Whales
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99 free Whales trivia questions with answers — nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
11 free whales trivia questions with answers. Dive into the deep blue with our comprehensive whale trivia quiz! Test your knowledge of the ocean's most majestic creatures, from their migration patterns to their incredible communication abilities. Whether you're a marine biology enthusiast or simply curious about whales, this 99-question challenge will help you learn amazing facts about these magnificent giants.
30 of 99 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which whale species is considered the largest animal on Earth?
Blue Whale
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.
Q 02What is the primary food source for blue whales?
Krill
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.
Q 03What is the most common collective noun for a group of whales?
Pod
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.
Q 04Through which specialized opening on top of their heads do whales breathe?
Blowhole
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.
Q 05Which word describes a whale hurling most of its body out of the water and landing with a huge splash?
Breaching
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.
Q 06What is the primary food source for sperm whales?
Squid and other cephalopods
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.
Q 07A whale drives itself forward by beating its tail flukes in which direction?
Up and down
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.
Q 08Humpback whales hunt together by herding fish inside a spiral 'net' made of what?
Bubbles
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.
Q 09Which whale species has the longest lifespan of any mammal, potentially over 200 years?
Bowhead Whale
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.
Q 10Which fast-swimming whale is the second-largest animal on Earth?
Fin Whale
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.
Q 11Which animal is the closest living relative of whales and dolphins?
The hippopotamus
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.
Q 12In the Bible, which prophet spends three days inside a 'great fish' that is often pictured as a whale?
Jonah
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'.
Q 13The humpback's scientific name Megaptera, 'big-winged', refers to which part of its body?
Its flippers
Q 21What name is given to the pictures whalers engraved on whale teeth and bone during their months at sea?
Scrimshaw
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.
Q 22Which people of the Bay of Biscay coast were the first to hunt whales commercially, back in the Middle Ages?
The Basques
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.
Q 23Which Nordic country objected to the 1986 whaling moratorium and resumed commercial hunts in 1993?
Norway
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.
Q 14Because a dolphin has to surface to breathe, how does it manage to sleep?
With half its brain at a time
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.
Q 15The orca, or killer whale, is actually the largest member of which family?
The oceanic dolphins
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.
Q 16The beluga is nicknamed the 'sea canary' because of what?
Its high-pitched calls
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.
Q 17The long spiral 'horn' on a male narwhal's head is really an overgrown what?
Tooth
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.
Q 18The bowhead whale is named after its massive triangular skull, which it uses to do what?
Break through Arctic ice
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.
Q 19The knobbly white patches of rough skin on a right whale's head are called what?
Callosities
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.
Q 20By the usual account of their name, why were right whales the 'right' ones to hunt?
They floated when killed
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.
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.
Q 24Which country left the International Whaling Commission and resumed commercial whaling in July 2019?
Japan
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.
Q 25Melville's white whale was modelled on which real, famously aggressive white sperm whale of the Pacific?
Mocha Dick
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.
Q 26Ambergris, a waxy lump that forms in a sperm whale's gut and washes ashore, was long prized for making what?
Perfume
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.
Q 27Spermaceti, the substance from a sperm whale's head, was once the material for high-quality what?
Candles
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.
Q 28A recording of humpback whale song left Earth in 1977 on the golden records carried by which space probes?
Voyager
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.
Q 29A cetacean carcass that sinks to the deep sea floor and feeds an ecosystem for decades is called what?
A whale fall
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.
Q 30How did Pakicetus, the earliest known whale, get around some 50 million years ago?
Walking on four legs
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.