For animals half the length of their body with ivory appendages protruding from the top of their head, Narwal moves through the water with amazing grace.
“It's almost captivating,” said Greg O'Collie Crow, a research professor at Florida Atlantic University, who studies marine mammals. “The accuracy they wielded their fangs wasn't like a broadsword. It was like a surgical instrument or a violin bow.”
In a study published last month in the Frontier of Marine Science, Dr. Okolly Kraw and colleagues argue that Naruwal doesn't just show off his fangs.
Narwhal's fangs were the inspiration for the mythology of the unicorns. With rare exceptions, it is known that only men have them, and the large fangs are what female Narwar seeks from their peers. However, animals were difficult to study.
“They are extremely shy and elusive whales,” said Christine Reidre, professor of applied animal ecology at the University of Washington, who was not involved in the study. “They're really hard to approach. They're really skittish,” she added that Nawal tends to dive deep into the water far from the coast, and doing research in the Arctic is logistically complicated and a challenging species to observe in the wild.
With the help of the local Inuit community, a team of researchers identified high Arctic spots in Canada and installed camps and fly drones. The calm waters of Creswell Bay in Nunavut, where Narwhals had previously been observed to have spent the summer, were shallow and clear, and combined with the 24-hour daylight in August allowed researchers to film some of the best footage of Narwhal ever filmed.
When Dr. O'Corry-Crowe and his team studied the recordings, they identified previously unobserved fang behavior. And one of those actions looked terrible, like a performance.
In multiple instances, Narwhals chased Arctic Char, but strangely, they didn't try to catch it and eat it. The whales even slowed down when necessary to keep the fish away from the tip of their tusks. When interacting with the fish in these encounters, they used gentle taps or nudges. And in fact, it appears that the Arctic char is not always trying to escape the Narwal they pursue.
“They don't actually forage fish. We were hesitant to use the word 'play', but that's really how it looked,” said Courtney Watt, a Canadian Fisheries and Marine researcher, and Courtney Watt, author of the study.
She added that the old Narwar could also use such behavior to teach young people how to pursue their prey.
The footage also captured the whale making some clever spears. The narWhals were seen before being careful before eating fish to eat fangs, but this is the first published study to document its behavior. Nawal stabs and slashes the fish with both the tip of the fang and shaft, negates and possibly kills them before consuming prey.
During spearfishing, the narWhals were interrupted by green seagulls and continued to jump into the water to rob the fish. Sea gulls are known to track and remove hunts of other marine mammals, but this was the first recorded interaction of this behavior, and specifically, the first recorded interaction.
Dr. Laidre said it is best not to jump to too many conclusions about Narwal's behavior observed in a single study. The researchers agree. That's why they didn't want to explicitly play Narwal's interaction with the Arctic Char. Dr. O'Corry-Crowe added that many of his team observed “suggesting more questions than they answer, and that's very exciting.”
“All we really need to do is go back and do more work,” he said. “And I can't wait to do that.”
