Diving into the world of Greece's native sperm whales

The underground space of the Hub venue in the central Athenian neighborhood of Kato Petralona was packed with people. But they weren’t there for a fancy charity event or some conference about entrepreneurship – popular events these days. Rather, they were there to listen to Dr Alexandros Frantzis, a biological oceanographer and founder and scientific director of the Pelagos Institute for Cetacean Research. The subject of his presentation was the sperm whale (Physeter macrocephalus), a subject he knows well having studied their presence in Greek waters systematically for the past 15 years.

Franztis, who has a contagious love for sperm whales and all cetaceans, transported his audience back to the summer of 1998, when what he calls a “conspiracy of nature,” found him off the southwestern coast of Crete on a research vessel equipped with his first hydrophone – an underwater microphone that records the sounds of the deep.

“I suddenly heard these sounds through the hydrophone,” said Frantzis. He played a tape of clicking sounds that instantly struck a chord with those members of the audience who knew what they were listening to, mainly people who had volunteered with the institute for its programs on Crete, in the Peloponnese, the southern Ionian and the Gulf of Corinth. The clicks were the sounds of the sperm whales’ own sound navigation system, which they use to make their way around the deep and search for food.

“It seems unreal. It’s difficult to convey the feeling right now, but it’s kind of like leaving this room and running into a dinosaur,” said Frantzis, sending a wave of laughter through the audience. As his research continued, the scientists made another startling discovery: that in contrast to...