Beaked Whales Dive Deepest
Dive a few hundred metres beneath the ocean's surface and the environment changes rapidly, becoming darker and colder as the pressure rises. It is amazing to think of warm-blooded mammals in such an inhospitable environment, yet this is the domain of whales and dolphins. Beaked whales are particularly at home in deep water, as Peter Tyack and his colleagues discovered when they tagged two species and monitored their dives. They found that beaked whales repeatedly make long dives as deep as 2 km in search of squid, making their average foraging dives deeper and longer than any other air-breathing animal.