99 Fun Facts About Whales

Which whale species is considered the largest animal on Earth?

Blue Whale: about 30 metres long and up to nearly 200 tonnes. Whalers took some 30,000 in the 1930-31 season alone and almost wiped the species out before hunting it was banned in 1966.

What is the primary food source for blue whales?

Krill are almost all a blue whale eats. It lunges open-mouthed into a swarm, then forces the water out through its baleen with its tongue, swallowing several tonnes of the shrimp-like animals a day.

What is the most common collective noun for a group of whales?

Pod: among orcas it is a family built around the mothers' line, and offspring tend to stay in it as adults; bigger gatherings form only briefly, to socialise or mate.

Through which specialized opening on top of their heads do whales breathe?

Blowhole: it is the whale's nostrils, which shifted over millions of years from the snout to the top of the head. Baleen whales still have two; toothed whales have just one.

Which word describes a whale hurling most of its body out of the water and landing with a huge splash?

Breaching can lift nearly the whole animal clear of the sea. Nobody is sure why whales do it; the leading ideas are signalling to other whales, shaking off parasites, or simply play.

What is the primary food source for sperm whales?

Squid and other cephalopods are hunted on dives that routinely reach 600 metres. Round sucker scars on the whales' heads suggest that giant squid put up a fight.

A whale drives itself forward by beating its tail flukes in which direction?

Up and down: a whale's flukes lie flat, where a fish's tail stands upright and sweeps sideways. Each humpback's flukes are so distinctly marked that scientists identify individuals from photos of them.

Humpback whales hunt together by herding fish inside a spiral 'net' made of what?

Bubbles: the whales circle beneath a shoal while releasing air, penning the fish inside a shrinking cylinder, then lunge up through the middle with their mouths open.

Which whale species has the longest lifespan of any mammal, potentially over 200 years?

Bowhead Whale: hunters off Alaska have found harpoon points more than a century old lodged in freshly caught bowheads, and studies suggest some live beyond 200 years.

Which fast-swimming whale is the second-largest animal on Earth?

Fin Whale: named for the fin on its back, it could outrun the early whaling ships, and was hunted in earnest only once steam-powered boats and exploding harpoons arrived.

Which animal is the closest living relative of whales and dolphins?

The hippopotamus and the whales split from a common ancestor more than 50 million years ago, which makes whales distant cousins of cows, pigs and deer too.

In the Bible, which prophet spends three days inside a 'great fish' that is often pictured as a whale?

Jonah is vomited out alive onto dry land. The Hebrew text says only 'great fish'; the whale arrived with translations such as the King James Bible, whose Gospel of Matthew puts him 'in the whale's belly'.

The humpback's scientific name Megaptera, 'big-winged', refers to which part of its body?

Its flippers: long and wing-like, they are what a humpback slaps on the water when it rolls at the surface, one of the displays that make the species a favourite of whale watchers.

Because a dolphin has to surface to breathe, how does it manage to sleep?

With half its brain at a time: one side rests while the other keeps the dolphin swimming, breathing and watching for danger through one open eye, and then the two sides swap.

The orca, or killer whale, is actually the largest member of which family?

The oceanic dolphins count the orca as their largest member. It is the sea's top predator, hunting in coordinated packs like wolves to take seals, sea lions and even other whales.

The beluga is nicknamed the 'sea canary' because of what?

Its high-pitched calls: a beluga chatters in whistles, squeaks, clucks and squeals. It also has no fin on its back, only a tough ridge, which lets it swim close beneath the sea ice.

The long spiral 'horn' on a male narwhal's head is really an overgrown what?

Tooth: it is a canine that grows out through the male's upper lip. Medieval Europeans who had never seen a narwhal took the tusks that reached them for unicorn horns.

The bowhead whale is named after its massive triangular skull, which it uses to do what?

Break through Arctic ice: the bow-shaped skull is about a third of the animal's whole length, and a bowhead comes up for air by ramming it through the frozen sea above.

The knobbly white patches of rough skin on a right whale's head are called what?

Callosities look white only because whale lice crowd onto them. Each whale's pattern is unique, so researchers use it like a fingerprint to tell one animal from another.

By the usual account of their name, why were right whales the 'right' ones to hunt?

They floated when killed, and were slow, full of oil and close to shore, or so the story goes. Dictionaries call that origin only alleged: what 'right' first meant in the name is unknown.

What name is given to the pictures whalers engraved on whale teeth and bone during their months at sea?

Scrimshaw was a whaleman's pastime: he scratched ships and sweethearts into a sperm whale's tooth with a jackknife or sail needle, then rubbed lampblack into the lines to make them show.

Which people of the Bay of Biscay coast were the first to hunt whales commercially, back in the Middle Ages?

The Basques rowed out after right whales that came into the bay, then followed the trade across the Atlantic. By the 1500s they were hunting from the coast of Labrador.

Which Nordic country objected to the 1986 whaling moratorium and resumed commercial hunts in 1993?

Norway was never bound by the pause, because it objected when the ban was agreed. Since 1993 it has set its own quotas for minke whales in its own waters.

Which country left the International Whaling Commission and resumed commercial whaling in July 2019?

Japan had not hunted commercially since the 1980s, whaling instead under research permits. On leaving the commission it gave up its Antarctic hunts and confined its whaling to its own waters.

Melville's white whale was modelled on which real, famously aggressive white sperm whale of the Pacific?

Mocha Dick, named after Mocha Island off Chile, was a legend among whalers for the fights he won. A magazine told his story in 1839, twelve years before Melville's novel appeared.

Ambergris, a waxy lump that forms in a sperm whale's gut and washes ashore, was long prized for making what?

Perfume makers prized ambergris because it makes a scent last far longer on the skin. The rare lumps that drift ashore are still nicknamed floating gold.

Spermaceti, the substance from a sperm whale's head, was once the material for high-quality what?

Candles of spermaceti were prized for their quality. The word is Latin for 'whale sperm', which is what the wax was first mistaken for, and the mix-up gave the sperm whale its name too.

A recording of humpback whale song left Earth in 1977 on the golden records carried by which space probes?

Voyager 1 and 2 each carry the record, compiled by a team under Carl Sagan: greetings in 55 human languages, music and the sounds of Earth, a humpback's song among them, for whoever may one day find it.

A cetacean carcass that sinks to the deep sea floor and feeds an ecosystem for decades is called what?

A whale fall feeds the deep in stages: scavengers strip the flesh within months, then for years or even decades the bones themselves fuel microbes and the animals that live on them.

How did Pakicetus, the earliest known whale, get around some 50 million years ago?

Walking on four legs: Pakicetus, found in Pakistan, was a wolf-like meat-eater that foraged at the water's edge. Only the bones of its ear give it away as a whale.

What mistake got the extinct whale Basilosaurus named 'king lizard'?

Its fossils were thought to be a giant reptile when it was named in 1834. Richard Owen then saw from the double-rooted teeth that it was a mammal, but the rules of naming kept the first name in place.

The mysterious 52-hertz call detected since 1989 earned its unidentified singer what nickname?

The world's loneliest whale sings far higher than the big whales around it, and for years only one such voice was heard in the whole North Pacific. Its discoverers guessed at a malformation or a hybrid.

Migaloo, the famous all-white humpback seen off Australia's east coast, was shown by a genetic test to be what?

A true albino: the test found that both his copies of the gene for tyrosinase, the enzyme that makes the dark pigment melanin, are broken, so his skin can make none at all.

The vaquita, the smallest and most endangered cetacean, lives only in which body of water?

The Gulf of California's northern end is its whole range, the smallest of any whale, dolphin or porpoise. Vaquitas drown there in illegal gillnets set for totoaba, a fish poached for its valuable swim bladder.

The baleen plates that filter a whale's food, once sold as 'whalebone' for corsets, are made of which substance?

Keratin, the stuff of human fingernails and hair, frays along the inner edge of each plate into bristles, and it is that fringe which sieves small prey from every mouthful of seawater.

A 2014 study found the long-finned pilot whale's neocortex holds almost twice as many neurons as which animal's?

A human's: the study counted about 37 billion neurons in the whale's neocortex, nearly double our own, and its authors concluded that neuron numbers alone cannot explain human intelligence.

Cabrillo National Monument, where crowds gather each winter to watch whales migrate along the coast, is in which US city?

San Diego lies on one of the longest migrations any mammal makes: from late December to March the whales pass the monument on their way from Alaska to give birth in Mexico.

Which whale swims about 10,000 miles a year between Arctic feeding grounds and the calving lagoons of Mexico's Baja California?

Gray Whale mothers give birth in Baja's warm, shallow lagoons. Whalers who hunted them there called the species 'devil fish' for the fury with which the whales, mothers above all, fought back.

Which environmental group sent inflatable boats between Soviet harpoon ships and whales off California in 1975?

Greenpeace began as a protest against nuclear tests in Alaska; campaigns like this one made saving whales its cause. A member forced off its board in 1977 over his tactics went on to found Sea Shepherd.

Which whale has out-dived even the sperm whale, reaching nearly 3,000 metres to set the mammal record?

Cuvier's Beaked Whale: a tagged animal reached 2,992 metres, deeper than any sperm whale on record. Mass strandings of the species have repeatedly been linked to the sonar of naval exercises.

Minke whales are the smallest members of which family of baleen whales?

The rorquals are the whales with pleated throats: the grooves let the mouth balloon outward to take in a huge gulp of water and food, even in the family's smallest member.

Despite appearances, a whale's spout is not a jet of seawater but mostly what?

Condensed breath: warm air from the lungs meets the cooler sea air and its moisture turns to droplets. The plume's shape differs from species to species, so watchers can name a whale from far off.

Why are most whales unable to turn their heads?

Their neck vertebrae are fused, which steadies the head at speed but locks it in place. The beluga is an exception: its neck bones are free, so it can nod and look from side to side.

Which way round is a whale calf usually born?

Tail first, though perhaps not always: a fossil of the early whale Maiacetus, read as a mother with her unborn calf, suggests that whales were once born headfirst.

The fatty 'melon' in the forehead of a beluga or dolphin does which job?

Focuses its echolocation clicks: the sound is made by air forced past structures in the nasal passage, and the melon beams it forward like a lens. A beluga can even change its melon's shape as it does so.

Why is whale excrement, released at the ocean surface, important to fisheries?

It is rich in iron and nitrogen that whales carry up from the depths where they feed. Released near the surface, the plumes fertilise plankton, the base of the food chain that fish stocks depend on.

In Herman Melville's great whaling novel, which captain hunts the white whale that took his leg?

Ahab finds his whale and loses everything: it sinks the ship and drowns the whole crew except the narrator, who stays afloat on a coffin built for his friend Queequeg.

The Stone Age rock carvings at Bangudae, which show whales being hunted from boats with harpoons, are in which country?

South Korea's Bangudae carvings were discovered only in 1971, six years after a new dam had begun to submerge the cliff for part of every year.

What is the thick layer of insulating fat beneath a whale's skin called?

Blubber is more than a coat against the cold: it is also the fuel store a whale lives on through the winter months, when food is scarce.

Whale milk is so rich in fat that it comes out with roughly the thickness of what?

Toothpaste is the usual comparison for whale milk, whose heavy load of fat lets a newborn calf build up its own insulating layer quickly.

How did Oregon officials famously dispose of a dead sperm whale on a Florence beach in 1970?

Blew it up with dynamite is the answer: engineers hoped scavengers would eat the small pieces, but large chunks landed in parking lots well back from the beach.

Which orca played Willy in the 1993 film Free Willy and was later flown to Iceland to be released?

Keiko became in 2002 the first captive orca to be fully released back into the ocean, though he never joined a wild group and kept seeking out people.

Which coffee chain takes its name from the chief mate of the whaling ship in Moby-Dick?

Starbucks got there by accident: its founders wanted a word starting with 'st', spotted a mining camp's name on an old map, and that reminded them of the novel's officer Starbuck.

Which social network showed the 'Fail Whale', a whale lifted by birds, when it was overloaded?

Twitter used Yiying Lu's drawing of eight orange birds lifting a whale in a net as its outage page, then retired it in 2013 once the site had become more stable.

Since 2020, orcas off Spain and Portugal have become notorious for ramming which part of sailing boats?

The rudder is the usual target: the orcas push and bite it until it bends or snaps off, and have spun some yachts almost full circle.

Which humpback whales produce the long, complex songs heard during the species' mating season?

Adult males do the singing: a single song can last about half an hour, and singers have been recorded keeping it up for as long as seven hours.

In Disney's Pinocchio, what is the name of the giant whale that swallows Geppetto at sea?

Monstro is a sperm whale in the 1940 film, and Pinocchio gets everyone out of his belly by making him sneeze.

Medieval traders sold the narwhal's long spiral spike as the horn of which legendary animal?

The unicorn was the supposed owner, and the spikes were given to kings as state gifts and used as a remedy against poisoning.

Which organ of the sperm whale is the largest of its kind in any animal, five times heavier than a person's?

Its brain averages about seven kilograms, the heaviest known in any living or extinct animal, though sheer size does not settle how clever a species is.

Which Star Trek film sends Kirk and his crew back to 1986 to fetch two humpback whales for the future?

The Voyage Home has an alien probe wrecking Earth because no humpbacks are left to answer its call, so the crew slingshots around the Sun to collect a pair from the past.

The 2013 documentary Blackfish centres on Tilikum, an orca held by which chain of marine parks?

SeaWorld reported falling attendance and profits the year after the film, which follows an orca involved in the deaths of three people.

A 2008 study found groups of sperm whales sleeping just under the surface in which unusual position?

Hanging vertically, the whales drifted motionless and ignored passing boats unless one actually touched them, which is why researchers think they were truly asleep.

Orcas and short-finned pilot whales are among the very few animals besides people known to go through what?

Menopause leaves female orcas living for decades after they have finished breeding, a pattern also found in belugas, narwhals and false killer whales.

Which sense are sperm whales thought to lack, having none of the lobes that process it?

Smell is missing because toothed whales have no olfactory lobes, whereas the baleen whales keep a working sense of it.

Belugas and narwhals lack which feature of most whales, an absence thought to help under sea ice?

A dorsal fin would get in the way under ice, so both species carry only a low ridge along the back; the beluga's genus name even comes from the Greek for 'wingless'.

Which lamp fuel, refined from petroleum, had replaced whale oil as the leading source of light by 1870?

Kerosene was cheaper, more efficient and longer-lasting than whale oil, and its rise sent the American whaling industry into decline.

A northern bottlenose whale drew crowds in January 2006 by swimming up which river in a capital city?

The Thames visitor, nicknamed Willy by Londoners, belonged to a species used to seas hundreds of metres deep, yet the river is only about five metres deep at most.

Most North Pacific humpback whales migrate each winter to breed in the waters of which US state?

Hawaii hosts thousands of humpbacks each winter, and the whales do not eat while they are there, living instead on reserves built up in colder waters.

Which sea monster described in the Book of Job later became a byword for a great whale?

Leviathan breathes fire and has impenetrable scales in Job, and the name later came to be used for great whales and for sea monsters in general.

Scientists estimate the age of a large baleen whale by counting the layers in which part of its body?

Its earwax plug builds up in layers through life, and one studied plug also held a record of the pesticides, flame retardants and mercury that the whale had met.

NOC, a beluga whale kept by the US Navy, surprised researchers in 1984 by imitating which sound?

Human speech from NOC was convincing enough that a diver surfaced to ask which colleague had ordered him out of the enclosure.

The 2002 film Whale Rider follows a girl of which people, whose ancestor is said to have ridden a whale?

Māori custom in the film reserves leadership for first-born sons descended from Paikea, so twelve-year-old Pai has to prove that a girl can be chief.

After hydrogenation was invented in the early 1900s, whale oil became an ingredient of which everyday food?

Margarine gave whaling a new market just as lamps stopped burning the oil, and makers went on using it until vegetable oil took its place.

Which American whaleship, rammed and sunk by a sperm whale in 1820, helped inspire the novel Moby-Dick?

Essex sank some 2,000 nautical miles off South America, leaving twenty men to make for land in three small whaleboats, a disaster that drew international attention.

Which group, founded by Paul Watson, harassed whaling ships off Antarctica in the TV series Whale Wars?

Sea Shepherd crews threw stink bombs of butyric acid, tried to foul propellers and even boarded the whalers, tactics that drew both praise and criticism.

The 'whale lice' that cling to the skin of right whales are not insects but small what?

Crustaceans of the family Cyamidae, whale lice are relatives of the skeleton shrimp rather than of the true lice that trouble land animals.

What is the name for a whale rising straight up to hold its head above the water?

Spyhopping is slow and controlled and can last for minutes, and orcas are thought to use it to look for seals resting on ice floes.

In Old English poems such as Beowulf, the kenning 'whale-road' is a poetic name for what?

The sea is also the 'swan-road' and the 'sail-road' in Beowulf, part of the poets' habit of renaming things with two-word riddles.

Hvaldimir, a beluga found in 2019 wearing a camera harness, was suspected of spying for which country?

Russia was the suspect, which is how he got his name: hval, a Scandinavian word for whale, joined to the first name of President Vladimir Putin.

A toothed whale picks up returning sound pulses mainly through which body part, not its ear openings?

Its lower jaw collects the pulses after they bounce back off prey and obstacles, letting the whale find its way in water too murky to see in.

The bumps on a humpback whale's head, known as tubercles, usually hold at least one what?

Fragile hair, about a tenth of a millimetre thick, pokes out of each bump, and because the knobs are rich in nerves they may act as sense organs.

What is the name for the branch of science devoted to whales, dolphins and porpoises?

Cetology took off only in the 1960s, when dedicated research institutes began studying the living animals intensively; before then most of what was known came from whalers.

Whale watchers can pick out a right whale at a distance because its blow rises in which shape?

A wide V forms because the two nostrils on top of a right whale's head are set far apart, sending up twin plumes about five metres high.

Pygmy and dwarf sperm whales can confuse an attacker by squirting what into the water?

Dark red fluid, up to twelve litres of it, is stored in a sac in the gut and released as a cloud to hide the whale, much as an octopus uses ink.

Sperm whales defend a calf by circling in the 'marguerite formation', with which parts pointing outward?

Their tails face the attackers because a full-grown whale's tail is powerful enough to deliver a lethal blow; the ring is named after a daisy-like flower.

What do the long pleats along a humpback whale's throat allow it to do?

Expand its mouth is the point: the pleats unfold like an accordion, so the whale can take in a far larger volume of water and strain its food from it.

Tourists visit Churchill, Manitoba, each summer to watch belugas in the river on the shore of which bay?

Hudson Bay's western shore has earned Churchill two nicknames: 'Beluga Capital of the World' and 'Polar Bear Capital of the World'.

Southern right whales gather to breed off the Valdés Peninsula, a World Heritage Site in which country?

Argentina's Valdés Peninsula shelters the most important breeding ground in the world for the species, and UNESCO listed the reserve in 1999.

Farewell Spit, a narrow sand spit described as a 'whale trap' for its mass strandings, lies in which country?

New Zealand's Farewell Spit catches long-finned pilot whales because the tide can retreat as much as seven kilometres across its gently sloping flats.

The grindadráp, a centuries-old hunt that drives pilot whales into shallow bays, is held in which archipelago?

Faroe Islands law has regulated the hunt since the Sheep Letter of 1298, and its name joins the Faroese words for pilot whale and killing.

Which Swedish naturalist declared in his 1758 Systema Naturae that whales were mammals and not fish?

Carl Linnaeus made the switch in the tenth edition of his catalogue of life, the same edition that zoologists treat as the starting point for all animal names.

Which traditional Inuit food consists of whale skin with the fat beneath it, usually eaten raw?

Muktuk is a good source of vitamin C, which sits in the skin itself, and in some dialects the word covers the skin alone.

In Avatar: The Way of Water, what are the whale-like creatures bonded to the Metkayina clan called?

Tulkun have sworn a vow of pacifism, which is why Payakan was exiled by the others for attacking the hunters who killed his mother.

Right whales feed by skimming through dense swarms of which tiny animals, a mainstay of the zooplankton?

Copepods are so small that a right whale has to swim open-mouthed through dense patches of them, straining the water as it goes.

What do scientists call the short rhythmic bursts of sound that sperm whales exchange within social groups?

Codas are learned within a stable family unit, and some patterns mark which clan a whale belongs to, a little like a dialect.

Which oxygen-storing protein, packed into the muscles of whales and seals, helps them stay underwater so long?

Myoglobin holds oxygen inside the muscle itself, and it was the first protein to have its three-dimensional structure revealed, work that earned a Nobel Prize.

Which term did English whalemen use for cutting the thick outer layer of fat from a whale in long strips?

Flensing was the English whalemen's word, while their American rivals called the same job cutting-in or flinching.

Which biologist's 1970 album Songs of the Humpback Whale became the best-selling nature recording ever made?

Roger Payne's recordings gave momentum to the Save the Whales movement, and a slowed-down snatch of them opens Kate Bush's debut album.

Which South African town employs a 'whale crier' who sounds a kelp horn when whales are sighted?

Hermanus has had the world's only whale crier since 1992, and the job inspired Zakes Mda's novel The Whale Caller.