The team who made Blue Planet II used a camera with suction cups to capture an intimate family portrait of sperm whales.

The sperm whale is the largest toothed predator on the planet and the master of the open ocean and the team wanted to show how having a tight-knit family is a good way to survive in the ocean.

Sperm whale family life is a complex social network and the logistics to film it are more than tricky - they live across the world’s seas and can rove for fifty miles or more a day, on many days you would be lucky to even have one encounter.

The team went out in a boat to where the whales gather in order to attach a camera

When one of the mammals surfaced, one of the team leaned out of the boat

One of the cameras that was attached to a sperm whale for Blue Planet II

Finding and staying with a sperm whale family would be the biggest challenge the team needed to solve.

Shane Gero of Aahrus University has been studying sperm whales for nearly twenty years in the Caribbean Island of Dominica.

He has been placing data and acoustic tags on them for a long time, so importantly had the experience to help them develop and deploy the camera tags, which he could then also use to further his research.

Gero said: ‘I spend thousands of hours with these whales and hundreds of hours with this family but I have never seen the world they have.’

John Ruthven, a producer for Blue Planet II, said when the team looked at the footage they were blown away.

The view from one of the special cameras that was attached to the whales

Producer John Ruthven said when they first saw the they 'where hardly ready for what we saw'

Although some diving behaviour has been recorded on a sperm whale before, no one has ever managed to keep a camera on for a complete dive cycle

Ruthven said the cameras allowed us to ride with the whale into its world like never before.’

‘To really be part of a sperm whale family and join them on a hunt, we wanted to deploy sperm whale suction-cup cameras. When we recovered the first camera tag we where hardly ready for what we saw.

‘The female carrying the camera had a calf, and it repeatedly bumped the mother, as if for reassurance, in a way never seen before.

‘Although some diving behaviour has been recorded on a sperm whale before, no one has ever managed to keep a camera on for a complete dive cycle.

‘In the pitch black we hear her calls change to louder and more regular clicks – sonar that echoes from her prey.

‘You can even tell when she catches a squid because the clicks speed up to a shrill intensity and then suddenly stop, as she presumably she pauses to feed.

‘In the end we recorded at least ten whole dive cycles from Dominican sperm whales, allowing us to ride with the whale into its world like never before.’