang out underneath the fishing vessel when the herring is being pumped, enough falls out that they get a free meal. Again, a very exciting and interesting adaptation. Now, orca had been feeding around fishing vessels in the past, that’s not a completely new behavior, but the amount that they begun to employ at once the herring moved up to Skjervøy increased significantly as a percentage of their diet. So, you know, we often think of intelligence as the ability to make decisions and to adapt and to change. And so it’s clear that these are extremely intelligent animals that we really hope to one day be able to talk to. But there’s a bit of a concerning pattern here, if you look at this map. You’ve got the migration in the late nineties, in Tysfjord; you’ve got it around 2008-2009 up to 2016, Tromso; starting 2017, Skjervøy. So where does it go from there? We don't fully understand the herring migration, but we do know that they are seeking certain temperatures of water, and what’s north of Skjervøy? The North Pole and what’s north of North Pole? The Moon perhaps. So you know, eventually you’re out of north, certainly if you're going to stay on this planet. So the concern is that the temperature of water the herring are seeking may no longer exist. But there is hope. There are things we can do, we can regulate, pay attention to our carbon emissions and to global warming. We can donate to certain organizations like Blue Ocean Trust and Norwegian Orca Survey. But whatever it is we decide to do I certainly hope that the choices that we humans make allow orca to have a planet on which they can still live, because they’re incredibly amazing, intelligent animals. Thank you. (Applause)