Footage Shows How Narwhals Use Tusks To Hunt And Play

We’re taking a polar plunge into the science of sea unicorns, also known as narwhals!

Narwhals are mysterious arctic whales with long, twirly tusks protruding from their foreheads, like a creature out of a fairy tale. And it turns out that we don’t know too much about them, partly because they live so far north in the remote Arctic.

An international team of researchers used drones to observe narwhals in the wild and learned new things about their behavior, including how they use their tusks to hunt and play.

Host Flora Lichtman gets on the horn with Dr. Gregory O’Corry-Crowe, research professor and biologist at Florida Atlantic University, who was an author on the new narwhal study, published last month in Frontiers in Marine Science.

Guest: Dr. Greg O’Corry-Crowe is a research professor at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, Florida.

Transcripts for each episode are available at sciencefriday.com.

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