Photo Credit: NOAA Fisheries
Speaking of humpback whales, today, these guys share the waters of New England with the fin whale, but that wasn’t always the case. Researchers believe that before the moratorium on commercial whaling, humpback whales saw an almost 95% reduction in population size, putting them squarely on the list of critically endangered species.
Humpback whales are easily identifiable because of their long pectoral fins and their namesake feature: the hump on their backs. They travel all across the globe, with some covering distances of nearly 5,000 miles to get to more productive feeding grounds.
When they arrive at these feeding grounds, humpback whales use their baleen to filter out food from large gulps of water. As highly intelligent creatures, they employ a number of techniques to gather food, the most interesting of which is called “group coordinated bubble net feeding.” This process involves using curtains of air bubbles to condense prey and push them toward the surface, where they are consumed by upward-swimming whales.
Minke Whale
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