Whales are large mammals adapted to marine life. Like other mammals, they breathe oxygen from the air, have a small amount of hair, and are warm blooded.
In 1820 an 80-ton sperm whale attacked the Essex (a whaling ship from Nantucket, Massachusetts) 2,000 miles from the western coast of South America. Herman Melville's 1851 novel Moby-Dick was in part inspired by this story.
The name of Moby Dick was inspired by a real albino whale called Mocha Dick which reputedly killed 30 sailors before being killed in 1838.
The 3-ton killer whale Keiko became a whale star in the 1993 movie Free Willy. After the success of the film, he was moved by the US Air Force from his cramped quarters in Mexico City to a luxury aquarium in Newport, Oregon.
Keiko was eventually freed in Iceland, in July 2002. He did not fully adapt to the wild and died at the age of 27 on December 12, 2003 in a Norwegian fjord.
Even when taking dinosaurs into account, the modern day blue whale is the largest animal to have ever lived.
The mouth of a blue whale is so big it can hold its own body weight in water.
A blue whale's heart is the size of a Volkswagen Beetle and you could swim through some of its arteries.
A blue whale's heart rate gets as low as 2 beats per minute, raising up to 37 when it resurfaces (more oxygen access). It works at physiological extremes, and explains why the whale never evolved to be even bigger.
Fins are used by aquatic animals such as killer whales to generate thrust, to control motion, or to regulate temperature.
The blue whale can produce can produce loud whistling calls that reach up to 188 decibels. The noise can be detected over 500 miles (800 km) away.
The sperm whale makes the loudest noise. It makes a series of clicking noises that can reach as high as 236 decibels making it the loudest animal in the world.
Sperm whales click sounds can literally vibrate a human body to death. But when research divers approach them, the whales welcome them into their pod; while modulating their clicks so the divers aren't hurt.
Blue whale song has been known to travel up to 12,000 miles.
Blue whales sometimes break from a song and then pick it up in the exact same spot six months later. Scientists have no idea how or why this is done.
A killer whale learned to mimic human words such as "Hello" and "Bye Bye." Researchers studied a female named Wikie at Marineland Aquarium in Antibes, France, who was the first of its kind to copy human speech. Whales and dolphins are among the few animals other than humans which can learn to produce sound simply by hearing them.
Humpback whales tend to form lifelong friendships and reunite with their pals every year.
The grey whale migrates 12,500 miles from the Arctic to Mexico and back every year.
Gray whales were once known as "devilfish," due to the ferocity with which a female gray whale will protect its young.
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| Killer whales Pixiebay |
FAMOUS WHALES
In 1820 an 80-ton sperm whale attacked the Essex (a whaling ship from Nantucket, Massachusetts) 2,000 miles from the western coast of South America. Herman Melville's 1851 novel Moby-Dick was in part inspired by this story.
The name of Moby Dick was inspired by a real albino whale called Mocha Dick which reputedly killed 30 sailors before being killed in 1838.
The 3-ton killer whale Keiko became a whale star in the 1993 movie Free Willy. After the success of the film, he was moved by the US Air Force from his cramped quarters in Mexico City to a luxury aquarium in Newport, Oregon.
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| Keiko at the Oregon Coast Aquarium |
Keiko was eventually freed in Iceland, in July 2002. He did not fully adapt to the wild and died at the age of 27 on December 12, 2003 in a Norwegian fjord.
ANATOMY
Even when taking dinosaurs into account, the modern day blue whale is the largest animal to have ever lived.
The mouth of a blue whale is so big it can hold its own body weight in water.
A blue whale's heart is the size of a Volkswagen Beetle and you could swim through some of its arteries.
A blue whale's heart rate gets as low as 2 beats per minute, raising up to 37 when it resurfaces (more oxygen access). It works at physiological extremes, and explains why the whale never evolved to be even bigger.
Fins are used by aquatic animals such as killer whales to generate thrust, to control motion, or to regulate temperature.
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| Pixibay |
BEHAVIOR
The blue whale can produce can produce loud whistling calls that reach up to 188 decibels. The noise can be detected over 500 miles (800 km) away.
The sperm whale makes the loudest noise. It makes a series of clicking noises that can reach as high as 236 decibels making it the loudest animal in the world.
Sperm whales click sounds can literally vibrate a human body to death. But when research divers approach them, the whales welcome them into their pod; while modulating their clicks so the divers aren't hurt.
Blue whale song has been known to travel up to 12,000 miles.
Blue whales sometimes break from a song and then pick it up in the exact same spot six months later. Scientists have no idea how or why this is done.
A killer whale learned to mimic human words such as "Hello" and "Bye Bye." Researchers studied a female named Wikie at Marineland Aquarium in Antibes, France, who was the first of its kind to copy human speech. Whales and dolphins are among the few animals other than humans which can learn to produce sound simply by hearing them.
Humpback whales tend to form lifelong friendships and reunite with their pals every year.
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| Pixiebay |
The grey whale migrates 12,500 miles from the Arctic to Mexico and back every year.
Gray whales were once known as "devilfish," due to the ferocity with which a female gray whale will protect its young.
When sperm whales want a snooze, they take a deep breath, dive to 45 feet (13.7 meters) and slumber vertically. No one is quite sure why, but one theory is that allows them to float near the surface and stay alert to potential predators.
The blue whale eats three tons of food a day.
Sperm whales seek out habitats with large communities of bioluminescent plankton, which are not part of the whale's diet. As the plankton's predators (fish) approach the plankton, their glowing alerts the whale. The whale eats the fish. The plankton then turn out their lights.
The world's sperm whale population are estimated to consume roughly twice as much seafood as all of humanity combined per year,. Sperm whales can devour a whopping 300 million tonnes of prey annually, primarily consisting of squid, octopus, and various species of fish. The global seafood consumption of humanity sits around 160 million tonnes per year.
FEEDING
The blue whale eats three tons of food a day.
Sperm whales seek out habitats with large communities of bioluminescent plankton, which are not part of the whale's diet. As the plankton's predators (fish) approach the plankton, their glowing alerts the whale. The whale eats the fish. The plankton then turn out their lights.
The world's sperm whale population are estimated to consume roughly twice as much seafood as all of humanity combined per year,. Sperm whales can devour a whopping 300 million tonnes of prey annually, primarily consisting of squid, octopus, and various species of fish. The global seafood consumption of humanity sits around 160 million tonnes per year.
almost as much seafood, by weight, as humanity.
The krill eaten by a blue whale everyday weighs as much as 40,000 cheeseburgers.
Baby blue whales drink almost 60 gallons of milk in a day and gain 194 pounds every 24 hours.
Archaeological evidence suggests that primitive whaling, by Inuit and others in the North Atlantic and North Pacific, was practiced by 3000 BC. The primitive quarry were small, easily beached whales or larger specimens that came close to shore during seasonal migrations from polar feeding grounds to breed in sheltered bays.
The Japanese used nets, and the Aleuts used poisoned spears. The Inuit successfully hunted large whales employing toggle-headed harpoons attached by hide ropes to inflated sealskin boats.
The forerunners of commercial whaling were the Basques, who began catching whales as the animals gathered to breed in the Bay of Biscay in the 10th century.
When seaworthy oceangoing ships were built in the late 14th century, the Basques set off in search of other whaling bays and found them across the Atlantic in southern Labrador.
In 16th century Europe particularly around the Bay of Biscay area whale blubber was a common food for the poor, especially around Lent when it was the main diet for many, often accompanied by peas.
In 1571 the city of Paris celebrated the arrival of Elizabeth of Austria in the capital with a lavish banquet, which included whale on the menu.
In the early 19th century, whales were pursued by six-man rowing boats armed with hand harpoons and lances. Carcasses were dismembered alongside the mother ship and the blubber was rendered (melted down) in brick ovens.
The resulting whale oil was used for lighting and lubrication and in the manufacture of varnish, linoleum, leather, and pharmaceuticals. Baleen (whalebone) was used for corsets, knife handles, umbrella ribs, and brushes.
Modern whaling techniques were introduced in about 1870, when steam-powered whale catchers replaced the traditional rowing boats.
The first job of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, was ship's surgeon on a Greenland whaler named Hope.
More than 50,000 whales a year were killed by whaling operations during some years in the mid-1900s, before restrictions and enforcement became effective.
In 1946 the International Whaling Commission (IWC) was established to set up the guidelines followed by whaling nations today. The limitations were passed almost too late for the blue whale, which had already declined to dangerously low numbers in all oceans. The once large populations of blue whales in the eastern North Atlantic were almost brought to extinction.
In 1971 the United States declared all commercially exploited whales endangered species and made it illegal to use any product made from endangered whales.
During the 1970s a movement to eliminate all whaling operations began within the IWC. In October 1985 the nations belonging to the IWC imposed a moratorium on commercial whaling. However, not all countries have agreed to it, and several have used loopholes, which allow the killing of whales for research, in order to continue whaling. This makes it hard for the IWC to stop the hunters, so whales remain endangered.
Current whaling nations are Iceland, Norway and Japan, despite their joining to the IWC. Norway leads the world in commercial whaling, hunting hundreds more than Japan per year despite its much smaller population.
The scientific name for the blue whale is Balaenoptera musculus which may mean muscled whale but can also mean little mouse whale, perhaps a little joke by Carl Linnaeus who named it.
The krill eaten by a blue whale everyday weighs as much as 40,000 cheeseburgers.
Baby blue whales drink almost 60 gallons of milk in a day and gain 194 pounds every 24 hours.
RELATIONSHIP WITH HUMANS
Archaeological evidence suggests that primitive whaling, by Inuit and others in the North Atlantic and North Pacific, was practiced by 3000 BC. The primitive quarry were small, easily beached whales or larger specimens that came close to shore during seasonal migrations from polar feeding grounds to breed in sheltered bays.
The Japanese used nets, and the Aleuts used poisoned spears. The Inuit successfully hunted large whales employing toggle-headed harpoons attached by hide ropes to inflated sealskin boats.
The forerunners of commercial whaling were the Basques, who began catching whales as the animals gathered to breed in the Bay of Biscay in the 10th century.
When seaworthy oceangoing ships were built in the late 14th century, the Basques set off in search of other whaling bays and found them across the Atlantic in southern Labrador.
In 16th century Europe particularly around the Bay of Biscay area whale blubber was a common food for the poor, especially around Lent when it was the main diet for many, often accompanied by peas.
In 1571 the city of Paris celebrated the arrival of Elizabeth of Austria in the capital with a lavish banquet, which included whale on the menu.
 |
| Dutch whalers near Spitsbergen, their most successful port. Abraham Storck, 1690 |
In the early 19th century, whales were pursued by six-man rowing boats armed with hand harpoons and lances. Carcasses were dismembered alongside the mother ship and the blubber was rendered (melted down) in brick ovens.
The resulting whale oil was used for lighting and lubrication and in the manufacture of varnish, linoleum, leather, and pharmaceuticals. Baleen (whalebone) was used for corsets, knife handles, umbrella ribs, and brushes.
Modern whaling techniques were introduced in about 1870, when steam-powered whale catchers replaced the traditional rowing boats.
The first job of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, was ship's surgeon on a Greenland whaler named Hope.
More than 50,000 whales a year were killed by whaling operations during some years in the mid-1900s, before restrictions and enforcement became effective.
In 1946 the International Whaling Commission (IWC) was established to set up the guidelines followed by whaling nations today. The limitations were passed almost too late for the blue whale, which had already declined to dangerously low numbers in all oceans. The once large populations of blue whales in the eastern North Atlantic were almost brought to extinction.
 |
| World population graph of blue whales |
In 1971 the United States declared all commercially exploited whales endangered species and made it illegal to use any product made from endangered whales.
During the 1970s a movement to eliminate all whaling operations began within the IWC. In October 1985 the nations belonging to the IWC imposed a moratorium on commercial whaling. However, not all countries have agreed to it, and several have used loopholes, which allow the killing of whales for research, in order to continue whaling. This makes it hard for the IWC to stop the hunters, so whales remain endangered.
Current whaling nations are Iceland, Norway and Japan, despite their joining to the IWC. Norway leads the world in commercial whaling, hunting hundreds more than Japan per year despite its much smaller population.
FUN WHALE FACTS
The scientific name for the blue whale is Balaenoptera musculus which may mean muscled whale but can also mean little mouse whale, perhaps a little joke by Carl Linnaeus who named it.
Sperm whales got their name from late 18th century commercial whalers who discovered the enormous white fluid-filled organ in the whale's head and misinterpret it for sperm fluid. This organ is now called the spermaceti organ.
In 1999 scientists identified a bowhead whale, caught off the coast of Alaska, that had lived for 211 years, suggesting they are the longest-living mammals on Earth.
There are whales alive today which were born before Moby Dick was written.
Whales can die under their own weight if on land. Without water to support their size, they can end up crushing their own organs.
Under the Wreck of the Sea, Whales and Sturgeons Act of 1317, any whale washed up on British shores is the property of the monarch. The head belongs to the king and the tail to the queen.
Apart from man, great whales are the only specific animals mentioned in the King James Bible account of the creation in Genesis.
Sources Daily Express, Compton's Encyclopedia, Food For Thought by Ed Pearce
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