Original subtitles

Beautiful!

They are surrounding that boat right now.

In 2015, I was in a kayak whale-watching trip in California

with my friend Charlotte.

That's us, there.

And then this happened.

TOURISTS GASP

A humpback whale breached on top of us.

TOURIST: I got him on video!

My name's Tom Mustill.

My name's Charlotte.

I make documentaries.

I'm an accountant.

Out of the water came this giant thing, like a big, black thing

and it blocked out the sun.

Really, it was huge.

It was like a building grew out of the water next to us.

And it happened just like....

Whoosh...

Phwoar! And that was it.

TOURIST: Oh, my gosh!

I felt this huge swoosh and I was cartwheeled around like a doll.

Had no idea if either of us were going to survive.

I remember having to swim and seeing the surface and swimming

towards the surface.

I remember this absolute elation,

seeing light when I got above the water.

Just being so happy to be alive.

Our guide came over and said, "That's never happened before."

And I started to think, "No-one's ever going to believe me."

Two days later, this video pops up on the internet.

ASTONISHED GASPS

TOURIST: I got him. I got him on video.

My husband woke me up in the middle of the night and I think

what he said was, "Look, you're famous."

Charlotte didn't want to watch the video.

I think I've only watched it maybe two or three times.

I found myself watching it over and over again.

It's the most ridiculous thing that's ever happened to me

and probably will ever happen to me.

How can you get that close to something that big

and that much power and not die?

I started to realise that we weren't alone.

There were other videos of other close encounters.

Oh, my BLEEP.

Please tell me you got that, Julie!

EXCITED SHRIEKING

Charlotte went back to work,

but I couldn't let it go.

I just wanted to go back and try and figure out what happened to me.

Who was this whale?

Why was it there?

What was it doing?

And did it do that on purpose?

I became sort of obsessed with whales.

And that's where the detective work starts.

I've come back to California

to try to figure out what happened to me that day.

This is Moss Landing Harbor in Monterey Bay.

Out there is where the humpback whale landed on the us.

I'm a wildlife film-maker.

But this time it's different, because it's personal.

To get some answers, I'm going to need some help from these guys -

pioneers of whale research.

PLOPPING

What's that sound?

These are the animals they have dedicated their lives

to understanding and protecting.

Whales and humans live in different worlds.

Very occasionally, out of nowhere, our worlds collide.

I wanted to meet someone like me.

One of the few people who'd come as close to a whale as I had.

As gentle as it thinks it's being, its most gentlest swipe

could be damaging to a human.

Because we're so frail compared to a whale.

Meet Shawn.

Shawn Stamback.

He has two dogs.

Hallie and Pete.

He really likes coffee.

Espresso.

He's a commercial diver and runs fishing charters.

I like to make things for my boat.

I've come to see Shawn because, although he's a professional diver,

a whale snuck up on him.

Holy BLEEP!

You're just like, wow! Man, that just really happened!

Out of all the videos of humans and whales I've seen, Shawn has come

the closest to being eaten.

Did you think about what it would've been like to be engulfed?

Yeah, I played the scenario over in my mind a lot of times.

If I went in the whale's mouth, you just have to deal with it.

I would probably hold my breath till I passed out.

Did you feel lucky to have had that experience? Oh, yeah!

You know many people on Earth get to have that experience?

It's probably... I bet more people have been struck by lightning.

I feel like it's like a weird club.

Yeah, it is a weird club!

I know that humpbacks normally feed by taking great gulps of seawater

and eating the small animals inside.

A humpback whale is 500 times bigger than a human.

So, could a whale have eaten Shawn?

Eat? No.

Hold him in its mouth?

I guess it's physically possible.

This is Professor Joy Reidenberg.

This is her husband Bruce.

This is her mouse Spinelli.

She's adorably cute.

Joy is an old friend of mine.

She is one of the great experts of whale anatomy.

When a whale dies, Joy dissects it.

And she's done a lot.

Maybe I'm getting close to a thousand.

These are the tools of her trade.

You can't hurt somebody that's already dead.

But you can learn a lot from it.

I've come to Joy to get a Humpback Whale 101.

A humpback is so much bigger than a person.

But its throat's only a little bit bigger than yours is.

A humpback hasn't got any teeth.

According to Joy, it can't even nibble you...

..let alone swallow you.

They have baleen, which is kind of like a big set of brushes

in their mouth, and they filter the food through that.

So, the water squirts out and the fish stays.

They might look very different,

but they are our relatives.

In many ways, they're actually closer to us than many other animals

that share the world with us.

Whales are mammals.

Their ancestors once lived on the land,

but then they moved back to the sea.

They breathe air like we do.

They have pregnancies like we do.

Give birth to live young, nurse them with milk.

Maintain a high body temperature.

All these are mammalian things.

Their skin, just like ours, constantly grows and sheds,

feeding armies of giant lice.

They're so big, even their lice are the size of your thumbnail.

They can host a community of other animals on their bodies,

like barnacles.

Barnacles take root on whales and live there for their whole lives.

I actually think they use these barnacles as weapons,

like brass knuckles.

Inside a humpback's pectoral fins are the biggest arms on the planet.

Its big tail fins are called flukes.

They can propel this 30-tonne beast into the air

in what is known as a breach.

Sometimes they breach close to our boats

and extremely rarely, they land on people, like us.

This is the other reason I've come to see Joy.

I want her to look at my breach.

Just have a watch of it.

OK.

Whoa!

It's not funny!

No, no, actually, it's not funny.

The thing that really surprised me when I saw that video was that whale

didn't do what I would think is a normal breach.

This whale tried to accomplish an aerial spin

while it was flying through the air.

It looked like it was going to tilt, maybe land on the side,

maybe land on the back of its head, but instead rotated

very counterintuitively, the wrong way.

You guys would've been dead if it had landed with the back

of its head on you.

It was a weird breach, do you think? I think it was very unusual.

Joy's theory is that our whale turned away from us in mid-air.

But why was it breaching at all?

We don't even know what breaches are about.

You don't know what breaches are about?

No, there's lots of theories about what breaches are about.

No-one really knows for sure because no-one can get

inside the head and ask a whale, "Why did you do that thing?"

All right? That's like asking someone who decides to dance down

the street, "Why are you dancing down the street?

"Well, maybe you're happy or maybe you're crazy

"or maybe you've got an ant in your shoe."

I think we have so much we need to learn about these animals.

So, it seems that the animal that almost killed me is an enigma.

Here's a short list of what we don't know about humpback whales.

We don't know how long they live.

We don't know how many there are.

WHALE SINGS

We don't know what their beautiful songs are for.

We've named all the ways they splash...

..but we don't know why they do any of them.

Most of our explanations for their behaviours

are still theories.

Because almost all of their lives are hidden beneath the waves.

This is the sea off Moss Landing.

This is where the whale landed on me.

And this is MBARI. It's a marine research centre and somewhere

I hope I can get some answers.

And this is John.

My name is John Ryan.

He's a scientist here.

I'm a guy who listens to whales in the world they live in.

He likes roller-coasters...

I have a season pass to the Boardwalk.

..skateboarding...

I just have a cruiser that allows me to get around town quickly.

..and enormous subwoofers.

DEEP SOUND PULSATES

That was a fin whale.

I've come to ask John why my whale was here.

Monterey Bay is spectacular when we view it at the surface

and if we were to look beneath the water,

we would see that it is spectacular along the bottom,

because the bay is bisected

by a massive submarine canyon

on the scale of the Grand Canyon.

And this means that very deep water is close to shore.

The scientists at MBARI have explored this canyon

and found it stretches over 250 miles

and is as much as 3,500 metres deep.

Many species of animals are difficult to study

with the visual methods.

However, they vocalise,

which means that just by listening continuously in the ocean,

we can learn a lot about their lives.

WHALESONG

This is the call of a male humpback whale.

SONG CONTINUES

John's listening to a microphone that he attached to a monitoring

station 1,000 metres beneath the waves.

Down here, MBARI's machines can see and hear what we cannot.

This deep water is rich in nutrients.

WHALESONG ECHOES

And when it rises and hits sunlight, there's a colossal

explosion of life,

an enormous interconnected feast.

Squid, seals, eels, sea slugs, jellyfish,

sharks, otters, mola mola, kelp, sea lions, sea birds in their tens

of thousands,

and, of course, whales.

They are drawn to feast on krill and fish.

This is why my whale was here.

Monterey Bay is a humpback feeding ground.

You can see whales out this window sometimes forging

very close to shore.

I love it here.

On that day, there was an unprecedented layer of anchovies

over a mile long and packed into the canyon mouth.

And we were right on top of it.

But we weren't alone.

The whales had come to feed and people had come

to see the whales.

TOURIST: Wow!

This stretch of coast is one of the whale-watching centres

of the world.

Oh!

You forget about everything when you're out there.

Quite often when I see whales, I cry.

It's too much happiness to handle.

It is amazing.

I mean, it's just so powerful.

Spectacular to see a humpback breach.

Some go out over 100 times a year.

Do you think you're addicted to whale watching?

Hell, yeah!

Are you addicted?

I'm addicted.

I think it's a wonderful obsession!

When I look at a whale, I feel like a very small piece

of this world.

EXCITED MURMURS

Oh, my God!

It was just amazing,

something you'd never experienced, ever before.

That close, within a just a few feet!

This sight would've been unbelievable until recently,

because Monterey Bay was once a whaling base.

We hunted whales for their oil,

baleen, flesh and bones.

Last century, we killed an estimated 3 million of them,

reducing some populations to almost nothing.

Thankfully, here, the slaughter has stopped

and the humpbacks seem to be recovering -

their numbers roughly tripling in the last 25 years.

Whale watchers are drawn here in their thousands.

Did somebody photograph my whale that day?

Oh, fluke!

I've heard of a man who can help me find out.

I guess people would call me the "Whale-Tail Guy".

Meet Ted.

My name is Ted Cheeseman.

Ted is a surfer.

I need to be in the outdoors.

This is his wife Rene.

Hi!

And this is their dog Morson.

Morson's favourite trick is "sitting pretty".

I've come to see Ted because he runs an unparalleled humpback whale

photo identification service.

I've now looked at way over 100,000 images of whales.

Has that made you weird?

It could be!

Ted's database is called Happywhale.

And it relies on a very helpful

feature of whales' tails.

Humpback whales' tails are really fantastic.

They will tend to scar black on white.

A humpback's life story is written in the unique pattern

of scars on its tail flukes.

You can use the bite marks of killer whales.

You can use scars from entanglement in fishing gear.

Barnacles leave a little round scar.

For decades, scientists have painstakingly assembled

catalogues of humpbacks' tail flukes which they gave to Ted.

7,000 images of 3,000 known individuals

over the past 25, 30 years of whale science in California.

Ted's big idea was to combine these catalogues

with the constant stream of whale-watching photographs.

So, you see a whale, you take a photograph.

Send it to Happywhale.

We'll identify that individual.

It might be the whale Grumpy, it might be Frosty,

one of my favourites.

People's holiday snaps have become a scientific tool.

We have identified about 1,500 in the last three years,

so that's coming close to, say,

70% of individuals in California.

Is there a chance we could track down my whale?

Is it somewhere in Ted's archive?

I want to know if it's possible to identify any of the whales?

Ummm. I don't know.

2015 we were just starting and so...

I'd hoped we could get a lead from the shots of the whale spotted

next to us from right before the breach.

It's very odd.

But, um... Do you want to try it?

It's running. I just loaded the...

I took 22 screenshots so,

herein, I'm attempting to match these against one of our catalogues

which has 18,000 photos in it.

Do you think you can find that one?

I'm not very hopeful. I mean, we can look at it.

I had hoped we might be able to identify

a few suspects.

But Ted got back to me a few days later.

It turns out that the 12th of September, 2015, was a freak day.

More whales were identified that day than almost any other.

He sent me photo after photo of flukes and their catalogue numbers.

In Monterey Bay alone, 51 different known whales

were confirmed that day.

How could I ever find out which one is my whale?

But whoever this whale was,

I still questioned whether it meant to jump on us.

Was it an aggressive act?

I'd heard a story of a whale attack from my world

of wildlife film-making.

If the animal had hit me eight inches higher

it would have hit me in the neck.

It would have knocked my head clean off.

This is Howard and Michele Hall.

They're a team.

If I'm boss, he's president.

They are pioneer underwater film-makers.

Over 3,200 dives, I have kept track.

These are some of their awards.

At our age, people start giving us awards for having had a career.

This is Howard's old camera housing.

I think I built this in the mid-1980s.

And this is one of his new ones.

This captures images in 8K.

This is a grey whale's penis.

Over 30 years ago, Howard recorded one of the first-ever shots

of one underwater.

But it almost cost him his life.

I never saw it and I was unconscious when I got that.

Crazy.

We managed to find the film to show him.

This is the first time I've seen it in 20-odd years.

Filming the friendlies turned out to be more risky

than our film crew anticipated.

I was working for a producer that wanted to capture a shot

of whales mating underwater,

which is totally impossible.

Visibility down there is only about two metres,

about six feet.

I took a deep breath, swam down 30 feet and swam out

towards some whales that were mating and that's when it's got scary.

Within a few seconds, I could see dark shapes all around me

and that was literally terrifying,

to know that you're in the midst

of whales that are violently mating,

and suddenly, right in front of me,

there was a whale's face and I could see its eye.

The whole animal just bolted and I was totally terrified.

I knew I was going to get hit. I curled up into a ball,

trying to make as small a target as possible,

and the next thing

there was a whale's tail next to my left arm.

I didn't see it coming, it just happened.

It sounded like a shotgun went off right next to my ear -

very, very loud explosion - and then the lights went out.

I was unconscious for 20 seconds or more

and when I woke up I'm upside down,

murky bay.

I just managed to get to the surface.

I had a broken arm, two broken ribs, but the good part of the story

is that I had the camera running.

Footage of this gigantic, 12-foot-long prehensile penis

moving through the frame, and I wasn't enormously proud

of the shot because it really wasn't composed very well,

but that's excusable considering I was,

you know, unconscious.

Howard believes the whale intentionally attacked him

because he got too close and surprised it.

But following this encounter, Howard has continued

to film whales underwater.

Like these humpbacks.

Is he not scared, being so close to these giants?

It's not scary being in the water with whales.

Especially when you consider that an animal that's literally gigantic,

can so easily hurt you, even unintentionally,

and they tend not to.

You get a sense when you're with one of these animals

that it recognises you as another living thing...

..and is looking back

at you when you're looking at it.

And is careful not to hit you or hurt you

or be aggressive to you.

It sort of leaves me speechless to try to describe

what it's like to see a mom and calf

that allow you to be in their proximity

and swim by you, swim around you,

move their pectoral fin where you think,

"Oh, my gosh, it's going to hit me."

But it doesn't.

So, how come my whale hit me?

This is just so mind-boggling.

Oh, my...gosh!

They can make mistakes just like people do,

and I think that animal just, you know, kind of blew it,

was jumping, wasn't paying attention,

and wouldn't have done it on purpose,

but, you know, you were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Wrong place, wrong time.

It seems what happened to me was just an accident.

My investigation had been into my whale and my experience,

but, suddenly, I was drawn into a much bigger story.

We heard that a whale had been found dead three hours north

of where we were staying.

Joy arrives to join a big team that's gathering.

They bring her up to speed.

They towed it over to Angel Island,

and that's one of the only beaches

that they can actually tow our whale to in the bay.

When dead whales turn up in San Francisco,

they're towed to this uninhabited island.

The remains of other dead whales litter the shores.

First priority is, why did this animal die?

If we don't know why it died, we can't do anything about it,

we can't stop it.

If we lose those opportunities,

then we may lose the species,

because we will have missed the warning signs.

The red flags are all there but we have to find them,

so it's a crime scene first.

We've got to understand why the whale died.

Once that's established, the next order of business

is scientific collection.

This is the saddest part of all,

because it's a female

and a fairly young female.

Fin whales are an endangered species.

This young female would have had many years of life

and many calves ahead of her.

A big team has gathered to do a thorough necropsy.

It will take many hours in the hot sun to find out what killed her.

Joy has a suspicion that something big hit this whale

and she's looking for proof.

The layer underneath that muscle should look

like this, should be kind of whitish yellow. Oh, yeah.

This is not normal. That's a bruise.

Right. And bruising would indicate that it was bleeding

and bleeding indicates it was alive when it was struck.

And if you look over here, that's rust from a boat.

Is it? That is like, probably the site of the main impact right here.

Joy needs more evidence to prove it was a ship,

so the team dig deeper.

You've got to have a strong labour force of people,

basically, playing tug-of-war with organs, it's tough.

You are dealing with 50, 60 - 70, sometimes - feet of massive animal,

tonnes of animal.

It's very, very difficult to do.

I do get hungry. You get hungry?

I do get hungry when I'm working on a whale,

especially when it's really fresh, because it looks kind of like roast

beef, you know, it's meat.

I know it's gross - I don't want to eat the whale,

I just instinctively get hungry.

Finally, the team expose the spine,

but it's not all where it should be.

This one's been pushed out of position, so much so

that it's up against the rib.

It should be in the middle of the whale, it shouldn't be

against the rib. This is crazy.

That's a massive amount of pressure and it also means that whale

was really snapped in half.

We just don't think of whales as things that snap.

They shouldn't. Yeah.

What would normally hit a whale that hard?

There's nothing bigger than a whale in nature,

and then comes along a ship and it doesn't know how to handle that.

I don't think this was done on purpose. Yeah.

It's more that I'm sad,

I'm sad that it happens,

I'm angry that we haven't been able to do something about it to stop it,

and a tragedy - more than anything else, it's a tragedy.

The necropsy complete, the remains of the whale

are left for scavengers.

And Joy and the team head home.

Sadly, this wasn't the only dead whale I saw that week.

First, a grey whale calf was spotted with its mother

with what looked like propeller wounds on its tail.

It washed up on our local beach a few days later.

Then two different humpbacks were seen with fishing gear wrapped

around them, like this one with its pec fins

bound to its sides.

And then another dead whale washed up a few miles south.

What was going on?

We see a lot of scarring of whales running into human stuff.

More than half the whales probably bear some kind of scarring

from a ship strike or from an entanglement.

I learned that whales had been turning up entangled,

injured or dead, in record numbers.

The last five years had seen a 300% increase

in humpback entanglements alone.

On the East Coast, so many humpbacks were dying

that a UME had been declared.

What's a UME?

UME is the abbreviation for Unusual Mortality Event,

which simply means that we're getting too many dead animals

and we don't know why that's happening.

It's really like declaring a state of emergency for whales.

We have to take stock of what's happening and really understand

this, so that we can stop it.

I started out wondering if my whale had tried to kill me,

but now all I can think of is, have we somehow killed IT?

Do you think people would be upset?

Oh, not upset - people would be up in arms.

You're driving down the road, you see a deer caught in a fence,

right? You wouldn't just drive by.

At very least, you'd call 911.

But these whales are out of sight, out of mind.

We don't know, we can't see it,

so once you do start seeing it,

it's not something you can ignore.

But all hope is not lost.

There are highly trained volunteers standing by along the whole

West Coast, waiting for word that a whale is in trouble.

We, as human beings, owe it to these innocent animals

to reduce their suffering and save their lives.

This is Pieter.

My name is Pieter Folkens.

Pieter is a world renowned wildlife illustrator.

He also helped design the models for Flipper and Free Willy.

Pieter has a lot of jobs.

Scientific illustrator, naturalist, conservationist,

writer, publisher, search and rescue.

But Pieter has another job.

I'm one of a small group of individuals

that disentangles whales.

Just a handful of people in the state are authorised

to cut trapped whales free.

We heard fishermen had found a whale in trouble.

We joined a team of three small boats and a Coast Guard escort

heading out into the open sea.

No crew has ever filmed a disentanglement here before.

It took us hours to reach the whale.

The whale is trapped by a rope attached to fishing gear

on the sea bed.

The team thinks it could have been like this for weeks.

They're approaching the whale now, Tim.

I'm trying to get the line where the float is,

if we can.

There are few things that I've ever done

that are as dangerous

as disentangling whales.

You don't know what this animal is thinking and feeling

and it may lash out at you.

You know the animal is scared, it's frightened, it might think

of you as a threat, and it's going to defend itself

against the threat.

People have been killed disentangling whales.

I know of three just in the last few decades.

And so, we absolutely insist that nobody even attempt it

if they don't have a thorough understanding of what

they're doing.

I think we're deep enough, going to pull in.

Yeah, we might get a reaction out of the animal.

The rope has cut deep into the whale.

OK. That was a stress blow.

We're are out there being very sensitive to the state

of the animal, listening to its blows, are they stressful,

or are they relaxed?

WHALE BLOWS

Stress blow. Stress blow.

Even more so.

He knows that we're here.

Be mindful of the flukes.

Hey, Pieter, it's underneath in a jumble in the body of the whale.

OK, then what you can do is you can drop it.

Drop it. Drop it. I want to make sure...

Drop it on the right side.

Drop it on the right side of the whale.

It's a very anxious period of time

and, erm... It's not comfortable.

Dropping the line on the side. Step back again.

WHALE BLOWS

The flukes are underneath the bow.

Pull them up.

OK, we're above the flukes right now. OK.

With the weather turning, the team is running out of time.

But Pieter judges that the whale

is relaxed enough to move in for the cut.

Do you have your safety knife?

At this point, Pieter is attached by a rope to an animal larger

than T Rex, just feet from its biggest weapon,

its tail.

Pieter makes the cut.

Good dive. The flotation may pull it through.

As the whale swims away, the rope pulls out of its tail.

It's pulling through now.

Almost there, almost there.

And after weeks joined to the seafloor,

it's free.

The whale is now free. Free.

It's like a huge emotional rush that we accomplished the task.

Everybody's safe and I don't have to worry about it any more.

Although the animal's tail was deeply compromised,

there's at least a chance in there that it will now survive.

It was kind of a release,

the adrenaline was flowing away,

realising that we had done something that was, without question, good.

I can't stop thinking about MY whale.

What happened to it in this ocean

that I now know is so dangerous for its kind?

I need to narrow down this wall of tails to one whale.

I figured out that there were three boats on the water near us

that fateful morning.

In the first one, the captain, Mike, managed to get photos of the whale

while it landed on our kayak.

But, crucially, its tail is underwater.

His camera metadata shows the whale landed

on us at 9.24am.

Next was Captain Kate Spencer.

When we were in the water, her boat raced over.

Her GPS track shows exactly where we were.

On the third boat was Captain Kate Cummings.

She missed our breach, but photographed other breaching

whales that day.

Could one of these be our whale breaching again?

And a final witness was watching from afar.

Filming from the beach that day was a woman called Debi Thompkins.

Debi is obsessed with whales.

That was after I saw my first blue whale.

Whey! I love whales.

She wears them on her skin and ears.

In an astonishing fluke,

Debi had unknowingly captured a second angle

of the most extraordinary moment of my life.

I got them splashing!

Have you talked to them at all...

Well... ..the people that it happened to? It was me.

You're BLEEP me!

I didn't know that! I thought you'd figured it out. No!

I can't imagine what that was like.

Not one of these witnesses had got a shot of our whale's tail,

but now I had a precise time and place, two videos

and scores of photos.

Was my whale's identity somewhere in all of this?

I'd been sent some videos from my new friends,

the whale watchers.

Ones without an easy explanation...

Wow!

I love you!

..where the whales almost seem to be watching the whale watchers.

WATCHERS CHATTER

Here we have the leviathan,

the giants of the deep.

Which turn out to be friendly animals.

Wow!

They're curious about us.

They turn out to not be out to kill us, even though we spent centuries

very successfully killing them.

Wow!

Could humpbacks be interested in other species?

I'd seen another video viewed over 10 million times,

stranger than all the rest.

Seriously, I would never believe any of this as a biologist

and a researcher. I would...

Unless it happened to me, because I just can't believe

it happened to me, but if someone told me this story,

I never would believe it.

This is Nan.

Nan Hauser.

And this is her dog Brody.

He likes to sing along with Nan's humpback whale recordings.

Nan's a marine biologist, so her fridge is a bit unusual.

Samples of whales, manatees and seals.

Great! Is that normal?

Do you always have parts of animals in your fridge? Absolutely.

Nan has spent much of her life studying whales in the Cook Islands.

I was famous for getting the first sperm whale fart. And...

The first fart?

Yes, the first sperm whale fart!

Here's the fart in one of Joy's scientific papers.

For decades, Nan has studied the underwater behaviour

of humpbacks in the Cook Islands.

This passed largely without incident until this happened.

I just knew it was a dangerous situation.

Humpbacks normally avoid touching people,

and Nan would never normally touch a whale,

but here she felt she had no choice.

I couldn't push 50,000 lbs away from me, but I knew

that I could push ME away from 50,000 lbs.

He tried to tuck me under his fin and literally

would swim until I would be under his fin,

and I'd hold on to it

so he couldn't hold me there because I would drown.

And his eye was right next to mine.

He had this eye widening where you see the whites of his eye.

It was painful, and it was very, very scary.

This went on for ten and a half minutes...

Until I saw the shark.

The whale came right up behind me and pushed me to the boat.

There is a big, big tiger shark up there!

Well, come in the boat!

A big tiger shark!

And climbing up on the back of the boat and the whale

was still there.

Nan, the whale...

Literally there.

WHALE BLOWS

I love you, too!

I love you, too!

This is not a normal thing.

I love you!

I just know that it's incredible altruistic behaviour.

What's altruistic behaviour?

Altruism is when you commit an act

to help or protect another life

What did this whale gain from any of this

other than pushing me to the boat and protecting me?

It turns out that Nan isn't the only one to have been saved

by a humpback.

There have been over 100 recorded incidents of humpbacks interfering

when other species are being hunted.

The global centre of these is Monterey Bay,

and this woman has been seeing it for years.

Humpbacks are saving other animals.

Why are they doing this?

Meet Nancy.

My name is Nancy Black.

Nancy is an animal lover and takes her dogs to sea.

But the animal Nancy loves the most is the killer whale.

I just like, saw them, and I am like, "I just want to study

"wild killer whales."

Nancy spent her life following them

and named her boats after them.

The Sea Wolf...

the other boat is caught the Blackfin.

She's one of the great pioneers of whale watching in Monterey Bay.

When I first started way back in the late '80s,

no-one believed me that there was whales here to watch.

This is Jason, and this is Mike.

They're Nancy's drone guys, giving her a new perspective

on whale behaviour.

You can see things from the air that you wouldn't see

at all from the boat.

This season, Nancy watched from above as killer

whales hunted and killed this grey whale calf.

And then from nowhere,

humpbacks arrived.

What were they doing?

I was on the surface and could only catch glimpses

of what was happening.

It's just, sort of, humpbacks everywhere and then killer whales

everywhere and trying to figure out, with all the boats,

what's happening. That's really difficult.

From above, Nancy could see the whole scene.

With the drone, you can see where the humpbacks are in relation

to the killer whales.

What were they doing?

They were protecting the carcass from the killer whales

from coming at it. It was almost like they were acting

like it was their own calf.

The carcass has been pushed deeper underwater,

and the humpbacks seem to be chasing the killer whales away

and throwing their tails.

A blow from a humpback could kill a killer whale.

Do you just think they hate killer whales?

Probably, yeah.

Whatever it is, their instinct is to shoo them away.

Humpbacks have been seen coming to the rescue of seals,

sea lions, dolphins, and even giant ocean sunfish.

Do they really care about saving other animals?

I don't want to think it initially, as a scientist,

because I feel like I am anthropomorphising the whale.

But when you see more and more and more evidence

of these animals saving other animals,

then you have to start thinking, is their social awareness

of other species so high that they feel empathy to other animals,

that they want to save those animals?

Other baleen whales like blue whales and fin whales

are very scared of killer whales.

Where the biggest animal on the planet, the blue whale,

flees, humpbacks can fight.

No other whale has such giant and lumpy pectoral fins.

Scientists think that these five-metre-long deadly weapons

give humpbacks the power to take on the wolves of the sea.

It was our humpback's pectoral fin that hit our kayak,

and, crucially, from the beach, Debi had filmed a clear shot

of that fin.

So, I took it to show Ted.

Dmph!

There! That is pretty good.

Oh, that is pretty good.

OK, so....

Ted found a breaching whale from that day

with a similar pec fin.

These are Kate Spencer's photos.

This is your day, but this is an hour

and 20 minutes later.

Let's zoom in a little bit.

Take a little screenshot of it so we have a reference there.

Then, let's go to this video.

It has got dark lump there. Yeah.

It's got a shape there.

It's got a white gap running through there,

then it's got a dark lump there.

That makes this an interesting suspect.

Could you look at all of the photos of our candidate?

Yeah.

All the sea lions.

They're just having a ball.

Wait! That's us! There you go!

That's next to us!

One of these boats is our boat.

She is in our kayak group.

That's her there! I think that makes her the prime suspect.

It's got the same left under arm pec. Yeah.

Well, not the same, but very...

Who knows, it doesn't look dissimilar.

Yeah. Exactly. It's next to us just before we get breached on,

and it's breaching after we get breached on.

It is a strong case.

Yes!

In your honour, Tom... You're going to...

..we are going to name this whale "Prime Suspect".

I like it.

I didn't think that would work!

What's that line there?

We can ask Pieter.

Pieter looked to the scars on the whale we'd named "Prime Suspect".

Do you see that little indentation right there?

That's very typical of an entanglement.

Prime Suspect, like over half the whales

in these waters, bears scars

from contact with us.

And Pieter also picked up on something else,

something I'd missed even though I'd watched the video

hundreds of times.

There is a lot of awareness going on here, because usually

those eyes are much closer in on the body to kind of protect them,

and they're looking to the sides,

but this animal has pooched them out.

Look at the eyes here! The eyes are now distended out.

It's looking down at the kayak.

Eyes in, starts to go out, goes out more, goes out more.

So, now I know that as I looked up at Prime Suspect,

it stuck out its eyes and looked back down on us.

And, finally, Pieter wanted to check that we'd got the right whale.

Humpback whales have knobs on their faces.

These have whiskers inside them,

and they're patterns are unique to each whale.

Here it is. OK, that's what I'm looking for.

So, you got your blowhole here. You got your blowhole there.

Just on the opposite side of the blowhole,

you see these paired rostral knobs, smaller, bigger, smaller, bigger,

so based on this photograph and that frame from the video,

these are the same animals.

That's my story, and I'm sticking to it.

So, Debi's video of our breacher

gave us a glimpse of his left pec fin,

which looked like the left pec fin of a whale Kate Spencer saw

breaching an hour later.

That same whale was photographed by Kate Cummings

next to some kayakers just before the breach,

the same people who came

to our rescue minutes later.

From Pieter, came the final piece of evidence.

The knobs on my whale's head are a perfect match.

Against the odds, we've solved this whale whodunnit.

But this success is bittersweet.

Prime Suspect has become an individual to me

and somehow more real.

And I want this whale to be OK,

but I still don't know where it is.

I want to meet someone who can you tell me what the future

holds for Prime Suspect and its fellow whales.

I think there's a real chance that there's a couple of species

or populations of whales that could go extinct in my lifetime

if we don't do things differently, and I take that personally.

I take responsibility for that at some level, because I am

a human, and I don't like it.

This is Ari.

My name's Ari Friedlaender.

This is his dog, Buckwheat.

Buck, do you want to go to the beach?

Ari loves Antarctica.

You feel small and insignificant very quickly.

And this is Ari's job.

I'm the guy that puts tags on whales and learns about what they do.

Ari is one of the pioneers of whale tagging.

The tags don't hurt the whales,

and they can stay in place for hours.

They can record the direction the whale moves, how fast

and how deep, and, most vividly of all,

videos pointing in different directions from the whale.

They are powerful new conservation weapon.

Every tag we get back and watch is new.

And we learn things every minute of every tag

that we've ever put out.

What's the feeling that you get when you just watch hour

after hour of being a whale?

Ohh...

Man, we don't know anything. You know?

You're constantly seeing things that you had no idea

they did, or that you didn't expect to see.

You're humbled, for sure.

This is how our distant cousins live.

In a world where we cannot go...

..and haven't seen before.

It's ballet underwater, it's calming, it's so quiet.

Just unbelievable.

We can see a humpback use its mighty tail

to propel itself into a breach.

We can watch them swoop through schools of fish...

..and see them swimming among the other animals.

We see that humpbacks, despite their size,

are far more agile than we suspected and manoeuvre gracefully

around one another.

But sometimes, like this,

they bump into each other.

These are tiny and profound glimpses

into what it's like to be a whale.

And they are vital.

I often have these guilty feelings like, "Am I doing enough?

"Are we getting enough out of this?

"Are we doing enough for these animals, just with our science?"

This year, Ari and his team are combining tagging

with a massive interdisciplinary whale-science blitz.

For two weeks, along with scores of scientists from different

universities and research centres, they're throwing everything

they've got in understanding the whales here.

Ari's friend Jeremy is in charge.

I'm an assistant professor at Stanford University's

Hopkins Marine Station.

We've got about four or five different boats out here

and about 30 people coordinating together

to try to get tags on whales.

We're looking to pick up a tag that fell off a blue whale

a couple of hours ago.

This tag has been on overnight though, so we got some

good information as to what the whale's been doing,

but we got to pick it up first.

Wooo!

We spotted it!

There it is!

Multiple drones take to the air

to track and measure the whales.

Biopsy darts take DNA samples. Good sample.

From the big boats, they take noise recordings,

plastic trawls, fish scans, and catch samples of whale faeces.

Oh, the things we do for science!

We can tell all kind of cool stuff from this, like how stressed out

they are, I can look at hormones.

You'll never see the entire animal underwater like this.

Right, I have never seen this before.

This is amazing.

Isn't it an amazing shot?

The hope is that by building the most complete picture yet

of the whales in their environment, we can find a way to share the sea.

It's not up to a whale to not get entangled or to get struck

by a ship. It is up to us to slow that ship down,

to put it in a different place,

or to use lines or types of fishing gear that aren't going

to lethally take down that animal.

But people won't change unless they care.

I'd love for people to be able to feel what I do

and to have that kind of connection to these animals.

So, you don't want to just find things? You want to affect people?

I absolutely do. I want to find out how these animals live,

and I want to use that information to make people care more.

A member of this giant team is someone I've been wanting to see

for a while.

A legend in this community.

John Calambokidis probably knows more about the large whales

on the West Coast than anybody else in the world.

John is the ultimate field biologist.

The guy that goes 70 miles out in a small inflatable by himself

to identify humpback and blue whales.

When he started over 30 years ago,

few had studied the whales here.

He now has the largest whale database on the entire West Coast.

I wanted to ask him about my whale.

Prime Suspect is one of the whales that we regularly have seen

on the California coast going back to 2008,

an animal that was actually first identified as a calf

and we actually knew who its mother was.

This is Prime Suspect's mum,

and this is Prime Suspect as a calf,

when its tail flukes were still white.

So, you know when it was born and who its mum is?

Yes. We try to track that.

I mean, it's part of our database.

We take this for granted among these 36,000 records we have.

We know from where it's been seen that it has a high chance,

both it and its mother,

of being an animal that either came from mainly Mexico

or Central America.

When was it born?

How old is it?

Seven years old in 2015.

I mean, that's amazing!

Yes, I know, it is kind of neat that we know that about it.

Now I know what happened that day.

That morning, we paddled out over a giant underwater canyon

and into one of the greatest concentrations of the humpbacks

in this coast's history.

The humpbacks were just doing what humpbacks do.

I don't think it was trying to hit us.

I know it was seven years old,

but it first came with its mother from Central America,

but it has returned each year since then until now.

I know it has survived being entangled.

But for all I've learnt,

I do not know where Prime Suspect is today.

As my time drew to an end, Charlotte joined to me,

and I told her everything.

I do feel strangely now that we have a connection

with Prime Suspect.

It's amazing if we can find this whale again,

then maybe we can see what it's doing and we can follow it

and we could maybe even be following it for as long as we live.

We went out every day.

Our eyes always peeled for a particular whale.

I would love Prime Suspect to have a long and happy life.

Hopefully, we'll see it before I go home. That would be amazing.

It was our last day out.

But when we left Moss Landing, there wasn't a whale to be seen.

All the other boats had driven far away in search of whales,

and then, this happened.

Breach!

It's right in front of us!

Whoo!

Again and again, the lone whale kept going,

breaching,

chin slapping, pec slapping, tail throwing.

It doesn't get better than this.

That was amazing.

We just had an incredible, chronic breaching humpback whale.

You called them chronic breaches? Chronic, they keep going.

They don't stop, at least over 30 times.

Do you know why?

Because of her! It was her last day!

It was my last day! I know, I can't believe it!

We've been here for six weeks, and we haven't seen anything like that.

And you have like a last afternoon... I guess I'm just lucky.

Yeah!

So good!

Now, we can add our video to the ever-expanding

library of whale awesomeness.

This is the closest I can bring you to the moment frozen in my mind.

A whale suspended in the air.

The most spectacular thing, I think, in the world.

But this whale was not Prime Suspect.

Its name is 0501280.

It was time for me to go home.

This detective story started as a whodunnit,

which I never expected to solve.

It's led me into a much bigger story

of a unique community driven by their passion to understand,

protect, and take wonder in whales.

They've taught me how much and yet, how little we know,

about these colossal animals.

Without them, the whales here would be in trouble.

And with their help, the search for Prime Suspect can continue.

And will you keep an eye out for me?

Yes, but I have about 3,500 other whale humpbacks

I'm keeping an eye out for, so I might get it confused!