Humpback whale

What do humpback whales look like?

Humpback whales are massive, growing up to 17 metres in length. Their huge, dark bodies are flanked by enormous pectoral flippers growing up to around a third of their body length.  Fantastic tools, they use their highly-manoeuvrable flippers for hunting by slapping the water and for swimming and even possibly regulating their body temperature. Equipped with a giant tail, this is their identifying feature. When they ‘fluke-up’ and dive, researchers can identify individual humpback whales by the markings on the underside of their tails. Moving to their heads and humpback whales are covered in funny knobbles. Unlike Auntie Mildred and more like Sooty the cat, these knobbles or bumps are called tubercles, and contain a single hair acting like a cat’s whiskers. Providing a sensory tool, these hairs feed back information about the whales’ surroundings.

What’s life like for a humpback whale?

A year in the life of a humpback whale is a tale of two halves. Humpback whales are experts when it comes to travelling and devote huge portions of their time to being on the move. With half the year spent in colder, high latitude polar waters like Norway, they use this time to feed and fatten up. Following this period, they then head to warmer, shallow tropical waters, socialising, mating and looking after their young calves. Well-known for their underwater lullabies, male humpback whales are particularly vocal during the mating season. No-one knows for sure why this is but it could be that males are attempting to serenade potential female partners. Covering such huge distances, humpback whales are constantly exposed to a number of threats and must navigate a myriad of life-threatening dangers. These include whalers, fishing nets and ships.

What do humpback whales eat?

Like many other large whales, the prey of humpback whales are microscopic compared to their own bulking mass. Feasting on plankton, tiny crustaceans like krill and other small schooling fish, they gulp enormous mouthfuls of their prey and seawater. Using their baleen plates, they then filter out the water. As you can imagine, due to their size humpback whales need to eat a lot of prey to survive. In fact, an adult humpback whale can consume up to 1360kg of food each day.

Where do humpback whales live?

Humpback whales are found in all the world’s major oceans. Most populations undertake huge annual migrations, moving between mating and calving grounds in warmer, tropical waters, and feeding grounds in colder, more bountiful waters. Unfortunately, humpback whales were hunted extensively in years gone by, and still are in some places, such as the St Vincent and Grenadine islands in the Caribbean. In some areas, like the north Atlantic, their numbers are thought to be recovering, yet in others, like the north west Pacific, there is still a major cause for concern.