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Humpback Whales
These amazing photographs were taken by our Lynx Observer Lt Stimpy Simpson.
Going up and Breaching whale
They show humpback whales feeding on krill. Humpbacks have a number of feeding techniques. They will either swallow krill as they cruise along just under the surface, or they lunge upwards at them from below. They also make nets of bubbles around swarms of krill and then swim up through the middle to engulf them.
Humpbacks are the fifth largest animal on this planet. A stoutly firm-bodied whale of about 13 -18 metres long ,weighing 25 – 30 tonnes, their colour ranges from all-black or grey to black upperparts and white below.
Belly shot and Back flip
The small dorsal fin sits on a raised hump (the humpback) with a series of smaller bumps leading to the tail. The most striking feature of these whales is their extraordinarily long pectoral flippers, nearly a third of the body length, some 5m long. Their flippers are white or nearly white and the pigmentations pattern on the underside of the fluke (tail) is unique to the individual, rather like a fingerprint.
Humpbacks normally travel in small groups, swimming at about 5 knots, but are powerful enough to leap clear of the water frequently in spectacular breaching. They sometimes meet in herds of up to twelve animals and move along predictable migration routes.
In the past these magnificent beasts were hunted in these waters. By the 1960s, stocks had been reduced to below 3000 from a pre-whaling population estimated at 100,000, but numbers are very slowly recovering. A recent estimate put the Southern Ocean population at 17,000.
Whales have inhabited the oceans for over 3 million years and captured the imagination of countless cultures. The native Inuit peoples of the Arctic, who have depended on hunting small numbers of sea mammals for generations, credit dolphins and whales with divine creation. Their legends tell of a young girl named Sedna, who refused to marry every man who asked her. She then fell in love with a dog and married him instead. Enraged, all of Sedna's rejected men took her aboard a boat and pushed her into the sea. Sedna grasped the edge of the boat in an effort to stop herself from falling into the freezing waters, but the cruel men chopped off all her fingers. Her severed fingers fell into the sea, and turned into the world's first whales, dolphins, seals and walruses. Sedna is now the reigning goddess of the sea, and if she becomes enraged, she will shut away all the sea-beasts so man is unable to hunt.
Humpback whale breaching
Whatever their origins, there is something undeniably special and unique about whales.
More information about whales can be found in our factfile on whales and whaling – click here
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