The Life Scientific - Darren Croft

Discovery

BBC

Science, Technology

4.3 • 1.2K Ratings

🗓️ 25 February 2025

⏱️ 27 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Darren Croft studies one of the ocean’s most charismatic and spectacular animals – the killer whale. Orca are probably best known for their predatory behaviour: ganging up to catch hapless seals or attack other whales. But for the last fifteen years, Darren Croft’s focus has been on a gentler aspect of killer whale existence: their family and reproductive lives . Killer whales live in multi-generational family groups. Each family is led by an old matriarch, often well into her 80s. The rest of the group are her daughters and sons, and grand-children. Especially intriguing to Darren is that female orca go through something like the menopause - an extremely rare phenomenon in the animal kingdom, only documented in just five species of toothed whales and of course in humans. Halting female reproduction in midlife is an evolutionary mystery, but it is one which Darren Croft argues can be explained by studying killer whales. Darren is Professor of Animal Behaviour at the University of Exeter. He talks to Jim Al-Kalili about his research on killer whales, his previous work revealing sophisticated social behaviour in fish, his life on the farm, and the downsides and upsides of being dyslexic.

Transcript

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0:00.0	On Radio 4, the more you listen, the more you see.
0:04.7	Hello, I'm Brian Cox.
0:05.6	And I'm Robin Ince, and this is The Infinite Monkey Cage.
0:08.3	In this series, we're going to have a planet off.
0:10.8	I feel like Jupiter wins.
0:12.8	And after all of that, we're just going to chill out a bit.
0:15.9	We're talking about your bog standard.
0:17.8	Ice, not the fancy one.
0:20.1	Science with funny bits.
0:21.9	The new series of The Infinite Monkey Cage.
0:24.1	Listen on Radio 4 and BBC Sounds.
0:28.0	My guest today is a biologist who's lucky enough to study one of the oceans,
0:32.7	most charismatic and spectacular animals, the killer whale.
0:36.8	Orca are probably best known for their predatory behaviour,
0:40.0	ganging out to catch hapless seals or attack other whales. But for the last 15 years,
0:45.6	Darren Croft's focus has been on a gentler aspect of killer whale existence, their family
0:50.7	and reproductive lives. Killer whales live in multi-generational family groups.
0:55.8	Each family is led by an old matriarch, often well into her 80s.
1:00.2	The rest of the group are her daughters and sons and grandchildren.
1:04.1	Especially intriguing to Darren is that female orca go through something like the menopause,
1:09.2	an extremely rare phenomenon in the animal kingdom,
1:11.9	only documented in a few other toothed whales, and of course in humans.
	...

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