Did you ever imagine the sperm whales sleeping? How would that look like..? If you still can’t picture that, then let the Swiss photographer Franco Banfi help you out.

Recently Franco snapped an extremely rare shot of a group of sperm whales in their sleep. He and a team of scuba divers were following the pack in the Caribbean Sea, near Dominica Island, when suddenly the whales stopped moving and went into a synchronized vertical rest. This behavior was first documented only back in 2008, when a team of biologists from the UK and Japan drifted into a group of stationary sperm whales. After studying tagged whales the team found out that this collective nap occurs for approximately 7 percent of the whale’s life, in short stretches of just 6-24 minutes. More info: Franco Banfi | instagram (h/t: kottke, colossal)

Read more

Flying Over the Sleepers

Franco’s photo “Flying Over the Sleepers” was a finalist in the 2017 Big Picture Competition in the category of Human/Nature.