Bubble-net hunters that sang their way back from five thousand
Humpback whales (Megaptera novaeangliae) are the sole species in genus Megaptera—rorquals fourteen to seventeen metres long and up to forty metric tons. They breach, slap, and migrate between polar feeding grounds and equatorial breeding waters, while males weave songs that often run four to thirty-three minutes.
Long pectoral fins—about a third of body length—and head tubercles packed with nerves make the silhouette unmistakable. Flippers may be all white or only underneath; southern animals tend to show more white, and fluke patterns identify individuals. Females usually run a metre or more longer than males. Calves arrive at roughly 4.3 metres and 680 kilograms. Baleen plates number 540–800; ventral grooves total fourteen to thirty-five. Whaling drove numbers to about five thousand by the 1960s; recovery has reached some 135,000 worldwide, though gear entanglement, ship strikes, and noise still harm them.
Diet is mostly krill and small schooling fish. Humpbacks gulp-feed, expanding throat grooves, then press water out through baleen. Groups often hunt with bubble nets—considered a form of tool use—spiralling or looping air cylinders that herd prey while costing less energy per mouthful. Tubercles on the flippers help stall at high angles of attack, enabling the sharp turns bubble-feeding demands. In Antarctic Wilhelmina Bay, researchers once counted 5.1 whales per square kilometre over a krill super-aggregation.
Genetic work places modern stock emerging in southern seas near 880,000 years ago, then reaching northern oceans between 200,000 and 50,000 years ago. A 2014 genetic study treated North Atlantic, North Pacific, and Southern Ocean stocks as distinct enough for subspecies names. An Arabian Sea group has been isolated some seventy thousand years. Brisson named the New England whale in 1756; Gray coined Megaptera—“giant wing”—in 1846. Orcas are the main natural predators; barnacles and whale lice ride the skin.
Source: Humpback whale
