Undiscovered Ocean

"A humpback whale lobtailing is one of the most dramatic behaviors visible from the surface — the whale raises its enormous flukes high into the air and brings them down with tremendous force, creating an explosive impact at the water's surface. Then it does it again. And again, and again, in a repetitive series that can last for minutes.

Why?

The sound carries. A humpback tail slap in calm water sends acoustic energy traveling kilometers in every direction — both above the surface as a sharp crack audible from boats, and below the surface as a pressure wave detectable by any other whale in the area.

The most supported hypothesis for lobtailing is long-distance communication — signaling to other humpbacks that are too far away for vocal communication. Lobtailing frequency increases during social gatherings and competitive situations.

A second hypothesis: lobtailing during feeding. Humpbacks have been documented lobtailing above fish schools — the concussive impact stunning the fish below.

A third: aggression or assertion. Male humpbacks in competitive groups use lobtailing toward rivals, seemingly as a show of size and strength.

One behavior. Three plausible functions. All happening in the middle of the ocean.

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"Baleen is not bone. It is keratin — the same protein that makes up human fingernails and hair.

In bowhead whales, this keratin grows into plates up to 4.5 meters (14.7 feet) long — hanging from the upper jaw in dense parallel rows of up to 350 plates per side.

Bowhead baleen is not only the longest of any living animal — it may be the longest baleen of any animal that has ever existed, including Miocene and Pliocene fossil mysticetes.

Why so long? Bowheads feed on copepods — tiny crustaceans roughly 1–3 mm in size. To filter them efficiently, the baleen fringe must be extremely fine. Longer plates allow for finer fringes while maintaining structural integrity — the length and fineness work together to create an effective net for microscopic prey.

A bowhead whale feeding involves slow swimming with the mouth held partially open, water flowing in through the front and exiting through the baleen plates on the sides, copepods accumulating on the fringed inner surface.

The bowhead mouth is proportionally enormous — the head comprises roughly one-third of the total body length, giving it the internal space needed for plates this large.

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"Most people think of orcas as ocean animals — and they are. But their hunting range occasionally takes them into places that seem almost impossible.

Moose are strong swimmers and regularly cross rivers, inlets, and coastal channels in British Columbia, Alaska, and other Pacific Northwest regions. This puts them, at times, in the same water as orcas.

Multiple documented cases exist of orcas targeting moose in coastal waterways:

• In 2005, a group of orcas was photographed killing a moose in a fjord near Hartley Bay, British Columbia.
• In 2016, orca s**t analysis in Alaska found moose remains in the f***l samples of known orca groups.
• Additional accounts from Indigenous communities along the BC coast describe historical observations of orca moose predation going back generations.

The pattern is consistent with orca dietary opportunism — if large prey is in the water, some orca populations will take it.

These are not the fish-eating Southern Resident orcas. They are Bigg's orcas (transient orcas) — the mammal-hunting population that has been documented taking sea lions, seals, porpoises, dolphins, minke whales, and apparently moose.

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"No one has ever witnessed a s***m whale hunting a giant squid in the wild.

The depth at which it happens — 600–1,200 meters in near-total darkness — makes direct observation essentially impossible.

But the evidence covers the skin of almost every adult s***m whale ever examined: circular sucker scars — pale ring impressions pressed into the skin around the jaw, head, and sometimes the flanks — each one corresponding to the suckers of Architeuthis dux (giant squid) or Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni (colossal squid), which are lined with sharp tooth-edged hooks capable of cutting deeply into flesh.

The squid wrap their arms around the whale's jaw during the encounter, attempting to prevent being swallowed. The whale, unable to use its teeth for prey capture, must use suction — drawing the squid into the oral cavity while the squid fights back.

The sizes of sucker scars on the largest s***m whales suggest encounters with squid estimated at 10–14 meters in length.

Giant squid beaks — indigestible and tough — are routinely found in s***m whale stomachs. One stomach analysis found 14,000 squid beaks — evidence of thousands of past encounters, each of them unseen.

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***mWhale "

"The commercial hunting of blue whales was banned by the International Whaling Commission in 1966 — 60 years ago.

The global blue whale population today: approximately 10,000–25,000 individuals.

The pre-whaling population: estimated at 150,000–300,000.

We have had six decades of protection. The blue whale remains classified as Endangered on the IUCN Red List. Recovery has been slow — agonizingly slow.

Why does it take so long?

Blue whale biology makes recovery difficult. Females reach sexual maturity at around 5–10 years and produce a single calf every 2–3 years. A population reduced to 3–5% of its original size takes many generations to rebuild, even under ideal conditions.

And conditions are not ideal. Blue whales today face:
• Vessel strikes — ships are faster than they were in the 20th century
• Ocean noise — interfering with the long-range 20 Hz calls they use to find mates
• Climate-driven krill decline — the krill aggregations they depend on are shifting and thinning
• Entanglement in fishing gear

The largest animal that has ever lived came within a few thousand individuals of extinction in the 20th century. It is still recovering. We are still watching.

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In the early 20th century, humpback whales were common in the waters around New York City. Whalers hunted them from Long Island as recently as the 1910s.

Then they were gone. For most of the 20th century, humpbacks were essentially absent from the New York Bight — the ocean area just off the coast of New Jersey and New York — a combination of hunting pressure, industrial pollution, and the collapse of the menhaden and Atlantic herring populations that fed them.

They're back.

Beginning in the mid-2000s and accelerating dramatically through the 2010s and 2020s, humpback whale sightings in the New York Bight increased from rare to routine. The Gotham Whale project — a citizen science identification catalog — now contains records of hundreds of individually identified humpbacks regularly using waters within sight of the Manhattan skyline.

The drivers of the recovery: the 1986 whaling moratorium, the Clean Water Act improving water quality in formerly toxic New York Harbor, and the recovery of menhaden — small schooling fish critical to both humpback feeding and the broader food web — following state management improvements.

A whale visible from the New York skyline is not a curiosity. It is evidence that marine ecosystems can recover when we stop actively destroying them.

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"When a narwhal initiates a deep dive, something extraordinary happens to its cardiovascular system.

At the surface, a narwhal's resting heart rate is approximately 60 beats per minute — similar to a fit human adult.

During a dive to 500–1,500 meters, heart rate drops to approximately 3–4 beats per minute.

This is one of the most dramatic diving bradycardias (heart rate reduction during diving) ever recorded in any air-breathing vertebrate.

The mechanism — the diving reflex — is common to all diving mammals and birds, but in narwhals the response is extreme. Blood flow is restricted to the heart, brain, and lungs. Non-essential muscles and organs receive minimal circulation. Oxygen stored in muscle myoglobin and in blood carries the animal through the dive.

What makes narwhal diving physiology particularly unusual: their heart rate can fluctuate erratically during the dive — sometimes rising briefly during swimming bursts, dropping back during glides. This irregularity is atypical in other diving specialists.

Research using biologging heart rate tags found narwhals showing what appeared to be a prolonged cardiac stress response when startled at depth — heart rate spiking while the narwhal was still deep, creating a dangerous mismatch between oxygen demand and supply. Noise from ship propellers and Arctic drilling operations may trigger this response, causing physical harm.

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"The pleats running along a humpback whale's throat are not decoration.

They are the mechanism that allows the most energetically expensive and spectacular feeding event in the animal kingdom.

During a lunge feed, a humpback whale accelerates toward a prey aggregation at up to 5 meters per second, opens its mouth to nearly 90 degrees, and in under 2 seconds, engulfs a volume of water that can equal or exceed the whale's own body volume — potentially 60–80 tonnes of water, with krill and small fish suspended in it.

The throat pleats — elastic, accordion-like folds that run from the lower jaw to the navel — unfurl and expand to accommodate this volume. The pouch inflates like a massive balloon, visible from outside as an enormous distended sac beneath the whale.

The drag created by this ballooning decelerates the whale almost immediately — the energy cost of opening the mouth against the incoming water column is enormous. Research published in Science (2021) found that a single lunge feeding event for a blue or fin whale requires as much energy as the animal burns in a full day of swimming.

The prey density inside the engulfed water must be high enough to make that energy cost worthwhile.

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"Beluga whale sleep looks nothing like what you'd expect from a whale.

Belugas rest by logging — floating motionless at or just below the surface of the water, horizontal, barely breathing. No forward motion. No sound. The animal simply floats.

The breathing interval during sleep is far longer than during waking activity — a sleeping beluga may go several minutes between breaths. When it does exhale, the blow is small and quiet — barely noticeable — and the blowhole closes immediately.

Beluga sleep studies at aquarium facilities using EEG have confirmed that belugas experience both bihemispheric and unihemispheric slow-wave sleep — periods in which the entire brain or one hemisphere enters a deep sleep state.

In the wild, beluga sleep logging occurs most often in calm, protected water — sheltered bays, inlet shallows, and estuary margins where tidal conditions reduce the risk of drift or orca encounter during the most vulnerable state of rest.

Groups of belugas often log together — multiple animals floating in loose clusters, all motionless, the surface barely broken by an occasional small exhalation.

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"Bilateral symmetry — matching left and right sides — is one of the most fundamental features of vertebrate body plans. Billions of years of evolution have maintained it across almost all complex animals.

The fin whale breaks it.

The lower right jaw of a fin whale is brilliant white. The lower left jaw is dark grey-black, matching the rest of the body. The asymmetry continues inside the mouth: the right side of the baleen plates is pale yellow-white, the left side is darker.

No other large animal on Earth has this kind of visible, permanent external asymmetry built into its body plan.

Why? The most widely supported hypothesis relates to feeding behavior. Fin whales have been observed preferentially rolling onto their right side when lunging — turning the white right jaw toward their prey school. The flash of white against the dark water may startle or disorient fish, driving them into a tighter ball and making them easier to engulf.

The white jaw is a hunting tool. The asymmetry is the price of speed and efficiency in one of the ocean's fastest predators.

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