Sperm Whales - Leviathans in the Med (250/268)

Sperm Whales - Leviathans in the Med (250/268)

Sperm whales are the largest predators on earth, but only a few hundred have survived in the Mediterranean. "Animal World" embarks on an adventure-filled search for the last leviathans of the Mediterranean.
Evi Tsougiopoulou has dedicated her life to the sperm whales of the Mediterranean. A Sisyphean task, given that only around 200 sperm whales still live in the eastern Mediterranean today, with barely 1,000 in the Mediterranean as a whole. Finding them is like trying to find a needle in a haystack. Nonetheless she must try and our documentary finds her en route to the Hellenic Trench - more than 1,000 kilometers of scientific terra incognita. Only here where the Mediterranean is at its deepest can deep-sea hunters like the sperm whale find sufficient food.
Evi Tsougiopoulou's first acoustic and visual observations found that the sperm whales spend the entire year on the west-southwestern coast of Crete. In subsequent years, it was discovered thanks to photo identification that, depending on the season, individual animals or small groups of young and mature males as well as females with their young stayed in this region at the same time. The Hellenic Trench is thus one of those rare places in the world where females with their young and single males spend the entire year living side by side, feeding and reproducing along trench. But are the numbers right?

More and more, Evi Tsougiopoulou has come to doubt that they are. On her last almost three-week long research trip she recorded only 17 sperm whales - on another 900 kilometer long trip to Sicily she failed to record even one.

The sperm whales face many threats including drift net fishing, climate change and environmental pollution, which all combine to decimate their numbers more and more.

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