Narwhals, also known as Monodon monoceros, are small whales that swim through the Arctic Ocean. They’re famous for their singular spiraled tusks that protrude as far as 10 feet from their faces. But one other oddity of the species is that it dives and surfaces within the water without any apparent rhyme or reason.
A new paper published in PLOS Computational Biology makes sense of the narwhal’s seemingly random swimming. Putting an area of mechanics and mathematics called "chaos theory" to work, this paper states that specific diurnal and seasonal patterns do direct narwhals’ diving and surfacing behaviors, despite all appearances to the contrary.
