Have you ever imagined how sperm whales sleep? How would that look …? If you still can not convince yourself, let Swiss photographer Franco Banfi help you.
Recently, Franco photographed an extremely rare group of sperm whales in their sleep. He and a team of divers followed the pack into the Caribbean Sea, near Dominica Island, when suddenly the whales stopped moving and entered a synchronized vertical rest.
This behavior was only documented for the first time in 2008, when a team of biologists from the United Kingdom and Japan drifted into a group of stationary sperm whales. After studying marked whales, the team discovered that this collective nap took place about 7% of the whale’s life, in short periods of 6 to 24 minutes.
Flying Over the Sleepers
