Harpoons crafted from the bones of humpback and southern right whales show Indigenous groups in what is now Brazil were hunting whales 5,000 years ago.

The discovery, which included 118 whale bones and crafted artifacts, reveal that prehistoric whaling was not confined to people in temperate and polar climates in the Northern Hemisphere, according to a study published Jan. 9 in the journal Nature Communications.

"Whaling has always been enigmatic," because it's difficult to distinguish bone tools made from actively hunted and stranded animals in the archaeological record, study co-author André Carlo Colonese, a research director at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, told Live Science.

So the new tools are significant because their discovery alongside multiple bone remains from members of the same species represents some of the oldest evidence of active whale hunting in the world, the authors wrote in the study.

Prehistoric whaling

For prehistoric people, whales provided huge feasts, oil for warmth, and bones for tools and cultural ornaments and accessories. Although coastal communities have opportunistically salvaged these resources from beached whales for at least 20,000 years, the evidence of active hunting is much younger. For example, people hunted large whales with deer bone harpoons 6,000 years ago in what is now South Korea, and harpoons from around 3,500 to 2,500 years ago have been uncovered in the Arctic and sub-Arctic.

Colonese and his team did not originally set out to investigate early whaling. Instead, they were trying to document the marine species that were used by Indigenous Sambaqui populations in southern Brazil. To do so, they analyzed the molecular signature of precolonial cetacean (whale, dolphin and porpoise) bones at the Joinville Sambaqui Archaeological Museum in Brazil. Of the 118 bone remains with an identifiable cetacean species, most were from southern right whales, but many bones were from humpback whales. Only 37 had been crafted into items such as pendants.

It was "completely random" that one of the museum's curators brought out a box of what were believed to be sticks, Colonese said. But based on their design, such as hollow centers for a wooden shaft and carved tips, he immediately recognized them as harpoons. The team identified 15 harpoon elements, including heads and shaft components, made from either southern right whale or humpback whale rib bones.

The researchers took tiny samples from two harpoon foreshafts to determine their age, which revealed that the tools were between 4,710 and 4,970 years old. Colonese said he jumped for joy when he saw the results because these are some of the oldest harpoons found anywhere in the world — over 1,000 years older than the Arctic and sub-Arctic examples.

The discovery also showed that these Indigenous populations in Brazil were not simply gathering mollusks and catching fish. "The conventional idea was that the Sambaquis didn't have the technology" for whaling, Colonese said. "This is telling us that they were actually hunting."

"It's a very spectacular, informative discovery," Jean-Marc Pétillon, an archaeologist at the University of Toulouse in France who was not involved in the research, told Live Science.

Although it's not clear that these particular harpoons were used to hunt whales — as opposed to other marine animals, such as seals — this new evidence helps to contradict the assumption that whaling was practiced only in the Northern Hemisphere, according to Pétillon.

"Having these people living in southern Brazil in tropical conditions that also did whaling is also a way to change our perspective on these maritime exploitation systems," he said.

A rocket-like jellyfish, a majestic Komodo dragon and a dangerous surfing encounter are just a few of the stunning photographs captured by the finalists for the Ocean Photographer of the Year 2025 competition. The competition includes categories such as Impact and Hope, which have solicited breathtaking photographs that capture diverse forms of marine life and human interaction with the ocean.

The overall and category winners of the contest, hosted by Oceanographic Magazine and watch company Blancpain, will be announced in September. But all of the finalists' photos emphasize the need to protect the planet.

"In the midst of a deepening climate and biodiversity crisis on our blue planet, ocean photography has never been more important," Will Harrison, director of Ocean Photographer of the Year, said in a statement from the organization. "These images are far more than just beautiful; they are powerful visual testaments to what we stand to lose, and they remind us of the urgent need for protection."

Here are some of the gorgeous photos.

Synchronized swimmers

Photographer Yuka Takahashi, a finalist in the "Young" category of the competition, captured a pair of synchronized humpback whales in French Polynesia swimming through rays of sun. "These two humpback whales are always seen together, and I was fortunate to capture this rare moment of synchronicity," Takahashi said. "To me, this photo reflects the strong bond between them while also revealing their playful and curious personalities."

Warm bath

In this image, snapped by "Wildlife" category finalist and photographer Suliman Alatiqi, a Komodo dragon (Varanus komodoensis) looms over an Indonesian shore. Because Komodo dragons are cold-blooded, they rely on cold water or mud to regulate their body temperature in the summer. They also travel across seabeds to search for food and mates.

Related: Ocean Photographer of the Year 2024: See stunning photos of hungry whale, surfing seagull, freaky fish babies, land-loving eel and adorable toxic octopus

Collateral damage

Photographer Natnattcha Chaturapitamorn snapped this image of fishers unloading their catches at a Bangladeshi harbor during sunrise, which is a finalist in the "Impact" category.

"Amidst this industrious energy, the presence of an endangered species serves as a reminder of the urgent need to protect marine biodiversity," Chaturapitamorn said. "As global fish stocks decline, safeguarding threatened species like this is vital, not only for ecological balance but for the long-term sustainability of fishing communities that depend on the ocean’s bounty."

Stranded

On July 1, wildlife veterinarians received a call about a humpback whale stranded on an Australian beach, and photographer Craig Parry documented the harrowing scene from above. For 15 hours, rescue teams and other members of the community worked to save the whale but were unsuccessful.

"While the outcome was heartbreaking, witnessing the collaboration and compassion shown by multiple agencies and volunteers was incredibly moving — a powerful reminder of what can be achieved when people come together with a shared purpose," said Parry, whose photo is a finalist in the "Human Connection" category.

School of fish

This mesmerizing image, taken in Indonesia by photographer Kim Hyeon Min, captures a school of juvenile fish circling around a tower of coral and is a finalist in the "Hope" category. The vibrancy of the coral suggests it has been unaffected by bleaching and is still able to host a miniature ecosystem for surrounding creatures. "In a time when marine ecosystems are rapidly disappearing, this image is a reminder of what we still have — and a hopeful glimpse of what we must protect for the future," Hyeon Min said.

Otherworldly jellyfish

Jellyfish are often described as alien-like, and this ethereal image captured in Spain by photographer Toni Bertran Regàs takes that comparison to new heights with this finalist in the "Fine Art" category.

"I've always been fascinated by the resemblance between jellyfish and space rockets," Bertran Regàs said. "I was looking for a photograph that conveyed that connection: a rocket leaving Earth. To do this, I used a fisheye lens and took the photo just as the sun was rising. Snell's Window" — an underwater optical phenomenon — "helped me create the Earth, the particles were the stars, and the sun luckily appeared behind it."

Monster waves

Photographer Ben Thouard, a finalist in the "Adventure" category, captured a day of rough seas in Nazaré, Portugal. Though the water was too dangerous for many surfers, two gave it a go. Despite the difficulty of photographing between huge waves and through salt water in the air, Thouard eventually shot this moment.

Blue whales sing less when they are starving and sing more when food is plentiful, a recent study revealed. Researchers listened to whales off California for six years and found that their singing increased following a marine heatwave — despite multiple news outlets claiming that blue whales are going silent.

Whales have a range of vocalizations, but only the males sing. There's evidence of males using their songs to attract females and communicate with other males, said study lead author John Ryan, a biological oceanographer at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in California. "It's an essential part of how they sense their world and interact with each other," he told Live Science.

The singing also provides researchers with an opportunity to study whales. Sound travels very well underwater, so in the vast ocean, listening for animals can be more efficient than looking for them, even when the animals you're looking for are the largest on Earth.

"We can see one of these whales if we're up close and at the surface, and it's at the surface, but we have to be very close," Ryan said. "In contrast, if one of those whales is anywhere within an area thousands of square kilometers around our hydrophone, we'll hear them."

In February, Ryan and his colleagues published a study in the journal PLOS One, which used hydrophones, or underwater microphones, to record the songs of blue (Balaenoptera musculus), humpback (Megaptera novaeangliae) and fin whales (Balaenoptera physalus) in the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary. The team then compared the acoustics data to fisheries data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The scientists found that whale singing fluctuates based on food availability and that whales sang less when food resources were scarce.

The study began in 2015 at the peak of a devastating marine heatwave known as "the blob." This heatwave disrupted the marine ecosystem and left whales starving. As a result, 2015 was the year researchers heard the least amount of whale song. However, when temperatures cooled and the marine ecosystem slowly recovered, the whales found their voices again.

Related: Creepy 'biotwang' noises coming from the Mariana Trench finally explained after 10 years

In July, National Geographic reported that blue whales are going silent, which has since been repeated by multiple news outlets citing the February study. However, while the amount of whale song in the study varied from year to year, all three whale species were singing more at the end of the study period compared with the beginning. In other words, the whales weren't going silent at all; they were getting louder — or at least, being heard more often after the heatwave.

Blue whale singing rose dramatically between 2015 and 2018, dropped between 2018 and 2020, and rose again in 2021. This singing trend tracked with rises and falls in the availability of their only prey, krill. The researchers believe that when food availability is low, the whales can't put as much energy into their singing.

"In the case of blue whales especially, they can't switch prey, so they simply have to search farther and wider for the only prey they eat," Ryan said. "We can imagine that if they have to dedicate much more time and energy to foraging, then there will be less time and energy available for other behaviors."

Chemical analysis of whale skin samples confirmed that blue whales searched farther and wider for krill when there were fewer available. In contrast, humpback whales switched between krill and fish (anchovies and sardines) depending on availability. As a result, they were the only whale species that saw a continuous rise in singing over the six-year period, according to the study.

"As food resources for whales changed throughout the six-year study period, humpback whales were found to be more resilient than blue whales," Ryan said. "This is because humpback whales have a more flexible foraging strategy, feeding on different types of prey," he added.

The study's findings were consistent with a 2023 study published in the journal Ecology and Evolution, which found a reduction in certain blue whale calls off New Zealand during regional marine heatwaves in the summers of 2016 and 2018. Both studies highlight the negative effects that marine heatwaves can have on whales.

Extreme marine heatwaves have tripled over the past 80 years, with additional widespread heatwaves in 2023 and 2024. The latest whale song study covered data collected up until June 2021, so it's currently unclear what has happened since. However, while the world's oceans are getting warmer due to climate change, the whales off California haven't "stopped singing."

Ryan said that they have continued to collect data since the end of the study period and are studying those numbers right now. When asked whether the blue whales have gone silent since 2021, he replied: "Nope."

Are blue whales in decline?

Blue whales are much rarer today than they were before modern commercial whaling decimated their populations in the early 1900s. Since then, blue whale hunting has been banned and their population has been increasing, according to NOAA. But most population estimates are a few years old.

A draft of the latest NOAA U.S. Pacific marine mammal stock assessment states that there are around 1,898 blue whales in the eastern North Pacific population — the blue whales that Ryan recorded singing off California. However, that estimate is based on data collected in 2018. The global population is estimated to be between 5,000 and 15,000 adults, according to the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, but that figure is also based on a 2018 assessment.

Editor's note: This story was amended to clarify that whale skin sample analysis revealed the blue whales searched farther and wider for krill, their primary diet, not just that they continued to feed on them.

A viral video appears to show a humpback whale gobbling up a kayaker off the coast of South America before quickly spitting him out again.

Adrián Simancas was kayaking with his father in the Strait of Magellan in Chile last Saturday (Feb. 8) when the whale burst out of the water and seemed to close its mouth around Simancas and his kayak. For a few seconds, the whale and Simancas disappeared beneath the waves.

"I thought I was dead," Simancas told The Associated Press (AP). "I thought it had eaten me, that it had swallowed me."

The whale didn't hold onto Simancas for long as he soon popped back up at the surface. Then, as the terrified kayaker treaded water, the whale hunched its spine and dove back down into the ocean. Simancas' father, Dell, caught the whole incident on video before assisting his son out of the water. The pair returned to shore unharmed, AP reported.

Related: Male humpback whale crossed 3 oceans for sex, inadvertently breaking distance record for species

Do humpback whales eat people?

Humpback whales (Megaptera novaeangliae) feed on small fish and crustaceans. To eat enough to sustain their massive size, the whales take stretchy mouthfuls of more than 5,000 gallons (23,000 liters) of seawater and filter out their prey across baleen plates — kind of like long hairy teeth that filter rather than bite. This strategy evolved for hunting small animals, not humans in kayaks.

Erich Hoyt, a research fellow at Whale and Dolphin Conservation in the U.K. and author of the Encyclopedia of Whales, Dolphins, and Porpoises (Firefly Books, 2023), told Live Science that the whale in the video almost certainly snapped up the kayaker by accident.

"It's not clear from the video whether the kayaker was entirely in the whale's mouth," Hoyt said. "He could have been partly inside but I'm sure the whale would have expelled him immediately."

This isn't the first time a whale has appeared to gobble someone up accidentally. In 2020, a similar viral video showed a humpback whale coming out of the water and closing its mouth around two kayakers in California. The kayakers were floating above a large swarm of fish when the whale came up, CBC reported at the time. The humpback immediately released the kayakers, who were unharmed in the incident.

In 2021, a lobster diver off Massachusetts estimated that he was in a humpback whale's mouth for 30 seconds before being spat out. Whale researchers suggested at the time that the diver may have also swam too close to the whale's food and been accidentally gobbled up with it.

Hoyt said that humans are too large to be swallowed by a humpback whale. Researchers have studied humpback whales with Cassin's auklet seabirds (Ptychoramphus aleuticus) in their stomachs, which were presumably accidentally swallowed. However, those birds are only about 9 inches (23 centimeters) long, Live Science previously reported.

While humpbacks don't eat people, they have occasionally injured humans when they've felt threatened. In 2020, a humpback mum — likely trying to protect her calf — charged swimmers in Australia and sent two to the hospital. However, the species is better known for occasionally saving other animals from predators like killer whales (Orcinus orca) than harming humans.

Killer whales

Simancas was talking to his father about killer whales shortly before the incident with the humpback whale took place (killer whales also live off the coast of Chile). He told AP that he thought the whale might have been a killer whale at first. However, even if that were the case, a human in the ocean has little to fear from a killer whale.

"There are no cases of a wild killer whale killing and eating a human either," Hoyt said.

Some orcas have a habit of attacking boats in southwest Europe, and the species has killed humans when kept in captivity, but there's only one confirmed case of a wild orca biting a human. That unlucky person was a surfer in California in 1972, who the orca probably mistook for a seal.

A male humpback whale crossed at least three oceans in search of sex, a new study shows.

The whale's journey is the longest great-circle distance between two sightings ever recorded for the species (Megaptera novaeangliae), scientists said. Great-circle distance refers to the shortest distance between two points on Earth as measured on the planet's spherical surface.

Beginning off the coast of Colombia in the eastern Pacific Ocean and ending off the coast of Zanzibar in the southwest Indian Ocean, the whale's odyssey took it 8,106 miles (13,046 kilometers) across the globe, the researchers said.

The whale likely swam eastward from Colombia, riding on prevailing currents in the Southern Ocean and potentially visiting humpback whale populations in the Atlantic Ocean, said study co-author Ted Cheeseman, a doctoral student at Southern Cross University in Australia and director of Happywhale, an image database where the researchers collected evidence for the study.

"This was a very exciting find, the kind of discovery where our first response was that there must be some error," Cheeseman told Live Science in an email. Together with the astounding mileage, one of the most important findings from the study was that the whale dropped in on several humpback whale populations along the way, exploring farther afield than any other humpback whale known to science, Cheeseman said.

Related: Watch heartbreaking footage of humpback whale with missing tail in Washington state

Humpback whales usually follow very consistent migration patterns, moving between feeding grounds in cold waters near the poles and breeding areas closer to the tropics. The whales are known to swim more than 5,000 miles (8,000 km) in the north-south direction every year, but they don't tend to travel far in the east-west direction and generally don't mix with other populations.

The cross-ocean journey observed in the new study shows that humpback whale migrations are more flexible than researchers previously thought. While scientists have occasionally recorded similar migrations before — such as the case of a female humpback whale that swam 6,100 miles (9,800 km) from Brazil to Madagascar between 1999 and 2001 — the male in the new study has set a new distance record while traveling from one breeding area to another.

"We've been able to document novel behavior which provides important insight into [humpback whales'] ecology," study lead author Ekaterina Kalashnikova, a biologist working with the Tanzania Cetaceans Program and the Barazuto Center for Scientific Studies in Mozambique, told Live Science in an email.

The discovery is based on photographs the researchers took between 2013 and 2022, and which they subsequently posted on Happywhale. The pictures showed the same sexually mature male in two locations off Colombia, and then five years later in the Zanzibar Channel, each time in the company of a competitive group — a group of whales in which a female is closely guarded by a male "principal escort" and other males compete for access to her, Kalashnikova said.

The motivation for the journey was probably sex, with the male in question increasing his chances of reproducing by mingling with members of another breeding population. Other reasons for the whale's unusual adventure could be to do with environmental shifts that impact the distribution of food; climate change; and humpback whale population growth, which boosts competition between males during the feeding and breeding seasons, according to the study.

The research was published Tuesday (Dec. 10) in the journal Royal Society Open Science.

Around 7,000 humpback whales in the North Pacific Ocean may have starved to death following the disastrous effects of a marine heat wave, a new study reveals.

From 20 years' worth of data, researchers found that a 20% drop in the North Pacific humpback whale population coincided with a marine heat wave dubbed "the blob" — an event that was responsible for record-breaking mass mortalities of multiple seabird species around the world. 

In the 20th century, global populations of humpback whales (Megaptera novaeangliae) were under threat from commercial whaling. An estimated 31,865 humpback whales were killed during the years between 1900 to 1976, dropping the population of humpback whales in the North Pacific to an estimated 1,200 to 1,600 individuals at the end of commercial catches in 1976.

In the new study, published Feb. 28 in the journal Royal Society Open Science, scientists used automated image recognition artificial intelligence (AI) created by Happywhale, a database with thousands of photographs of humpback whale tails sourced from researchers and the public to find out if populations have rebounded.

The AI identified 30,484 individual humpback whales over 132,684 encounters from the photographs of their tail flukes. 

Related: Kelping is a 'global phenomenon' sweeping the world of humpback whales, scientists say

This data allowed the team to work out population changes from the past 20 years. It revealed a positive recovery between 2002 to 2012, with the population growing at an average rate of 5.9% per year.

However, further analysis revealed a massive decline from 2012 to 2021 as numbers dropped from around 33,488 individuals to 26,662.

This drop coincided with the emergence of "the blob" — a patch of water in the Pacific Ocean linked to changes in the climate. In 2013, when the blob was first detected, ocean temperatures were 4 to 10 degrees Fahrenheit (2.2 to 5.6 degrees Celsius) above average. According to Science, it grew to cover an area of ocean spanning 1.5 million square miles (4 million square kilometers), stretching from the Gulf of Alaska to Mexico. 

The heatwave persisted for 3 years, causing toxic algal blooms, distribution changes of fish species, countless crashes in commercial fishing and mortalities of marine life. The Northeast Pacific returned to cooler conditions at the end of 2016.

"Warmer waters are less productive, like a farm with less nutrients available to grow crops," Ted Cheeseman, co-founder and director of Happywhale and lead author of the study, told Live Science in an email. 

Marine heat waves kill off organisms at the bottom of the food chain, causing a domino effect that lowers the abundance of food for small animals and then larger ones."Whales expecting to be able to get fat … on krill, anchovies, herring and other bait fish were instead suffering from starvation," Cheeseman said.

Concerns for the stability of humpback whale populations continue to grow as climate change increases ocean temperatures. "Today's extreme may become the normal state in 20 years," Cheeseman said. "If that happens, the heatwave of the future may mean genuinely unlivable oceans." 

For the first time ever, researchers have documented penetrative sex between two humpback whales. What’s more, both whales were male.

A private vessel spotted the adult whales off the Hawaiian island of Maui in January 2022. Citizen scientists on board the boat noticed one of the animals was an unusual, brownish color and deployed cameras underwater to record the encounter. What they captured is the first known case of a male humpback whale (Megaptera novaeangliae) inserting its penis into another male's genital slit.

"This is the first report of penetration by a humpback whale, and the first report of sexual activity between two male humpback whales," researchers wrote in a study published Tuesday (Feb. 27) in the journal Marine Mammal Science. 

The whales swam in circles around the boat for 30 minutes, with one of the humpbacks (Whale B) seemingly pursuing the other (Whale A), according to the study. Whale A looked emaciated, had a significant jaw injury and was covered in whale lice (Cyamus boopis) — parasites that indicate poor health and are the probable cause of the skin discoloration noted by citizen scientists at the start of the encounter. Whale B, on the other hand, appeared healthy and strong.

Related: Kelping is a 'global phenomenon' sweeping the world of humpback whales, scientists say

Whale B also had its penis extruded from its usual hiding place inside the genital slit during the entire encounter. "Whale B repeatedly approached from the rear of Whale A and penetrated the second whale, appearing to hold Whale A in place with its pectoral fins," the researchers wrote.

In response to Whale B's advances, Whale A contorted its body into an "S" shape — a posture which previous research suggests humpbacks in Hawaii adopt when they feel threatened or stressed.

"It is possible that the use of this posture by Whale A meant that this behavior was unwelcome, but that Whale A lacked the energy to engage in avoidance strategies," the researchers wrote in the study. "It was slowly attempting to swim away from Whale B but was not making any sudden or powerful movements and did not dive out of sight at any point."

After penetrating Whale A several times, Whale B dove and did not reappear, according to the study. Whale A remained at the surface for a few minutes before also plunging out of sight. It is unclear what caused Whale A's jaw injury, but the researchers suggested it may be the result of a collision with a ship.

Male-male sex in cetaceans — a group of marine mammals that includes whales, dolphins and porpoises — is well documented for common bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus) and several other species. Research suggests cetaceans engage in such homosexual activity to establish or reinforce dominance among males, to learn or practice reproductive behaviors, to form social alliances and even to reduce social tensions. 

Related: Orcas are learning terrifying new behaviors. Are they getting smarter?

Whale B may have mistaken Whale A for a female, the researchers suggested, or it could have been trying to reinforce their social relationship. But the sexual behavior may also have been "an expression of dominance over a weak and injured competitor," they wrote in the study.

While this is the first documented case of homosexual penetration in humpback whales, a similar incident reported in 1998 described a male humpback whale extruding its penis as it swam near the corpse of another male that had died shortly before.

"It is striking that the only two observations of such behavior in the scientific literature involve ailing or deceased whales," the researchers wrote in the new study. "Whether such behavior would occur between two healthy males is unknown."

Humpback whales frolicking in seaweed — a behavior known as "kelping" — is more widespread than previously thought and constitutes a "global phenomenon," new research has found.

Kelping was first observed in 2007, and scientists have described the behavior before — but only as isolated events. It turns out, humpbacks across the world enjoy the leafy caress of seaweed on their skin, both as a form of play and as a potentially soothing body scrub. 

"It's something they do together as a social event or by themselves," study lead author Olaf Meynecke, a research fellow at Griffith University's Coastal and Marine Research Centre in Queensland, Australia, told Live Science. "They put the seaweed on their head and roll around in it; they try to move it around with their pectoral fins as well."

For the new study, researchers examined 95 social media posts documenting kelping in humpback whales, spanning across the North-East Pacific and North Atlantic to the west and east coasts of Australia.

Related: Orcas and humpbacks clash in a violent melee of breaching and biting 

And while the term "kelping" suggests a preference for kelp — large brown algae that grow in relatively shallow waters near the shore — humpback whales (Megaptera novaeangliae) interact with different types of seaweed, Meynecke said.

"The whales don't seem to be that picky," he said. "Whatever was available in the region was what the whales interacted and played with."

Humpbacks belong to a group of filter-feeding whales known as baleen whales, which are known to interact with objects in their ocean habitat. Humpback whales sometimes play with logs and driftwood, as well as with fishing gear and jellyfish, according to the new study, published Sept. 15 in the Journal of Marine Science and Engineering.

Seaweed probably feels soft and pleasant against their skin, Meynecke said. Along their jaws and around their head, humpbacks have sensory, highly innervated hairs that may be stimulated when they brush against seaweed.

"It's very clear from drone footage that the whales are targeting the kelp and sometimes leaving a pod of whales to go straight for the kelp," Meynecke said. 

Kelping also may have therapeutic benefits, as it could help humpbacks shed parasites and bacteria that colonize their skin. "Just that rubbing will get rid of some of those little guys," Meynecke said. Seaweed is thought to have antimicrobial properties, but more research is needed to assess whether this applies to creatures that hitchhike on the whales.

Humpback whales sometimes bite down on seaweed and pull it underwater before letting go of it again, which may serve to scrub the insides of their mouths, Meynecke said. "They're grabbing it with their mouths — which is really interesting, because they're baleen whales that don't have teeth, and for them to bite something is not a natural instinct," he said. 

But parasites could be beating humpbacks at their own game by latching onto patches of seaweed and jumping across when whales come for a scrub, Meynecke said.

This wouldn't be the first evidence of these whales doing skin care. Earlier this year, for the first time, researchers filmed humpbacks treating themselves to a full body scrub on the seafloor. 

Playing in patches of seaweed could also enhance learning and strengthen social ties when several whales get involved, according to the study. "This is about coordination, mobility and the enjoyment of having something to play with," Meynecke said.

But climate change could ruin the whales' fun by shifting the distribution of seaweed, especially kelp, Meynecke cautioned. "Kelp has been under extreme stress with ocean warming," he said. The proliferation of species that feed on kelp, such as sea urchins, is also worrying, he added, because "they can turn an amazing, beautiful forest of kelp into a complete desert." 

Last year, passengers on board a cruise ship near Antarctica were treated to an extremely rare and spectacular sight: a giant congregation of baleen whales feeding on a gargantuan volume of krill for as far as the eye could see. Although initially estimated at several hundred individuals, the true number of whales in the feeding frenzy may have been closer to 1,000, according to a new study that analyzed footage captured by the lucky whale watchers. 

The incredible spectacle was witnessed Jan. 13, 2022, by guests on board the National Geographic Endurance, a polar exploration cruise ship run by Lindblad Expeditions, which is partnered with National Geographic. The ship was around 9.3 miles (15 kilometers) north of Coronation Island, the largest of the South Orkney Islands, when it came across the feeding frenzy, National Geographic reported. The aggregation mainly comprised fin whales (Balaenoptera physalus), which can grow to around 85 feet (26 meters) long and are second in size only to the blue whale (Balaenoptera musculus).

A video of the massive feeding event, which shows fin whales lunging for food at the surface and filling the air with jets of water ejected from their blowholes, was released on the Lindblad Expeditions-National Geographic YouTube channel on March 8, 2022. 

"We are absolutely surrounded by them," Conor Ryan, a resident zoologist on board the vessel, said in the video. "They are literally bumping into each other because there are so many of them." There were so many whales that you could even smell the whales' breath, which had an odor similar to "rotten broccoli," he added.

Related: Extremely rare gray whale birth captured on camera, possibly for the first time

Ryan initially estimated that there were between 200 and 400 individuals in the aggregation. But it was hard to tell exactly how many there were, because you could see only the whales that were at the surface and not those feeding below, he noted.  

In a new study, published Feb. 20 in the journal Ecology, Ryan and colleagues reanalyzed photos and videos from the event to better estimate how many whales were present. The researchers determined that there were around 970 fin whales in the "supergroup," which makes it the largest aggregation of the species ever recorded. There was also at least one blue whale and a pair of humpback whales (Megaptera novaeangliae) in the area, as well as Antarctic fur seals (Arctocephalus gazella) and thousands of seabirds, including petrels, penguins and albatrosses.

All of the hungry marine animals were feeding on Antarctic krill (Euphausia superba), tiny swimming crustaceans that form massive swarms, as well as the smaller fish that were also feeding on the shrimp-like critters.

This area of the Scotia Sea, which surrounds the South Orkney Islands, is a massive upwelling zone, meaning ocean currents force nutrient-rich waters from the deep to the surface. The feeding event occurred at the end of "a large spring phytoplankton bloom," which provided the necessary food for a rapid explosion in the population of krill, the researchers wrote in the paper.

"There must be millions, if not billions, of tons of krill below us," Ryan said in the video.

Fin whale numbers are on the rise again after historic whaling almost decimated the species in the mid-20th century. There are now around 100,000 individuals worldwide, but they are still considered "vulnerable" to extinction due to pressures such as climate change, plastic pollution and overfishing of krill by humans, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature's (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species.

Nevertheless, the sight of such a large group provides hope for conservationists about the species' future.

"A little more than a hundred years ago, seeing something like this probably wouldn't have been that uncommon," study co-author Matthew Savoca, a marine ecologist at Stanford University's Hopkins Marine Station, told National Geographic. This is a sign that we are heading in the right direction, he added.

Whale watchers near the U.S.-Canada border recently witnessed a brutal mass brawl between more than a dozen aggressive orcas and a pair of defensive humpback whales. The intense confrontation, which lasted for several hours, included breaching, tail-slapping, biting flippers and loud vocalizations that could be heard from above the surface, according to reports. But it is unclear which species swam away victorious. 

The cetacean showdown took place Sept. 29 in the Juan de Fuca Strait in the Salish Sea, which is around 25 miles (40 kilometers) west of Victoria, British Columbia and Port Angeles, Washington, representatives of the Pacific Whale Watch Association (PWWA) said in a statement. Crew members aboard an Eagle Wing Tours whale watching boat first spotted around 15 "unusually active" orcas, or killer whales (Orcinus orca), at the surface. Spectators onboard a nearby BC Whale Tours vessel soon noticed what was causing the orcas to act up — a pair of female humpback whales (Megaptera novaeangliae).

Throughout the day, various onlookers, including whale watchers onboard a Sooke Coastal Explorations boat, witnessed the progression of the unusual altercation, which lasted for at least three hours. However, whale watchers eventually lost sight of the epic encounter when a thick cloud of fog rolled in, so the result of the contest remains a mystery.

"I'm still trying to wrap my head around it because it was absolutely unbelievable," Mollie Naccarato, captain of the Sooke Coastal Explorations vessel, said in the statement. "At first the orcas seemed to be chasing the humpbacks, but then when it seemed there was space between them, the humpbacks would go back toward the orcas."

Related: In rare wildlife encounter, whale watchers spot two white killer whales off Japan 

Some of the orcas from the group were identified as individuals from three factions of transient killer whales; the T109As, T233s, and the T252s, which are frequently seen in the area. Transient orcas, also known as Bigg's killer whales, are an ecotype of killer whales — a kind of sub-species that is geographically distinct from the rest of its species. Unlike resident killer whales, which remain in large groups tied to a specific area, transient orcas form small groups and roam across a wider area and are known to be much more aggressive than other orcas.

The humpbacks were also identified by their tag numbers: BCX1948, also known as Reaper, and BCY1000, also known as Hydra. Reaper is a 4-year-old juvenile female known to spend the winter at breeding grounds off Jalisco, Mexico, and Hydra is an adult female known to migrate to Maui, Hawaii, where she’s given birth to at least three calves in her lifetime. If they survived the encounter, the humpback pair are due to begin their annual migration within the next few weeks, according to PWWA.

"Around these parts, it's very common for us to encounter orcas. It's also very common for us to encounter humpbacks," Erin Gless, executive director at PWWA, told CBC News. "It is not very common for us to encounter them in the middle of a brawl."

Bigg's orcas normally prey on smaller marine mammals such as seals, sea lions and porpoises, but have also been known to hunt larger whales like humpbacks, which makes them the only natural predators of humpbacks in the area, according to PWWA.

"Even though humpback whales can get to be the size of a school bus, a group of very experienced hunters can [still] attack them," Gless said. However, it can sometimes be unclear if these attacks are predatory or territorial, she added.

PWWA vessels have never directly observed orcas killing a humpback whale in the Salish Sea, but interactions between the two species have been on the increase in the region after humpback whale populations recently rebounded, following a severe decline brought about by historic whaling.

In May 2021, a group of 13 orcas similarly attacked a humpback mother and calf in the Salish Sea. Onlookers at the time believed that the baby whale had been killed, but there was no direct evidence of this. 

"With the return of the humpbacks in the Salish Sea after being hunted close to extinction we are seeing a lot more interaction between humpbacks and killer whales," Mark Malleson, a marine biologist at the Center for Whale Research in Washington, told Live Science at the time. But observed interactions of the two species could also be on the rise because there are "more eyes on the water" due to an increase in whale watching vessels in the area, he added. 

In February 2021, a young male humpback barely managed to survive a 4-hour attack from orcas in Australia, but lost its dorsal fin in the process.

All of these violent encounters have one thing in common — at least one of the humpbacks was a calf or juvenile. And that is no accident, said Erich Hoyt, a research fellow at Whale and Dolphin Conservation (WDC) in the U.K. and author of the book "Orca: The whale called killer."

"Orcas will attack younger humpback whales and sometimes get lucky," Hoyt told Live Science in an email. "But if there is an older individual around, particularly a female, it’s not often successful." 

Female humpbacks will also go on the offensive and attack orcas with vicious tail slams to protect younger whales and even to defend other species, such as seals or porpoises, Hoyt said. This isn't seen very often in the Salish Sea "but in places like Antarctica, where you get overlap between the two species, killer whales give the large female humpbacks a wide berth," Hoyt added. 

Related: Breaching humpback whale body slams boat in Mexico, injuring everyone on board

However, interactions between the two species are not always so hostile.

In January 2021, a pod of orcas freed a humpback whale who had become tangled up in ropes, although scientists don't know if this was true altruism or a botched predation job.

Killer whales also target other surprising marine megafauna, which more than earns them their sinister names.

In March 2021, a massive group of around 70 orcas managed to collectively take down a blue whale (Balaenoptera musculus) off the coast of Australia.

And in June this year, a new study revealed that a pair of orcas in South Africa are responsible for killing at least eight great white sharks (Carcharodon carcharias) by ripping out their energy-rich livers. 

A dead whale that recently washed up on a beach in Staten Island, New York, showed signs of human-caused injuries that may have contributed to its death, experts found.

On Sept. 17, the male humpback whale (Megaptera novaeangliae) was spotted floating belly-up in shallow water near the shore in Great Kills Park, part of Staten Island's Gateway National Recreation Area. Officials with the National Park Service (NPS) then contacted the Atlantic Marine Conservation Society (AMSEAS), a nonprofit that partners with New York agencies to rescue stranded marine life and to collect data and manage disposal when the animal is deceased, according to the AMSEAS website.

Their examination of the corpse revealed evidence of recent and serious injuries, AMSEAS representatives posted to Facebook on Sept. 18. Healing wounds around the humpback's head and mouth resembled injuries caused by entanglement with fishing equipment, and lodged in the whale's intestines was a large chunk of metal, which had damaged the animal's digestive tract, according to the post.

Related: In photos: tracking humpback whales

Once the organization's scientists arrived at the scene, they conducted a necropsy and collected samples for lab analysis, said AMSEAS founder and chief scientist Robert DiGiovanni.

This whale was found floating on its back with its blowhole under the water's surface, "which is usually a good indication that the animal has been dead for some time," DiGiovanni told Live Science. It measured about 38 feet (11.6 meters) long, and with an estimated weight of about 30 tons (27 metric tons) it had to be moved — and eventually buried — with an excavator. Workers used the heavy construction equipment to dig a deep grave on the beach near the whale during the necropsy, DiGiovanni said.

When the AMSEAS team performed their examination on Sept. 18, they noted that aside from its injuries the whale appeared healthy and well-fed, with a thick layer of blubber and a full stomach. Samples from the necropsy went to a pathologist for evaluation, and the whale was buried on-site, AMSEAS representatives wrote on Facebook.

"The cause of death remains undetermined until samples collected during the exam can be analyzed," they said on Facebook. "We will know more after we receive lab results." This process usually takes a month or longer, DiGiovanni explained.

Because whales have thick, insulating layers of blubber under their skin, gases from decomposition can be slow to escape from their giant corpses. However, off-gassing does occur from natural openings in the body such as the mouth and anus, and if left alone the whale will eventually deflate like a leaky balloon, DiGiovanni said. Anecdotes of beached whales exploding can usually be traced to humans deliberately blowing up the remains, such as the incident in Oregon in 1970 in which local officials dynamited a dead and decaying sperm whale, Live Science previously reported. 

But sometimes whale explosions can be triggered by human manipulation of a dramatically bloated corpse. In 2016, a biologist's probe released a "huge blast of air" from a dead sperm whale that had beached in Skegness, a seaside town in England, the BBC reported. And in 2004, a 56-foot-long (17-m) sperm whale exploded on a city street in Tainan, Taiwan; it had been loaded onto a truck and was on its way to a lab for a necroscopy, according to NBC News.

Between 2017 and 2020, AMSEAS has responded to about 12 to 14 whale strandings per year. That adds up to about one whale stranding every 27 days on average, though "in some cases we had four whale strandings in a 30-day period," DiGiovanni said. However, there have also been more sightings of healthy whales reported in recent years than there were prior to 2017, "and that's one of the things that we've always been trying to understand — how stranding relates to wild populations," he said. 

If you spot a stranded marine animal on a New York beach, you can report it to AMSEAS via email or a phone hotline, according to the organization's website. 

Originally published on Live Science.

Whale watchers in British Columbia recently glimpsed a rare encounter involving a group of orcas seemingly attacking a humpback mother and calf in the Salish Sea.

In video footage captured by a local sailor on May 29 off the coast of Nanaimo on Vancouver Island, the orcas, also known as killer whales, repeatedly slammed against the water near the humpback pair, according to CHEK News.

Witnesses described the 30-minute encounter as an aggressive attack by 13 orcas that may have been targeting the baby humpback. In the footage, one onlooker can be heard saying, "I think they killed the calf." However, there is no evidence that the calf was killed, despite the fact it did not resurface after the attack and has not been seen since, according to Vancouver Island Whale Watch (VIWW), a whale-watching company involved in the subsequent search for these particular humpbacks.

Related: 13 bizarre things that washed up on beaches

"Hopefully, we will see the calf alive and well," Rodrigo Menezes, an oceanographer at VIWW, told CHEK News. "But for now, [there is] a lot of speculation about it."

Cetacean experts are also unsure if this rare encounter really was a deadly battle or just serendipitous splashing among cetaceans.

Transient orcas 

The encounter might be considered rare, but orcas are known for their sometimes aggressive behavior toward other marine mammals. In February, for instance, a pod of orcas off the coast of Australia ganged up on and tried to drown a young humpback whale who managed to escape, Live Science reported at the time. In March, a blue whale wasn't so lucky, when 70 killer whales hunted down and killed the mammal off the coast of Australia in an hours-long battle, Live Science also reported.

The recent encounter with humpbacks included so-called transient orcas — those that don't stay in the same area like resident orcas do — from three groups, the T100s, T123s and T46Bs, which range from southeast Alaska to central California, Mark Malleson, a marine biologist at the Center for Whale Research in Washington, told Live Science.

Unlike resident orcas, which feed mainly on salmon, transient orcas are known to target other marine mammals and some seabirds, Malleson said. 

Although transient and resident orcas are considered to be the same species, their differing geographic distribution and diets mean they rarely mix and are classified as distinct ecotypes or sub-species, according to the Center for Whale Research. 

A rare encounter 

Humpback whale numbers are on the rise in the Salish Sea, having only recently returned to the area after heavy commercial whaling in the late 19th and early 20th centuries drove them away, Malleson said. There has also been an increase in the number of transient orcas visiting the area in the last few decades, Malleson said. Those population increases mean there’s "a lot more interaction between humpbacks and killer whales" than in the past, he added.

Any encounters between the two species are also more likely to be documented now because there are "a lot more eyes on the water" due to whale-watching companies like VIWW, Malleson said.

However, despite encounters being on the rise, fatal interactions between orcas and humpbacks are almost unheard of in the area. 

"I have seen several interactions between humpbacks and killer whales over the last decade or two," Malleson said. "But not yet a fatal attack."

Fluke news 

Did the orcas kill this humpback calf? It is certainly possible, Malleson said.

"If there are enough killer whales to separate the mother from the calf and they are determined, it certainly would be possible," he said. "But I am not convinced that this was the case off of Nanaimo."

Malleson added, "Many people make false interpretations of what they see when killer whales are harassing large whales." If the calf's life had really been at risk, the mother would have tried much harder to deter the orcas, Andrew Trites, a marine mammal researcher at the University of British Columbia, told CHEK News. "Perhaps they [the orcas] were just testing the waters and saw an opportunity."

Although killer whales do slam their bodies into the water's surface to stun their prey, in this case the orcas may have been  just playing with the calf, Trites said.

The mother and calf have not been seen in the area since the encounter, VIWW told Live Science in an email. However, "there have also been no sightings of orcas feeding on a humpback carcass afterward, which would have been likely in the event they did attack and kill the calf."

Originally published on Live Science.

Cameras on the backs of baby humpback whales have captured a rare glimpse of moms nursing their calves. 

In addition to a camera, the suction-cup tags also carry an acoustic recorder, depth sensor and accelerometer, which together, collect data on the behavior, movement and breathing patterns of the whales. Researchers also deployed drones to simultaneously watch the graceful creatures from above and observe their size and body condition. 

The team, which includes scientists from the University of Hawaii at Mānoa Marine Mammal Research Program, the Stanford University Hopkins Marine Station and the University of California, Santa Cruz, is interested in finding out how often and for how long the calves nurse — a behavior that's tricky for researchers to observe from the surface. 

Related: Watch rare footage of whales blowing 'bubble nets' to capture prey in a vortex of doom

"We can actually see what these animals are seeing and encountering and experiencing themselves," Lars Bejder, the director of the Marine Mammal Research Program, said in a statement. "Itʻs quite unique and rare footage that we're obtaining, which is allowing us to quantify these nursing and suckling bouts that are so important."

About 100,000 humpback whales (Megaptera novaeangliae) visit the crystal clear waters off the coast of Maui, Hawaii, between January and March each year. The whales spend this time exclusively breeding, and they rely solely on energy stored from their previous summer feeding season in Alaska. 

The data collected in this study will provide important insights into the nutritional needs of humpback mothers and calves while they're hanging out in their Maui breeding grounds. 

Humpback whale research in Hawaii is a largely collaborative effort. Tag deployment and retrieval were made possible with help from local whale conservation and ecotourism groups.  

• Video: Humpbacks block orca's feeding frenzy
• Whale album: Giants of the deep
• Big miracle: The real rescue in images

Originally published on Live Science.

Blowing bubbles at the dinner table is generally considered to be very bad manners by human standards. But for humpback whales, it's a necessary part of trapping their dinner; humpbacks blow streams of spiraling bubbles to form "nets" of air around groups of the tiny marine creatures that the whales eat. 

Recently, researchers captured rare footage of this incredible sight, using cameras flying overhead and attached to feeding whales in waters near southeastern Alaska.

Airborne drone cameras hovering over humpback whales peered down at bubble trails as they rose up through the water, producing circular pens. At the same time, cameras worn by the whales showed what the net-building looked like from below the water's surface. As the whales exhaled bubbles, the animals swam in circles around their prey, creating an enclosing bubble wall to trap small fish and crustaceans, representatives of the University of Hawai'i (UH) at Mānoa said in a statement.

Related: Beastly Feasts: Amazing Photos of Animals and Their Prey

Once a bubble net surrounded the prey, the whale would swim through the net's center and gulp down anything caught inside.

"The footage is rather groundbreaking," said Lars Bejder, director of the Marine Mammal Research Program at UH. "We're observing how these animals are manipulating their prey and preparing the prey for capture," he said in the statement. 

Using suction cups, the researchers equipped whales with tags that held a video camera and accelerometer — instruments that measured the whales' acceleration — for gathering data about the movements in the whales' bubble-producing ballet. Together with the drones, the cameras provided the scientists with exceptional views of the whales as they generated prey-trapping bubble nets.

"The drone's perspective is showing us these bubble nets and how the bubbles are starting to come to the surface and how the animals come up through the bubble net as they surface, while the cameras on the whales are showing us the animal's perspective," Bejder said. "So, overlaying these two data sets is quite exciting."

Every summer, approximately 3,000 humpback whales in Hawai'i migrate around 3,000 miles (4,800 kilometers) north to Alaska, to gorge themselves where food is plentiful. Months later, at summer's end, the sated whales travel back to waters near Hawai'i, where the females give birth and nourish their offspring, the researchers said in the statement.

Scientists said they anticipate that findings from this mesmerizing bubble-blowing behavior will provide insights on how whales interact with their habitats. The footage and data could also reveal how humpbacks may be affected as climate change drives shifts in prey distribution and abundance, the researchers said. In addition, their observations could help explain why some humpback populations may already be declining, according to the statement. 

• In Photos: Tracking Humpback Whales
• Whale Album: Giants of the Deep
• Images: Sharks & Whales from Above

Originally published on Live Science.

Humpback whales (Megaptera novaeangliae) aren't just talented singers, they learn and steal each other's songs. And, according to a new study, they can pull off those musical thefts even when there are whole continents separating them from their targets.

An international team of researchers analyzed recordings of male humpbacks singing in the waters around Madagascar and Gabon, populations separated by the entire landmass of Africa. They broke down those songs into units (individual sounds, like a moan or a burble), phrases (arrangements of units) and themes (complete songs, composed of standard phrases). They found that between 2001 and 2005, the whales in the two populations appeared to lift ideas and whole songs out of one another's' songbooks, and repeat them in their home waters.

Whale researchers already knew that different breeding populations of humpbacks in the same ocean frequently took musical ideas from one another. But, in a paper published Nov. 28, 2018, in the journal Royal Society Open Science, the authors of this study said this was the first known example of song mixing from one ocean basin to another. [In Photos: Tracking Humpback Whales]

The whales likely learned one another's' songs while traveling to hunt for food, the researchers wrote. And the acoustic study backs up genetic data suggesting the populations from Madagascar and Gabon had come into contact with one another — enough so that they'd produced babies.

Whales across the Southern Hemisphere seem to share some cultural links, the researchers added, but the Madagascar and Gabon populations appear unusually tightly linked.

"We still know little about song learning and transmission in humpback whales," they wrote in the paper, "but it has been suggested that song revolutions may occur when there are a 'threshold' number of males singing the new song type, which then instigates song change within surrounding males, eventually spreading throughout the population."

Whales on two different sides of Africa might be more able than other separated groups to share songs in this way, they wrote, because the whales meet at the "relatively narrow" tip of the continent. Songs could pass back and forth between populations looking for krill down there, then move north as the whales head home.

• Video: Humpback Whales Sing Their Tunes
• Whale Album: Giants of the Deep
• Big Miracle: The Real Rescue in Images

Originally published on Live Science.

That's what some Ponta, Mozambique residents did when they saw a massive, 13-foot-long (4 meters) tiger shark (Galeocerdo cuvier) seemingly beach itself in order to chow down on the 30-ton humpback whale carcass bedecking the local shore.

According to Lorrayne Gaymer, a Mozambique dive instructor who filmed the incident (and the community's shocked response), the 66,000-lb. (30,000 kilograms) whale washed up on Ponta beach in early September. [13 Bizarre Things That Washed Up On Beaches]

"Initially, a rescue attempt was made for the whale, but after the locals of Ponta contacted a whale expert it became clear that the whale was very sick and shouldn't be moved," Gaymer told The Daily Mail. "It had passed away, and as the tide went out, hundreds of locals of Ponta all came down to take their share."

Then, Gaymer said, the sharks descended. According to Caters New Agency, an estimated 60 sharks of different species — including tiger, bull and dusky sharks — took turns ripping hunks of meat and blubber out of the whale's side. By the time Gaymer arrived on the scene and started filming, one giant tiger shark had swum so close to shore that it temporarily beached itself on the sand near the whale.

As you can intuit from the sundry shrieks and bleeped-out expletives that begin Gaymer's video, the sight of a tiger shark so close to shore was both exciting and terrifying for many spectators.

Tiger sharks (named for the large stripe running down the underside of their bodies) reside in coastal waters near the tropics and subtropics around the world. They are apex predators that can reach up to 18 feet (5.5 m) long, and are known for eating most anything they encounter. According to the book "Shark!: Killer Tales From The Dangerous Depths" (Allen & Unwin, 2011), they even have a reputation for venturing close enough to land to snag terrestrial animals like dogs, polar bears and, per a possibly apocryphal story out of Australia, even porcupines.

According to National Geographic, most sharks become beached when they swim too close to shore and get caught up in the ebb and flow of the tides. This is almost certainly the fate that befell the hungry shark in Gaymer's video. Luckily, after a few minutes on the sand of Ponta beach, a large wave washed the ravenous shark back into the water (and turned the ravaged whale carcass skyward for all to see.)

Originally published on Live Science.

Lots of baby humpback whales may be on their way, if recent years are any indication.

An unusually high number of female humpbacks living in the Southern Ocean around the Western Antarctic Peninsula have gotten pregnant in recent years, according to a study published today (May 2) in the journal Royal Society Open Science. Researchers are hopeful that the population is recovering from years of commercial whaling that nearly wiped them out in the area in the 20th century.

Humpback whales usually give birth every couple of years and have pregnancies that last for around 11 months, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Once the baby is born, the mother is very "protective" and "affectionate" toward its young, according to NOAA.

Pregnant or not, humpback whales were easy targets for whalers because of their abundance in bays and their tendency to float when killed, according to the study. With treaties put in place in the late 20th century, whaling stopped, and populations slowly began to recover. Now, humpback whales in the Southern Ocean around Antarctica are not considered endangered, according to The New York Times.

The researchers collected skin and blubber samples between 2010 and 2016 from 268 unsuspecting females. They tested the samples for progesterone — a hormone that regulates the reproductive system and pregnancy in most mammals, including humans. If the progesterone levels matched those found previously in pregnant female humpbacks, the researchers could indicate if these giants were "expecting."

They found that pregnancy rates varied greatly from year to year, from 36 percent in 2010 to 86 percent in 2014. But across all the tissue samples, on average, 63.5 percent of the females were pregnant. This is up from 48 percent of pregnant females identified between 1950 and 1956 in Antarctic whaling areas, according to the study.

But this good news could be short-lived, according to The New York Times.

The Western Antarctic Peninsula has increased in air temperature by nearly 12.6 degrees Fahrenheit (nearly 7 degrees Celsius) since the 1950s, according to the paper. Warmer air means more melting of the sea ice covering the Southern Ocean. This region has seen one of the greatest effects of climate change regarding warming. And while at first this might be helping the whales, providing them with 80 more days of hunting before the sea ice begins to cover their habitat, the good times most likely won't last, according to the researchers.

The whales may expand into more areas that were previously covered with ice, and "prey availability will likely increase," the researchers wrote, referring to the little crustaceans called krill that make up the bulk of humpbacks' diet. "Long-term trends, however, may be more problematic." According to The New York Times article, a reduction in sea ice can endanger the krill.

Originally published on Live Science.

At this time of year, gray whales and their calves are making their way up the California coast as part of their annual migration from Mexico to Alaska. A bounty of young, harmless grey whale calves is an irresistible lure for the top ocean-predators. [Watch Video of the Humpbacks Trying to Save the Gray Whale Calves]

Killer whales (or orcas) can always be found in the area off Monterey, but this year has been particularly grim for the killer whales' prey. One orca gang, led by an adult female named Emma, has been camped out in Monterey Bay for the past few weeks, said marine biologist Nancy Black, who works with Monterey Bay Whale Watch, a whale-watching outfit. In the last 12 days, the deadly orcas have killed seven gray whale calves, she said.

Meanwhile, humpbacks have been in the area to feed on anchovies. They do not appear to be fans of the orcas' deadly onslaught. Whenever they see an orca attack a gray whale calf, they rush in to stop it.

"Humpbacks have been charging in, probably because killer whales are the natural predators of the humpbacks also," Black said. "They are charging in and trumpeting and trying to get in the way, using their tail flukes to try to slash them and push them away," and being as boisterous and annoying as possible in the area, she said.

Savior instinct

It's not clear why humpbacks are trying to save the day, but it may just be a byproduct of their natural "hatred" for killer whales. Killer whales also prey upon humpback calves (though not adult humpbacks), Black said. Around this time of year, though, humpbacks don't have their calves with them, so stepping in isn't a matter of self-defense.

"They're probably instinctually just trying to push away their predator from the area, whether it's a different species of animal doesn't matter, they just want to get them away," Black told Live Science.

This isn't the first time scientists have documented this phenomenon. A study in 2016 found that humpbacks band together to fight off killer whale attacks, no matter the species involved.

Humpbacks are probably lured to the area by killer whale vocalizations, Black said.

So far, Black hasn't seen a humpback whale successfully stop a gray whale kill, but they have made feeding on a gray whale calf carcass more stressful, Black said.

However, humpbacks are often successful at saving sea lions or other small mammals from the killer whales' jaws.

Humpbacks "have prevented killer whales from catching seals and sea lions," Black said. "They push the sea lion out of the way and save it."

It's not clear exactly why the humpbacks play the hero, as no other creature on Earth seems willing to stand up to killer whales — and certainly not for a different species.

"Other whales like blue whales, when they hear killer whales, they flee," Black said. " Blue whales take off in the opposite direction." Blue whales are the largest animals on Earth.

Originally published on Live Science.

Whales' social lives have largely remained a mystery to scientists, until now.

Researchers have gained a whale's-eye view of the marine mammals' lives in Antarctica, thanks to a research project that placed noninvasive digital tags — containing sensors and a camera — on minke and humpback whales.

The data and footage collected reveal the animals' feeding habits and social behaviors, and show how whales use their blowholes to clear sea ice so they can breathe. [Whale Album: Giants of the Deep]

The research project, a collaboration between the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and Oregon State University, used suction cups to attach cameras with sensors to the whales' backs. These camera tags would stay on each whale for 24 to 48 hours, allowing researchers to experience a day in the life of a whale. 

"We have been able to show that whales spend a great deal of time during the days socializing and resting and then feeding largely throughout the evening and night time," lead scientist Ari Friedlaender, an ecologist at Oregon State University, said in a statement. "Every time we deploy a tag or collect a sample, we learn something new about whales in the Antarctic."

Different feeding behaviors have also been discovered because of the sensors. For instance, whales will range from rolling lunges near the surface to dives up to 1,148 feet (250 meters) deep to eat krill (small crustaceans), their main food source. Video of the whales diving for food also reveals the relative size of krill, and the density of the krill patch, that the whales are feeding on. This information can help with whale conservation efforts because beyond the impacts of climate change, an increase in krill fishing can also threaten the whales, said Chris Johnson, ocean science manager for WWF-Australia.

"Once we have an idea about where the whales feed, how often, where they go and rest, we can use this to inform policy and management to protect these whales and their ecosystem," Friedlaender said.

The researchers are still analyzing the data collected from their initial deployment of the sensors in March. The scientists said they plan to publish their findings eventually in a scientific journal.

Original article on Live Science.

First drones, and now satellites are allowing scientists to spy on whales — for research, that is.

Though they are massive animals, whale populations are difficult to monitor, according to researchers. Drones have been used to capture footage of whales, and now scientists are turning to even higher-flying help. Researchers in Australia are using satellite imagery to track local humpback whale populations, reported the Australian Broadcasting Corp. (ABC).

Humpback whales were considered an endangered species under the Endangered Species Act of 1973. However, the U.S. National Marine Fisheries Service lifted the whales' endangered status last year as a result of successful conservation efforts. But despite this success, the migratory whales are difficult to track, and many population estimates are largely speculative, according to Curt Jenner, managing director of the Centre for Whale Research in Western Australia. [In Photos: Tracking Humpback Whales in the South Pacific Ocean]

"People say, 'The whale numbers are very healthy, aren't they?' Well, we can't actually honestly say yes to that, we don't know because we haven't had a monitoring program for this largest humpback population on the planet for about 10 years," Jenner told ABC News of humpbacks in Western Australia. "So we're very interested to find out if this very large number of whales can be sustained and whether it is healthy enough to continue on into the future."

Jenner and his colleague, Michele Thums, an ecologist with the Australian Institute of Marine Science, have investigated new ways to count humpback whales. The researchers said they will use two satellite images, taken from 373 miles (600 kilometers) above Earth, to conduct an accurate head count of humpback whales as they migrate up the Western Australian coast.

"Previously, it was done by traditional methods with people on aeroplanes or boats counting whales," Thums told ABC News. "But we're trialling a new method, which is to see if we can count them from space, and specifically from satellites that are in space."

Thums said the satellite imagery's high resolution allows for whales to be spotted with "quite a bit of certainty." However, it is a time-consuming process as they scan images manually. The researchers say they eventually want to develop a computerized scanning system to identify whales in the satellite images.

Original article on Live Science.

A new National Geographic video showing humpback whales in a graceful ballet around a passenger boat in the South Pacific is a whale-watcher's dream.

The behavior of the whales is called "mugging," an all-purpose term marine biologists use to describe whales approaching a boat. Sometimes they stay for mere minutes, said Stephanie Stack, a marine biologist at the Pacific Whale Foundation in Hawaii. Other times they stay for hours.

Regulations prevent boat captains from running their engines within 100 yards of a whale, Stack told Live Science. Thus, the boat has to stay put until the whales, or "muggers," decide to swim away. [See Photos of Researchers Tracking Humpback Whales in the South Pacific]

"People don't seem to mind" that delay, Stack said. "It's the best thing that can happen on a whale watch."

The video, shared by National Geographic on Facebook, was taken near the New Caledonia archipelago in the South Pacific. Three whales circle a boat calmly, occasionally breaching with an eruption of spray from their blowholes. A drone captured the footage, creating a bird's-eye view in which the whales nearly dwarf the boat.

Humpback whales (Megaptera novaeangliae) can grow up to 60 feet (18 meters) in length, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The whales migrate farther than any other mammals, traveling from summer feeding grounds as far north as Maine and Alaska to winter calving grounds near Hawaii or the Dominican Republic, according to NOAA. They can eat up to 3,000 pounds (1,360 kg) of tiny crustaceans, plankton and miniature fish a day, straining it through the comb-like baleen in their mouths.

Mugging seems to be motivated by curiosity, said Stack, who wasn't involved in the taping of the New Caledonia encounter. The whales aren't aggressive or stressed during these episodes, and sometimes engage in a behavior called "spy hopping." That's when a whale slowly lifts its head out of the water, bringing at least one eye above the waterline to find out what's happening above the surface.

"They're just investigating," Stack said.

Occasionally, a female humpback will mug a boat while trying to avoid an unwanted suitor, Stack said. She will use the boat as a shield between her and a persistent male. In general, Stack said, mugging is relatively uncommon, but seems to happen more often off the coast of eastern Australia in the Pacific than near Hawaii.

Original article on Live Science.

A humpback whale that stranded on a sandbar in Moriches Bay in Long Island, New York, on Nov. 20 was euthanized on Wednesday (Nov. 23), after attempts to move the animal into deeper waters were unsuccessful.

Marine biologists and veterinarians evaluated the whale's condition and determined that the animal was too badly injured to survive.

"It was thin, limp, weak, minimally responsive, [and] had evidence of neurological abnormalities and extensive skin injuries with evidence of infection," the team said in a statement released Nov. 23. The team included individuals from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the Riverhead Foundation for Marine Research and Preservation (RFMRP), the International Fund for Animal Welfare, and North Carolina State University. 

Related: Big Miracle: The Real Rescue in Images

"Based upon these findings, the most humane option was to euthanize the whale since its chance of surviving in the wild was minimal," the experts added.

Reports of a whale swimming in Moriches Bay first surfaced on Nov. 13, the RFMRP shared on Facebook. The group explained that the whale, which appeared to be a young humpback, was probably feeding, and the RFMRP advised boaters to keep their distance.

However, on Nov. 20, the whale became grounded on a sandbar in Hart's Cove in very shallow water — about 1 to 2 feet (0.3 to 0.6 meters) deep, according to NOAA.

RFMRP biologists, who respond to whale strandings under NOAA's guidance, attempted to dislodge the animal from the sandbar by using boats to create wave action that would lift the whale free. However, the waters were too shallow. Even after several tide cycles raised the water level around the whale, the animal remained stuck.

The team evaluated several other options for freeing the whale, but the possibility of causing great harm to the animal in the process was simply too high, the RFMRP said on Facebook. The decision to euthanize the whale, which involved an injection, was the only remaining option, said John Bullard, director of NOAA's Greater Atlantic Regional Fisheries Office.

"The tidal conditions and other oceanic or biological factors that led to this stranding overtook any ability by our responders to rescue it," Bullard said in a statement. "We are thankful to our partners and the community for their caring response and respect for law enforcement as we pursue this humane option."

A necropsy will be performed on the whale after it is transferred to a safe location. The procedure will help scientists determine whether health issues caused the animal to strand in the first place.

Original article on Live Science.

The photo is extraordinary. In waters near the Antarctic peninsula, an enormous humpback whale floats on its back, cradling a Weddell seal on its chest and elevating it above the ocean surface. Only moments earlier, the seal was perilously close to becoming dinner for a group of hungry killer whales.

Biologist Robert Pitman snapped the image while on a research expedition in 2009 — but it wasn't the first time he had observed this unusual protective behavior.

Just one week earlier, Pitman, a researcher with the Southwest Fisheries Science Center in the NOAA Fisheries Service in California, saw a pair of humpbacks aggressively confronting killer whales that were circling a lone seal on an isolated ice floe. The humpbacks plowed between the killer whales and the trapped seal, vocalizing and churning the water with their flippers, and shielding the seal until the orcas gave up and swam away. [Daring Duos: Unlikely Animal Friends]

Pitman wrote about both encounters in an article published in the November 2009 issue of the magazine Natural History, but that was only the beginning of a much longer and more in-depth investigation. In a new study, Pitman explores dozens of examples presenting humpback whales as unlikely marine vigilantes, ganging up on predatory killer whales that try to attack other species.

His research analyzed 115 interactions that took place between humpbacks and killer whales, observed by more than 54 individuals — scientists and non-scientists — in ocean locations around the world and spanning 62 years, from 1951 through 2012.

The study found that large and powerful humpback whales, the only whales known to attack orcas, will band together and sometimes travel great distances to interrupt and terminate a killer whale attack, regardless of what type of animal the orca is attacking.

Humpbacks to the rescue

Adult humpbacks usually don't have much to fear from killer whales. Observers' accounts suggested that when killer whales approached humpbacks, they were targeting the more vulnerable calves or juveniles as prey, the study authors wrote.

But humpbacks frequently turned the tables on their would-be attackers. Observers also described numerous reports of humpbacks — alone and in groups — making the first move, approaching killer whales that were already pursuing other prey. Sometimes the orcas' victims were humpback mothers with young calves. But belligerent humpbacks also appeared when orcas pursued other whale species, or even seals and sea lions. The humpbacks would slap their tail flukes and flippers in the water, and make loud "bellowing" sounds to drive the orcas away.

Humpbacks' whale-deterring moves typically lasted for at least one hour and could extend for as long as seven hours, the authors wrote. And according to observers, the whales' intervention often allowed the orcas' prey to escape.

One account in the study described a killer whale attacking a gray whale mother and calf, when "out of nowhere, a humpback whale came trumpeting in." Four more humpbacks shortly followed, which the observer found odd because no humpbacks had been sighted in the area before then. Their timely arrival allowed both calf and mother to flee to safety, the researchers said. [Real-Life 'Zootopia': Mongooses and Warthogs Are Unlikely Pals]

Heeding distress calls

The sounds made by attacking orcas may be what draw humpbacks to the scene — even when they're nearly a mile away, the authors suggested. Killer whales are silent and stealthy when stalking their prey, but become highly vocal once they attack. Humpbacks could recognize this sound from orca attacks on their own young, and respond even when they don't know what species the killer whale is targeting.

But why would humpbacks put themselves at risk to protect animals that aren't even their close relatives? They aren't known to mingle with seals and other whales under normal circumstances, Pitman told Live Science in an email.

"Sometimes different species will collect in an area of abundant prey," he said. "But usually there are no direct interactions."

The protection the humpbacks' behavior offers to other species is probably very welcome — but is likely unintended, the study authors said.

"A simple behavioral rule like 'interfere with attacking killer whales' may prevent a related calf from being killed," Pitman explained, "and it may also help out other species at times."

Since the risk to a healthy adult humpback from a killer whale is low, the benefit of possibly saving a humpback calf could outweigh the high-energy cost of putting themselves in harm's way — even if the animal they're saving isn't always a humpback, Pitman said. [Whale Album: Giants of the Deep]

Friends and allies?

There is indeed a great deal yet to be learned about the motivations of these hero humpbacks, but is the idea of animal altruism really so unusual? Animals of the same species that live in groups are known to band together to drive off a threat, to collaborate in complex construction projects, to hunt for food or to attack rivals.

And even different species that would typically never interact can form close bonds when introduced at a young age — such as a leopard and golden retriever that were raised together in South Africa.

But do animals in the wild experience compassion or concern for other species that go beyond the need to protect themselves and their young? Animals can't tell scientists about their intentions. And while it may be tempting to interpret their behavior through a human lens, there is still much that eludes easy explanation, according to the researchers.

"I think we need to consider the possibility that altruism can be unintentional and arise out of self-interest, as we suggest for the humpbacks," Pitman said.

He said that current understanding of whale behavior is also hampered simply because whales are scarce. Whaling throughout the 20th century drastically reduced their numbers, and many populations that were nearly eliminated are only recently beginning to rebound.

"As their populations continue to recover, and we learn more about how they interact with each other and their environment, we could be in for some surprises," he added.

The findings were published online July 20 in the journal Marine Mammal Science.

Original article on Live Science.

Behemoth whales whose tails are often seen in large numbers slapping the water off Hawaii during the winters have been slow in reaching the Aloha State. Some onlookers had labeled the Hawaii humpbacks as "missing."

Each year, humpback whales return to the Pacific Ocean near Hawaii, Mexico or Central America for their winter breeding, starting as early as August some years and often lingering into May, said experts at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)'s Hawaiian Islands Humpback Whale National Marine Sanctuary (HIHWNMS). This year, the whales showed up in Hawaii later than normal.

"It's an example of the variable nature of Mother Nature," Ed Lyman, resource protection specialist and large-whale entanglement response coordinator for HIHWNMS, told Live Science. Unlike humans, whales don't have calendars, and there are a lot of variables that could cause a later or earlier arrival from year to year, Lyman said. [See Photos of the South Pacific Humpback Whales]

Why humpback whale numbers matter

Humpback whales are considered an endangered species by the Endangered Species Act , which means that U.S. law prohibits poaching these animals or coming within 100 yards (approximately 90 meters) of them. Fewer than 10 percent of these plankton-eating animals exist today, and world estimates fall between 35,000 and 40,000 individuals, according to the California-based Marine Mammal Center.

The HIHWNMS and other organizations closely monitor the whales' population to see how it continues to bounce back after being whittled down by excessive hunting, falling to around 6,000 individuals in the early 1990s.

These marine mammals are also well-known for their long migrations. They travel over 3,000 miles (about 4,800 kilometers) between their summer feeding grounds in the northern Pacific Ocean to their breeding grounds near the equator, the sanctuary said. Hawaii usually sees more than 10,000 humpback whales traveling to the area to mate and feed each year between November and May, the sanctuary's website said.

Where did all the confusion come from?

Some initial reports from the Guardian and other media sites suggested the whale numbers were much lower than usual for late December.

"We don't have any empirical data that can verify whether there are fewer whales at this time of year as compared to recent years," wrote Elia Herman, the marine protected species program manager for Hawaii's Department of Land and Natural Resources, in an email to Live Science. "What we do know is that that has been the general impression of some people," she stated.

It is still relatively early in whale breeding season, Herman said, and it's not unusual to see lower amounts of activity until closer to February — the peak of the season.

HIHWNMS also released a statement on Jan. 5, stating that "recent news stories have caused concern about the apparent low numbers of humpback whales appearing this season in Hawaii" and that the sanctuary "would like to clarify some information." The sanctuary went on to say that while the humpback whales were arriving later this year than in recent years, they are now arriving in what local tour operators confirm are "normal numbers."

Humpback whale concerns

Once the whales make it to Hawaii, their stay isn't always a blissful vacay: About 30 percent of the humpbacks that breed in Hawaii have shown signs of recent entanglement with fishing gear, according to some new data from HIHWNMS.

Fortunately, the annual ocean whale counts and monitoring programs run by the sanctuary help researchers make a rough estimate of humpback whale numbers and learn about humpback whale behavior. These studies also help researchers and aid workers at the HIHWNMS identify and assist entangled whales in addition to gaining a better understanding of how humans affect humpback whale behavior, Lyman said.

Tour boat operators and professional fishers also report entangled whale sightings, so that sanctuary workers can assist the whales in need.

Follow Elizabeth Newbern @liznewbern. Follow Live Science @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science.

Underwater mountains are key stopovers in the migratory routes of an endangered population of humpback whales in the South Pacific, new research shows.

Humpback whales are found in all of the world's oceans, from icy to tropical waters. They migrate farther than any other mammal, traveling great distances from their summer feeding grounds to their winter breeding and birthing grounds. In fact, a record-setting female humpback was recently discovered swimming from Brazil to Madagascar, a voyage of at least 6,090 miles (9,800 kilometers).

Many aspects of humpback migrations remain mysterious, as they mostly occur far away from humans. Previous research had revealed that humpback whales migrating from breeding grounds off the east coast of South America and the west coast of Africa swim in nearly straight lines in the Atlantic Ocean without noticeable stops and in relatively narrow corridors. Similar migration patterns were seen among humpbacks migrating from breeding grounds off Madagascar in the Indian Ocean. [See Photos of the South Pacific Humpback Whales]

Recently, scientists discovered an offshore habitat for southwestern Pacific humpback whales off New Caledonia, an island territory in the South Pacific. To learn more, the researchers tracked these whales with satellite-monitored radio tags.

The scientists approached the whales on boat and used 26-foot-long (8 meters) poles to implant tags into the flanks of whales near their dorsal fins. The researchers photographed the fins and flukes of tagged whales, which are as unique to each of the giants as fingerprints are to humans. The investigators also used a crossbow and custom-made arrows to collect skin samples from the whales, to identify their sex and analyze their genes.

"Tagging whales is a long, hard and difficult process, as you need to come close to the animals," said study lead author Claire Garrigue, a marine biologist at Opération Cétacés in New Caledonia. "Being a few meters from an animal of 14 meters [46 feet] and 30 to 40 tonnes [66,000 to 88,000 lbs.] is very impressive."

The scientists analyzed 34 tags, which transmitted between five and 110 days' worth of data. Unlike previously studied humpback migrations, the tagged New Caledonia whales dispersed in a wide range of routes toward feeding grounds in Antarctica.

Unexpectedly, the satellite data revealed that about three-quarters of the New Caledonia humpbacks paused over seamounts, underwater mountains rising at least 330 feet (100 m) from the ocean floor. Recent studies had revealed that seamounts are one of the largest sets of major habitats in the world, supporting a profusion of life.

For instance, the humpbacks trekked at an average speed of 2.2 mph (3.5 km/h) during most of their migration, but at Antigonia seamount, located near the New Caledonian islands, visitors slowed to about 0.8 mph (1.3 km/h) on average. The average stopover at Antigonia exceeded a week, with the longest lasting more than 22 days. This is the first time scientists have found that humpbacks make regular use of seamounts, and the researchers suggested that these undersea peaks may represent an overlooked habitat for the species.

Seamounts are more common in the Pacific than they are in the Atlantic. This could help explain why these South Pacific humpbacks make use of seamounts whereas previously analyzed humpbacks did not, the researchers said.

It remains uncertain what, exactly, the New Caledonia humpbacks do at seamounts. The researchers suspect that seamounts likely serve multiple important roles — perhaps as breeding locations, resting areas, navigational landmarks and supplemental feeding grounds.

The researchers noted that, in the New Caledonia region, there are lots of seamounts but only a few of them seem attractive to humpbacks. Future research can analyze the features of the preferred seamounts and possible functions they could serve for their behemoth visitors, Garrigue said.

Although humpback whales are no longer endangered as a species, the small New Caledonian population of this species is considered endangered. If seamounts are important locations for these humpbacks during their migrations, "conservation measures need to be implemented there," Garrigue told Live Science. "They could, for example, be designed as offshore marine protected areas," she said.

Other species of whale and dolphin — such as Baird's beaked whales, short-finned pilot whales, common dolphins and spinner dolphins — may also make use of seamounts, Garrigue said. Future research can also investigate seamounts outside the South Pacific for visiting whales — "those in the north Pacific, for example, or in the Indian Ocean," Garrigue said.

The scientists detailed their findings online Nov. 25 in the journal Open Science.

Follow Charles Q. Choi on Twitter @cqchoi. Follow us @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science.

Scientists monitored the travels of the southwestern Pacific humpback whale in an offshore habitat off New Caledonia, in the South Pacific Ocean. They found that underwater mountains called seamounts serve as key stopovers in the whales' migratory routes. Here's a look at images from the tracking study of the humpback whales. [Read the full story on humpback whales and seamounts] 

Prepping for departure

A humpback whale shows the underside of its tail, or fluke, before taking a dive. This "fluke up" position lets scientists and others identify the whales because there are unique markings on the flukes. (Photo Credit: Opération cétacés.)

Diving down deep

The scientists also took photos of the humpback whales' fins and flukes, which are unique to each whale and as such can serve as "fingerprints" to identify the giants. 

On the move

To track the whales, the researchers approached the behemoths on boats and used 26-foot-long (8 meters) poles to implant tags into the flanks of the marine mammals near their dorsal fins. (Credit: Yohann Djerahian.)

Two birds

The researchers also collected skin samples to identify each tagged whale's sex and to examine its genes. Here, the scientists deploy a satellite tag on an an adult humpback whale and at the same time collected a biopsy with a crosbow. (Photo Credit: Opération cétacés.)

Family time

A mother humpback whale and her calf swim off Caledonia. The white flank of the mother is a characteristic of some Southern Hemisphere humpback whales. (Photo Credit: Opération cétacés.)

Look out below

The satellite data collected from the tags revealed about 75 percent of the humpback whales off New Caledonia stopped over at seamounts, or underwater mountains, that rose at least 330 feet (100 meters) from the seafloor. (Photo Credit: Opération cétacés.)

Slap and splash

For instance, the humpbacks trekked at an average speed of 2.2 mph (3.5 km/h) during most of their migration, but at Antigonia seamount visitors slowed to about 0.8 mph (1.3 km/h) on average. Here a humpback whale slapping its tail in front of Mato islet, New Caledonia. (Photo Credit: Opération cétacés.)

Practice, practice, practice

Humpback whales range in weight from 50,000 to 80,000 pounds (22,000 to 36,000 kg), with lengths of up to 60 feet (18 meters), according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Females are larger than males. Here, an immature humpback whale breaching. (Photo Credit: Opération cétacés.)

Strong and beautiful

Early morning breaching on a calm austral winter day. (Photo Credit: Opération cétacés.)

Hailing the crew

Pectoral extension with the evening light, above a seamount. (Photo Credit: Opération cétacés.)

Up and away

Breach of humpback whale. (Photo Credit: Opération cétacés.)

Family love

A mother humpback whale and her calf interact on Antigonia seamount off New Caledonia. (Photo Credit: Opération cétacés.)

Humpback whale populations across the world may actually be separate subspecies, a new genetic study reveals.

Though the expert swimmers make the longest migrations of any mammal, the subpopulations in the North Pacific, North Atlantic and the Southern Hemisphere oceans stick to separate routes.

"Humpback whale populations are actually more isolated from one another than we thought. Their populations appear separated by warm equatorial waters that they rarely cross," study co-author Jennifer Jackson, a researcher with the British Antarctic Survey, said in a statement.

This isolation may explain why the northern swimmers tend to have darker coloring on their underbellies and tails than their southern counterparts. The results suggest the different populations are evolving independently. [In Photos: Tracking Humpback Whales]

As a result, the populations in the three oceans should be classified as distinct subspecies, the researchers found.

Long-distance swimmers

Humpback whales (Megaptera novaeangliae) usually feed at high latitudes, then make their way toward the equator to breed — a journey that can cover 3,000 miles (5,000 kilometers). The whales also seem to travel in strikingly straight lines, rarely veering off course by more than 1 degree, though exactly how they accomplish this amazing navigation remains a mystery.

To understand how the different populations were linked, Jackson and colleagues used tiny darts to collect DNA from more than 2,600 whales in five different ocean regions. The team then analyzed the whales' mitochondrial DNA, which is carried in the egg and passed on through the maternal line, as well as DNA found in the nucleus of the cell, which is inherited from both parents.

Because mitochondrial DNA changes more quickly, it provided a snapshot of how the different humpback whale populations migrated and intermingled over the last million years, whereas the more slowly mutating nuclear DNA revealed longer-term trends for the species.

Isolated populations

The DNA analysis revealed these populations have kept to themselves for quite a long time.

"Although female whales have crossed from one hemisphere to another at certain times in the last few thousand years, they generally stay in their ocean of birth. This isolation means they have been evolving semi-independently for a long time," Jackson said in a statement.

The new findings could mean some humpback populations are more fragile than scientists had thought. Scientists can't assume dwindling populations in one ocean will be replenished with emigrants from distant oceans.

The study was published today (May 20) in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

Follow Tia Ghose on Twitter and Google+. Follow Live Science @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science.

Five distinct humpback whale populations have been identified across the North Pacific Ocean in the most comprehensive genetic study of the mammals in this region yet, a new study reports.

The ranges of the newly identified populations include: Hawaii; Mexico; Central America; Okinawa and the Philippines; and an additional West Pacific population whose range has yet to be determined more specifically.

Humpback whales are found in all oceans of the world, but the North Pacific humpbacks are genetically isolated enough to be considered a subspecies of other humpbacks, of which the new populations are further subclassifications, study co-author Scott Baker, a professor of fisheries and wildlife at Oregon State University, said in a statement. [Video: Humpback Whales Sing Their Tunes]

"Even within these five populations, there are nuances," Baker said. "The Mexico population, for example, has 'discrete' sub-populations off the mainland and near the Revillagigedo Islands, but because their genetic differentiation is not that strong, these are not considered 'distinct' populations."

To distinguish the separate populations, the team studied DNA within 2,200 tissue samples of whales from 10 feeding regions and eight winter breeding regions during a three-year study called SPLASH, which stands for Structure of Populations, Levels of Abundance and Status of Humpbacks.

The team studied distinct breeding and feeding grounds because these are the types of "barriers" that isolate marine animal populations and make them become genetically distinct, whereas terrestrial animals more commonly become isolated and genetically distinct by geographic barriers, Baker said. Researchers think that migration routes, feeding and breeding grounds of individuals are passed from mother to calf and through subsequent generations, with the separations between populations ultimately becoming evident in their DNA as a distinct marker of the population.

Using photo identification records to estimate humpback whale populations, the researchers suggest roughly 22,000 humpbacks currently swim throughout the North Pacific, which is close to the population size of humpbacks before whaling decimated their populations during the 19th and 20th centuries. Commercial whaling has been banned by the International Whaling Commission since 1966, when hunting had dwindled the species down to roughly 5,000 individuals worldwide.  

Though the U.S. Endangered Species Act still lists humpbacks as endangered, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature currently only recognizes two populations as endangered — one in the Sea of Arabia and one in Oceania. The team believes that one or more of the newly identified populations may qualify as endangered as well.

"Each of the five distinct populations has its own history of exploitation and recovery that would need to be part of an assessment of its status," Baker said.

The study findings are detailed this week in the journal Marine Ecology – Progress Series.

Follow Laura Poppick on Twitter. Follow LiveScience on Twitter, Facebook and Google+. Original article on LiveScience.

Who hasn't seen the iconic global warming image of a sad, skinny polar bear floating on an ice chip, threatened with extinction from habitat loss and the rapidly changing Arctic ecosystem? But at Slate.com, author Jackson Landers argues that the polar bear is one of five species whose extinction risk is actually a myth.

The Nanook of the North has survived multiple warming cycles in the past 600,000 years, Landers writes, and only eight of its 19 subpopulations are in decline. Other predators that are thriving despite reports of their imminent demise include the Komodo dragon and Southeast Asia's Clouded leopards, Landers said.

On the enormous end of the scale, humpback whales represent a conservation success story, with an estimated 80,000 of the giant beasts swimming the seas, Landers reports. There were probably 125,000 whales before their numbers were decimated due to whaling. Finally, Landers knocks down an urban myth that praying mantises are endangered in the United States. In truth, none of the 20 species of these amazing insects are at risk of extinction.

Read more: Slate.com

Email Becky Oskin or follow her @beckyoskin. Follow us @livescience, Facebook & Google+. 

Humpback whales and killer whales are losing up to 94 percent and 97 percent, respectively, of their communication space in the busiest areas of the ocean off the British Columbia coast, according to a new study.

Although this simplified summary represents a somewhat pessimistic interpretation of 10,000 hours of underwater noise levels in various sites off the coast that yielded highly variable results, researchers say the finding is helpful because it demonstrates a method that tries to interpret what those noise levels might mean to fish or whales.

"On average, what we found is, the habitats that are most important to resident killer whales — both northern and southern populations — are the noisiest of the sites we are studying," said Rob Williams, study leader and a whale researcher with the sea mammal research unit of the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.

The areas most preferred by humpback and fin whales are quieter, he added, but there may be no legal protection to keep the sites that way. The study focused on three whale species, but the researchers hope to expand their work to more marine creatures, such as fish. [Video: Humpback Whales Sing Their Tunes]

Shouting above the dial tone

Whale vocalizations serve many purposes, as far as researchers can tell. Calls can be used to coordinate whale movements to find food or head to mating grounds. Fish also emit calls: For example, male cusk-eels flex their muscles to emit mating calls through the water.

Marine creatures can communicate across tens of miles, but no one knows just how far whales are using and responding to the acoustic information that may be contained in their songs, or how well they are able to compete with the noise from human ocean activities. Fin whales, in particular, have very loud calls, making it easy for them to shout above ship noise at short distances, the researchers found, whereas calls made by humpbacks and killer whales are fainter and, therefore, more likely to be masked by ship noise.

"We really don't have good information on the size of the habitat that the whales are using," Williams told LiveScience. "You can say the whale's acoustic space is being reduced by 50 percent or 80 percent, but that is relative to our best guess about the range the whales are using."

The calls were recorded on a device built by the Bioacoustics Research Program at Cornell University, led by co-author Christopher Clark.

The underwater microphones, called "pop-ups," were placed on the seabed and programmed to record ship noise, whale calls or anything else that went by, collecting 4 terabytes of data between 2008 and 2010. The team sailed back to each deployment site in the fall, and played an underwater sound to retrieve the recorder.

"It's like pressing a garage-door opener: The machine is smart enough to listen for that signal and nothing else," Williams said. "It releases an electric current that burns through a wire, and they slowly pop up to the surface with hard drive and electronics intact."

Involving the whale community

Williams' team decided to crowdsource their work as much as possible to cut down on research costs. Local boat taxis, whale watchers, scientists and other people on the water were asked to deploy and pick up all 12 microphones and associated equipment, which weighed anywhere between 200 and 500 lbs. (90 and 230 kilograms) depending on the equipment's configuration. Williams said his improvised collaborators were eager to help.

Noise is an easy thing to fix in oceans that are facing acidification, a warming climate and other situations that would take decades to address, Williams added. To cut down on the cacophony, ships could slow down or avoid whale-filled areas, or manufacturers could construct quieter vessels, he suggests.

The funding for the research came from a wide range of individual donors and private foundations, including the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation in the United States, the Marisla Foundation and the Canadian Whale Institute.

A study based on the research was recently published in the journal Animal Conservation. Some members of Williams' team also did a study showing increasing humpback-whale populations in British Columbia that was published in the journal PLOS ONE in September.

Follow Elizabeth Howell @howellspace. Follow us @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on LiveScience.

Underwater conversations between humpbacks have revealed a surprising secret: Some of the whales in the Southern Hemisphere appear to skip their northward migration and stay in frigid Antarctic waters for the winter.

A scientist overheard the whales chatting in the month of April – the start of the Antarctic fall – while using a research station in the area that has underwater microphones. At the time, conventional wisdom said the whales should have been 4,350 miles (7,000 kilometers) away off the coast of Africa.

"I was totally surprised, because the textbook-opinion until that day was that humpback whales migrate to Antarctic waters only in the austral summer months," said Ilse Van Opzeeland, a marine biologist at the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research in Germany, in a statement.

To see if this was a one-time excursion, Van Opzeeland developed a program to analyze all recordings made by the PerenniAL Acoustic Observatory in the Antarctic Ocean (PALAOA), located near the Weddell Sea, in 2008 and 2009. Humpback calls popped out in the winter months of both years. [Video: Humpback Whales Sing Their Tunes]

"Today, we know that, in 2008, the humpback whales were present near the observatory with the exception of the months May, September and October," she added. "In the following year, they were absent only in September. Therefore, it is highly likely that humpback whales spent the entire winter in the eastern Weddell Sea during both years."

Avoiding the commute?

Humpback whales, which are about the size of a bus, are generally believed to migrate from the poles in the summertime to the equator in the winter, where they breed.

It's possible that young humpback females not pregnant with calves may stay behind in Antarctica to avoid the energy-draining commute to Africa. There would be enough krill near Antarctica to fatten up for future years, Van Opzeeland said. Later in their lives, after giving birth and suckling a calf, each female will lose up to 65 percent of her body weight.

There are several sets of humpback populations, and nobody is sure which group the Weddell Sea singers belong to. The scientists plan to compare the PALAOA recordings with songs recorded near Gabon and Mozambique in Africa. The cries and howls of humpbacks are unique to each group, providing an "acoustic fingerprint" that could give clues as to where the Antarctic whales breed, Van Opzeeland said.

Another open question is why the whales were only heard for part of the winter. Scientists think humpbacks may hang out in "polynyas," which are open areas in the ice that form when offshore winds push sea ice away from the Antarctic continent.

"When polynyas close or change position, the whales may move with them and leave the recording radius of 100 kilometers, which our underwater microphones are monitoring. However, we do not yet have proof for this behavior," Van Opzeeland said.

The research was published in the Sept. 6 issue of the journal PLOS ONE.

Follow Elizabeth Howell @howellspace, or LiveScience on Twitter @livescience. We're also on Facebook & Google+. Originally published on LiveScience.

Humpback whale populations are on the rise in a small coastal area of British Columbia, a new estimate reveals, but researchers remain cautious about the whales' safety in the face of several human threats.

In the summer, the whales share space with a shipping channel that goes through the Caamaño Sound area, which is just south of the port city of Prince Rupert and midway up the province's coast. Whale collisions with freighters sometimes happen, and ship noise interferes with the feeding calls the humpbacks emit. Humpbacks can also get tangled in fishing gear and drown, or starve if the gear interferes with their ability to eat.

Canadian gas company Enbridge is considering a pipeline in the area that would bring oil from the tar sands in a neighboring province, Alberta, and pump it several thousand miles to the coast for shipping.

Despite the threats, however, new estimates show the local humpback population doubled between 2004 and 2011 to about 134 individuals, following a trend of increasing numbers in the North Pacific area. [In Photos: Tracking Humpback Whales]

"The doubling was a combination of true population growth, and covering a wider area as there was more funding for research and two boats on the water," Erin Ashe, who led the research and is pursuing her Ph.D. with Scotland's University of St. Andrews, told LiveScience.

That increase is delicate, though. Using a statistical metric called "potential biological removal" that shows the impact of individuals leaving the population, the researchers say it could take the death of just one or two whales before the numbers go down again.

"The feeling globally and certainly regionally is they haven’t reached recovery yet, but the good news is that they're recovering," Ashe said.

Counting flukes

Humpbacks were hunted commercially in the North Pacific off Canada until the country banned the practice in 1966; the hunting reduced the population by an estimated 90 percent from 15,000 whales before 1905 to 1,400 whales. (The exact numbers are uncertain given that no one was closely counting whales in the 1960s, Ashe said.)

Researchers rely on sightings of markings on the top of the whales' tails (called "flukes") to determine which individuals are in a particular area. A 2011 estimate with a separate research team — based on 18,000 fluke identification photographs — pegged the entire North Pacific's humpback population at 21,808, suggesting to some that the species may be doing better than ever recorded before.

Ashe's group used two local groups of spotters to look for whales in an area about 40 miles (65 kilometers) long: the North Coast Cetacean Society and the Gitga’at First Nation. Surveys were done between July and October.

Ashe's statistical analysis revealed the population is doubling, and that the whales are thriving. "The survival estimate is among the highest reported for the species anywhere in the world," she said.

The wider North Pacific survey from 2011 indicated a 5 percent annual increase, so she said the numbers in her smaller study area were not too much of a surprise.

Her next step is several studies on shipping noise in the area, including a paper that is in press in the journal Animal Conservation. Surveys of whale population numbers in Caamaño Sound are ongoing, she added.

The study was published in the journal PLOS ONE on Sept. 11. Besides Ashe's institution in Scotland, the study included participation by three British Columbia-based marine resource and cetacean groups.

Follow Elizabeth Howell @howellspace. Follow us @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on LiveScience.

Evidence is mounting that several animals can learn behaviors from their peers, and pass down these traditions from generation to generation — an ability once thought to be uniquely human.

The latest study to document social learning in animals, published today (April 25) in the journal Science, has found that humpback whales learned a new feeding technique from other humpbacks, a trait that stuck around and spread throughout the population.

In 1980, a whale in the Gulf of Maine (off the coast of New England) was first seen slapping its tail on the surface of the ocean before feeding on a type of fish called sand lance. This behavior soon spread and was passed down over several generations. It's now a commonplace behavior in humpbacks throughout the region, said Jenny Allen, a study co-author and researcher at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.

27 years of data

It is difficult, of course, to prove that a certain behavior is learned socially, especially when it comes to marine animals. But the researchers behind the study developed a powerful computer model that allowed them to compare the likelihood that this behavior arose via social interaction versus individual learning.

Drawing upon a database of 27 years of observations of whale foraging, the model returned a result that, at a bare minimum, the humpbacks were 1 million times more likely to have learned the feeding technique from peers than to have each learned it individually.

"It was so big my supervisor made me run it again because he thought I might have messed it up somehow," Allen told LiveScience. "It was so startling to have that strong a result."

The whales perform this behavior, slapping their mammoth tales on the surface one to four times, just before diving and bombarding their prey with bubbles, which helps to organize them into schools upon which the whales can more easily feed, Allen said. The purpose of the technique, called lobtail feeding, is unclear, but it's possible it helps organize the fish into tighter formations before mealtime, she added.

Learning from peers

Whales learn the technique from other whales that they tend to spend a lot of time with, the study found. Importantly, the humpback whales didn't appear to learn the technique from their mothers, said Jooke Robbins, a senior scientist at the Provincetown Center for Coastal Studies in Provincetown, Mass., who wasn't involved in the study. That makes it easier to conclude that the behavior is socially learned, as opposed to genetically preprogrammed.

Humpbacks have somewhat loose social structures compared to other whales; youngsters separate from their mothers after two years and don't usually interact with them much after that, Allen said. "They have associations that are kind of weak and flexible but even in that situation you can have information that's transmitted in a social context," Robbins said.

This is the first quantitative proof that whales can socially learn a new feeding behavior, Allen said. But it's hardly the first evidence of cultural transmission in whales: Humpbacks have been shown to learn songs from one another, and sperm whales and other cetaceans speak in different dialects that can be described as traditions, Allen said. [Video: Humpback Whales Sing Their Tunes]

These whales, in other words, have multiple traditions. And they likely have other socially learned behaviors and cultural quirks. "The reason we were able to identify this is because it’s a 50-foot whale waving its tail at you. But there are probably many other subtle behaviors that aren't as obvious and easy to record," that are also culturally transmitted, Allen said.

Scientists have also found abundant evidence for social learning and cultural transmission in a variety of primates. Another study published today in Science found that wild vervet monkeys can copy their neighbors' feeding habits, learning to eat what "local" monkeys in new areas are eating.

Email Douglas Main or follow him @Douglas_Main. Follow us @livescience,  Facebook or  Google+. Article originally on LiveScience.com.

Specially trained rescuers recently freed a humpback whale swimming off the island of Maui from a tangle of rope, a potentially life-threatening situation for the animal.

A tour vessel and a U.S. Coast Guard aircraft initially spotted the whale on March 8;the animal had small-gauge line cutting into its tail, according to a release from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's National Marine Sanctuaries. Observers found the whale in the waters of Hawaiian Islands Humpback Whale National Marine Sanctuary, where humpbacks migrate each winter to mate, calve and nurse their young.

A response effort, led by the sanctuary and working under NOAA's Marine Mammal Health and Stranding Response Program, was quickly launched, the release said. The rescuers worked from vessels to cut away 40 feet (12 meters) of trailing line, but couldn't completely free the whale.

However, they attached a satellite-tag buoy to the whale and relocated it between Kaho'olawe and Lana'I on Monday (March 11); there, they were able to remove the rest of the gear tangled around the animal. [Photos of the whale rescue.]

Altogether, rescuers removed more than 200 feet (61 m) of line and two buoys from around the whale. Neither of those two buoys identify where the gear came from, so the source likely won't ever be known, the release said.

So far, only three humpback whales have been found entangled this season, about one-third the typical reports by this point. This effort was the first successful rescue of the season, the release said.

Getting entangled in fishing gear can kill a whale by causing it to drown or starve, by getting caught in its mouth, by exhausting the animal as the creature drags gear behind it, or by causing injuries that lead to infection or blood loss.

Editor's note: This story was updated to correct an error made in the release. Divers were not involved in the effort; rescuers worked only by boat, as being in the water during these operations is unsafe, according to a sanctuary representative.

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Throughout the year, the waters off the U.S. West Coast host a diverse group of whales. But the area is also home to busy shipping lanes and fishing activity, putting whales at risk for ship strikes and entanglement in fishing nets.

A new program is being developed by the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), Oregon State University and the University of Maryland to help prevent these accidents. Called WhaleWatch, it's being designed to give ship captains a better idea of where whales are most likely to congregate. It could also help NOAA adjust shipping lanes if necessary, and take other measures needed to prevent unnecessary whale deaths, said Daniel Palacios, a researcher with NOAA's Southwest Fisheries Science Center.

WhaleWatch, which is due to be finished in about 1.5 years, is being developed using data from tags placed on as many as 150 whales over the last 20 years, Palacios told OurAmazingPlanet. This information has allowed researchers to determine a set of physical measurements — such as water depth, temperature and plankton productivity — where whales are usually found. Much of it depends on how these conditions affect the location and abundance of krill, a small shrimp-like animal that is a favorite food of these great whales, he said.

The program will take these variables, which can be measured by satellites, and issue a periodic online map showing where certain whales are most likely to be found, Palacios said.

The program is based upon TurtleWatch, a product developed by NOAA researchers that's used by longline fishermen in Hawaii, and which has helped reduce the number of entanglements of loggerhead sea turtles there, Palacios said. TurtleWatch similarly produces maps of where the endangered turtles are most likely to be found, namely in warm waters where wind currents converge, said Evan Howell, TurtleWatch developer and a researcher at NOAA's Pacific Islands Fisheries Science Center in Honolulu.

The data for WhaleWatch comes from tags placed on blue, fin, gray and humpback whales from off the U.S. West Coast, Palacios said. This tagging work was led by Bruce Mate, a researcher at Oregon State University and Palacios' collaborator, Palacios said.

Reach Douglas Main at dmain@techmedianetwork.com. Follow him on Twitter @Douglas_Main. Follow OurAmazingPlanet on Twitter @OAPlanet. We're also on Facebook and Google+.

What would you do if an animal the size of a submarine wanted to give you the once-over?

An inflatable boat full of tourists found out recently in Hawaii, when two humpback whales circled their boat for at least 10 minutes, according to a report by Hawaii News Now. The female humpback whale bumped up against the boat as if she were scratching her back, a crew member for the tour company, Captain Zodiac Rafting Expeditions, told the site.          

As the whales approached the boat, shouts of excitement ring out in a video posted online by the tour company.  

Humpback whales seem the most curious of all the large whale species, said Jooke Robbins, a senior scientist at the Provincetown Center for Coastal Studies in Massachusetts and director of the center's Humpback Whale Studies Program.

"It's not just boat-related. A colleague of mine saw this curious approach at an iceberg," Robbins told OurAmazingPlanet.

The way humpback whales approach boats, icebergs, clumps of seaweed or other large objects in the water is almost a stereotypical behavior, Robbins explained.

"They will circle around it, sometimes they will go belly up underneath it, and they are very careful in the approach," she said. "Often, their eyes are closed while they are doing it."

Sperm whale seeks robot

Humpbacks are the not the only curious whales, though. Deep-diving sperm whales, notorious for nipping fish off longline fishing lines in Alaska, are also starting to pop up on YouTube videos. In the underwater video seen here, a massive sperm whale checks out a remotely operated robot.

Because sperm whales aren't at the surface as much as humpback whales, scientists know less about their behavior, Robbins said. She added, "There is certainly a type of apparent curiosity, such as approaching boats and other things, that has been seen in different forms in many of the large whales." [Images: Sharks & Whales from Above]

Scientists still don't understand what the inquisitive behavior represents to whales, Robbins said. For example, she is not convinced the humpback whale seen in the tourist video was scratching its back on the boat. "It takes them a while to go over and touch a novel thing," she said. "They are very, very careful about touching."

Keep your distance

Robbins did praise the tour company for their interaction with the whales. A "code of conduct" published by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration  asks people to avoid approaching whales too closely. The guides let the whales come to them, which is permitted, and turned off their engines.

"It's important to remember that something like this is a precious thing," Robbins said. "It's important to keep a respectful distance. Many of these species are still considered endangered, and where we like to look at them is in critical breeding habitat."

Whale watching seasons started Aug. 30, 2012, in Hawaii, which may have been the earliest the mammals have ever been seen in the area, according to a statement from NOAA. About 10,000-12,000 humpback whales visit Hawaiian waters every year to mate, give birth and nurse their calves in the warm waters, where they are protected.

Reach Becky Oskin at boskin@techmedianetwork.com. Follow her on Twitter @beckyoskin. Follow OurAmazingPlanet on Twitter @OAPlanet. We're also on Facebook and Google+.

Melissa Pelaez was visiting Panama to do research on yellowfin tuna for her master's degree in aquaculture, the cultivation or farming of fish. One fine morning she and her University of Miami classmates set out from the Achotines Laboratory to catch adult tuna, which they planned to bring back to the station from the Pacific Ocean to breed.

But the fish weren't biting very well that morning, July 13, and after several hours Pelaez had caught only two bonitos, unappetizing baitfish. She was discouraged, hungry and lost in thought when she heard the ship's captain yell "¡Ballena!," Spanish for "whale." Far to her left there were splashes of water … and two humpback whales.

"I jumped to my feet, fumbling for my camera, with a burst of excitement replacing the hunger I had just felt," she wrote in a post about her trip.

It was the first time she'd ever seen whales of any kind in the wild, she later told OurAmazingPlanet.

Even though it was time to return to shore, the group followed the whales and eventually drew near. The whales began to surface and one of them suddenly leapt out of the water, or breached, which Pelaez managed to capture with her camera. 

"I had hoped to see dolphins at some point during the morning, but a whale – especially two humpback whales – was more than a privilege, it was a blessing from the sea," she said. 

Pelaez plans to use her degree to go into aquaculture production and raise saltwater fish for food.

Populations of humpback whales (Megaptera novaeangliae) were seriously depleted by commercial whaling but have been protected in most areas for the last 50 years, and most populations are growing.

Reach Douglas Main at dmain@techmedianetwork.com. Follow him on Twitter @Douglas_Main. Follow OurAmazingPlanet on Twitter @OAPlanet. We're also on Facebook and Google+.

Humpback whales spend their summers in Antarctica chowing down on shrimplike krill. Now, scientists are finding that these marine behemoths are reluctant to leave the Antarctic as winter draws near.

A new study, published online July 30 in the journal Endangered Species Research, is one of the few to count whales in the Antarctic autumn rather than summer and to focus on near-shore waters rather than open ocean. The results reveal that Antarctica's bays are a more important food source than scientists had expected. The study also suggests that later winters and less ice due to climate change could affect the whales' migration habits.

"Establishing the autumn density of humpback whales in the inshore regions of the Western Antarctic Peninsula is crucial for understanding the role they play in this rapidly changing ecosystem," study researcher Ari Friedlaender, a scientist at the Duke University Marine Lab, said in a statement.

Friedlaender, study leader David Johnston of Duke University and their colleagues surveyed the bays and straits of the Western Antarctic Peninsula between April and June 2009 — when summer is already drawing to a close at these high latitudes. They used visual surveys backed up by tagging studies to estimate the density of whales near the Antarctic shore. [In Photos: Tracking Humpback Whales]

Humpbacks (Megaptera novaeangliae) typically feed at high latitudes in the summer and then move toward the equator to breed in the winter. They were once hunted nearly to extinction, but have recovered in numbers since bans on commercial whaling have been enacted. The International Union for Conservation of Nature lists humpback whales as "least concern," though they are still protected under the U.S. Endangered Species Act.

It's not easy to get good counts of whales in the tight confines of bays and inlets, Johnston said in a statement.

"We had no idea that the whales were going to be packed up in these narrow channels and passages," he said. "We had to think on our feet a bit and use alternative sampling approaches and incorporate data from other portions of the project."

The result was a count of 371 groups of humpback whales over a 406-mile (654 kilometers) area of ocean. At their most crowded, the whales were seen at a density of 1.75 per square kilometer. (One square kilometer equals about 0.4 square miles.)

"That's higher than anyone expected," Johnston said.

That high density was seen in the relatively close quarters of Wilhelmina Bay, Antarctica. The lowest densities were seen in more open areas, the researchers reported.

The findings reveal that humpbacks spend more time than expected in Antarctica before beginning their long migrations north to the waters off of Central and South America, Australia, New Zealand and southern Africa to breed. Climate change could alter these patterns, the researchers wrote.

"The number of humpback whales we detected in these bays in the late autumn raises questions about the timing and frequency of migratory movements to breeding regions by individual whales," they wrote. "If the Gerlache Strait region remains largely ice-free in future winters, nonreproductive humpback whales could choose to remain close to large overwintering krill swarms and forego migration."

Follow Stephanie Pappas on Twitter @sipappas or LiveScience @livescience. We're also on Facebook & Google+. 

Humpback whales living on different sides of the southern Indian Ocean bellow very different songs, suggesting the behemoths don't mingle much, or at least they aren't freely sharing their musical material, a new study finds.

The results, published in the January issue of the journal Marine Mammal Science, give scientists more information about how culture in the form of these songs spreads among these whales that can reach lengths of 50 feet (15 meters).

Among humpback whales (Megaptera novaeangliae), males are the typical crooners, singing their tunes at a population's winter breeding grounds, along migration routes and at summer feeding grounds. The songs consist of complex arrangements of so-called themes, which are mixes of wails, moans and shrieks that get repeated in cycles lasting up to 30 minutes, according to the researchers.

Like disc jockeys fading out one song while starting another, humpback whales also transition between song themes; these transitional "phrases" combine bits from both the preceding and subsequent themes. (A past mathematical analysis revealed just how complex these songs are, using grammatical rules to string together hours-long melodies.)

While past research has suggested humpbacks sharing the same ocean basin also share similar songs, the new study suggests that's not the case for the two populations on both sides of the southern Indian Ocean.

The scientists used hydrophones to record humpback whale songs from 19 individuals in two spots along the coast of Madagascar and three areas along Western Australia during the 2006 breeding season. The team captured more than 20 hours of whale song (either whole song cycles or fragments of songs). Their analysis revealed a total of 11 different themes in both regions, with just one theme shared by both populations. [Video of the Whale Songs]

"Songs from Madagascar and Western Australia only shared one similar theme, the rest of the themes were completely different," said lead author Anita Murray, who conducted the research while a graduate student at Columbia University and the Wildlife Conservation Society.

Murray and colleagues say the reason for the song anomaly is a mystery.

"It could be the influence of singing whales from other ocean basins, such as the South Pacific or Atlantic, indicating an exchange of individuals between oceans which is unique to the Southern Hemisphere," said Murray, who is currently a doctoral student at the University of Queensland in Australia.

The researchers note the findings are limited by the fact that they are based on just one breeding season, and further research is needed to elucidate the reasons behind the whales' distinct songs.

As for why the two populations share one song, the researchers speculate that "some number of males from Madagascar and Western Australia could potentially be in acoustic contact during the feeding season and during this contact cultural transmission in song content would occur," they write in the journal article.

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More humpback whales are swimming in the waters of the North Pacific Ocean than previously thought, an analysis of the largest ever humpback whale survey finds.

The number of North Pacific humpback whales in the 2008 study known as the Structure of Populations, Levels of Abundance and Status of Humpbacks, or SPLASH, was estimated at just under 20,000 based on the initial look at the data. But the new research puts the number at over 21,000 and possibly even higher.

"We feel the numbers may even be larger since there have been across-the-board increases in known population areas and unknown areas have probably seen the same increases," said Jay Barlow, marine mammal biologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) Fisheries Service at the Southwest Fisheries Science Center in La Jolla, Calif.

The boosted population numbers are a far cry from the scant 1,400 humpback whales estimated in the North Pacific Ocean at the end of commercial whaling in 1966.

"While populations of some other whale species remain very low this shows that humpback whales are among those that have recovered strongly from whaling," said John Calambokidis, senior research biologist and co-founder of Cascadia Research, a non-profit organization based in Washington and focused on marine mammal studies.

The SPLASH research was a three-year project begun in 2004 involving NOAA scientists and hundreds of other researchers from the United States, Japan, Russia, Mexico, Canada, the Philippines, Costa Rica, Panama, Nicaragua and Guatemala and was the first systematic survey ever attempted to determine the humpback whales' overall population, structure, and genetic makeup in the North Pacific. The new estimate comes from a refined statistical analysis of the SPLASH data.

Researchers were able to quantify the number of humpback whales by photographing and cataloguing over 18,000 pictures of the animals' tail, or fluke, because the pigmentation patterns on the fluke act like a fingerprint and are unique to each animal.

Scientists determined population numbers by comparing photographs taken in northern feeding grounds (around the Pacific Rim from California to Kamchatka) compared with matches of the same animals in the warm tropical waters of southern breeding areas as far as 3,000 miles (4,800 kilometers) away. [Related: The Greatest Migration on Earth]

This story was provided by OurAmazingPlanet, a sister site to LiveScience.

The Bermuda Triangle holds an often maligned and mysterious place in ocean lore, but for endangered humpback whales, it's about to get a little more welcoming.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) recently announced a letter of intent signed by the Bermuda Department of Environmental Protection to establish a sister sanctuary to NOAA's Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary for the gentle giants.

The sister sanctuary would not be the first for Stellwagen Bank, located in the Gulf of Maine, and its humpback whales. Beginning in 2007, Stellwagen established the world's first sister sanctuary with the Dominican Republic's Santuario de Mamiferos Marinos de la República Dominicana to protect the endangered migratory marine mammal on both ends of its range.

Whale populations

There are five distinct populations of humpbacks in the North Atlantic, with Stellwagen Bank being the feeding grounds for one of the groups. The other four are off the coasts of Nova Scotia, Norway, Greenland and Iceland. Down in the Caribbean, the whales mingle during breeding season, and one of the largest congregation spots is off the coast of the Dominican Republic.

But protecting just two points in the humpbacks' range is not enough to ensure their survival. Bermuda will protect the species in its migratory corridor, rather than the furthest reaches of its range, the first marine mammal sanctuary to offer such a waypoint.

"This is a first step in putting together conservation stepping stones throughout their migration," said Nathalie Ward, coordinator of the Sister Sanctuary Program for Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary.

When the Bermuda sanctuary is established, hopefully by the end of this year, NOAA will issue a memorandum of understanding to exchange data that will include photos of the whales and coordinate research, education and strategies for engaging locals in whale conservation. The massive creatures are threatened not only from direct human pressures, such as ship strikes or fishing net entanglement, but also indirect pressures such as pollution and ocean noise.

The goal is to grow the family of sanctuaries throughout the Caribbean, Ward told OurAmazingPlanet. NOAA is currently negotiating memorandums of understandings with the French Antilles and some Dutch territories in the eastern Caribbean.

"If we don't have protection in different parts of the humpback's range," Ward said, "it's going to impact our population."

Good for whales and humans

The sanctuaries allow for more focused research that can reap benefits for the whales. In Stellwagen Bank, renowned for its whale watching, researchers looked at more than 20 years of whale sighting reports to establish where the whales spent most of their time. The effort resulted in a proposal to shift shipping lanes northward by just 12 degrees, which scientists estimated could reduce whale strikes by 81 percent.

Information like that in other regions of the whales' migration path could help inform similar management techniques, as well as help boost local economies by establishing whale watching and other tourism that supports both the sanctuary and the people who live nearby.

"This is really a pioneering program," Ward said. "The expansion of our Sister Sanctuary Program will play a powerful role in protecting endangered humpback whales, and the opportunity for international cooperation in marine conservation is invaluable."

This story was provided by OurAmazingPlanet, a sister site to LiveScience.

A record-breaking crowd of humpback whales has been seen in chilly waters near Antarctica, giving researchers a unique opportunity to study the colossal creatures — not to mention a few thrills.

However, scientists warn the unprecedented whale numbers, drawn to the region for all-night feasting on their favored prey, may portend hard times ahead for the region's other residents in an ominous sign of climate change.

A research team saw the humpbacks, 306 all together, in tiny Wilhelmina Bay, a slice of water along the western side of the Antarctic Peninsula, a long finger of land that juts out from the continent and points toward South America. [In Photos: Tracking Humpback Whales.]

The research team counted five whales per square kilometer. Picture New York's Central Park, and that translates to 15 whales, each about 45 feet (13 meters) long, hanging around the premises. The previous observation record was about one whale per square kilometer.

"In the published literature this is the highest density estimate for humpback whales, period," said Ari Friedlaender, a research scientist at Duke University in North Carolina and co-author of a paper published today (April 27) in the online science journal PLoS ONE.

Researchers studied the bay during two six-week trips in May 2009 and 2010, a time of year when summer is waning and the colder weather of austral autumn is setting in. It was 2009 that saw record-breaking whale crowds, but similarly impressive numbers were around in 2010 as well.

Whale buffet

Friedlaender said discovering they were floating amid a crowd of hundreds of whales, each longer than a school bus, was quite an experience.

"It was completely new and kind of shocking to be honest," Friedlaender told OurAmazingPlanet. "We're used to working in areas where you might run across five, 10, 15 whales in a day. We were not prepared for this in any way."

From their research vessel, the team witnessed whale gluttony that might make the Romans blush. The bay was teeming with tiny marine creatures called krill — humpback whales' favorite food — roughly 2 million tons worth, data indicate. Instruments aboard the ship showed the ghostly pink, shrimplike crustaceans were swarming the bay from the surface waters to as far as 985 feet (300 meters) down.

The whales would feed continuously for 12 or 14 hours, "gorging until 9 or 10 the next morning, when they would kind of go into a food

coma, and just be asleep on the surface," Friedlander said. "So it made counting them very easy."

But the researchers weren't just there to count the whales — they also affixed tags to the humpbacks, which, for the 24 hours they stay attached to the massive beasts, capture data on everything from temperature to sound to position, allowing researchers to construct a 3-dimensional map of the whale's underwater activities, complete with a soundtrack.

The lethargic whales sometimes barely budged when researchers paddled up in a small boat and thwapped a tag onto their heads. "A couple times we put tags on whales that didn't wake up, which is kind of embarrassing for the whales," Friedlaender said.

However, all the whale feasting and easy access for researchers may come with a high price, Friedlaender said, because of the complex relationship between krill, predators and sea ice, which is disappearing from the region.

Sea ice-free

Climate change is keeping the region ice-free for far longer than in past years, said Ted Scambos, a lead scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC), part of the University of Colorado.

The history of Antarctica's sea ice is a complicated one. Records indicate there was a huge drop in sea ice around the frigid continent sometime in the '60s or early '70s to near-present day levels — and there has been a slight increase in sea ice since then.

However, Scambos said, there is one big exception: the Antarctic Peninsula, particularly the western side, "where everything is going gangbusters in the direction of warming."

Changes in wind patterns have brought warm weather to the region, and the area around the peninsula has warmed by 4 or 4.5 degrees Fahrenheit in the last 50 years, Scambos said.

"It's already made a major transition from a coastline that was bound by ice most of the time, to a coastline that is surrounded by open water most of the time," Scambos told OurAmazingPlanet.

Crucial krill

Sea ice is crucial for krill populations, acting as a sanctuary, a nursery and a rich pasture for the tiny crustaceans.

Under the cover of sea ice, the young krill are shielded from predators, and the older krill feed on the algae and phytoplankton that live beneath the floating ice fortresses.

No sea ice means the krill are laid bare as an all-you-can-eat buffet for whales.

"You've got the krill getting it on both ends," Friedlander said.

In addition, creatures that are land-bound, such as penguins and seals, have a hard time reaching krill without sea ice, which provides a natural raft to reach the abundant food source.

"In the short term, the whales are going to be the ones that gain, but in the long term, if we increase the predation rate and decrease the amount of recruitment in the population, there's going to be less krill for everybody," Friedlaender said, adding that it's important to be aware of the situation, and understand what the extent of the challenges are going to be, especially since few people have the opportunity to see the region for themselves.

"It's a difficult experience to describe, being in a bay in Antarctica with a lot of whales," Friedlaender said. Photographs don't quite do it justice, he said.

"Down there it's all around you. It's hard to look at a photograph and get the feeling of being very small and very cold," he added. "If you get used to this, you need to readjust what you think is special."

• Creatures of the Frozen Deep: Antarctica's Weird Sea Life
• Image Gallery: Amazing Creatures from the Census of Marine Life
• Extreme Living: Scientists at the End of the Earth

Andrea Mustain is a staff writer for OurAmazingPlanet, a sister site to LiveScience. Reach her at amustain@techmedianetwork.com. Follow her on Twitter @AndreaMustain.

The giants that migrate farther than any other mammal on Earth, humpback whales, do so with mysterious, extraordinary accuracy, veering off course by less than 1 degree over hundreds of miles, scientists find.

Humpback whales (Megaptera novaeangliae) regularly swim roughly 3,000 miles (5,000 kilometers) between breeding and feeding grounds. However, a record-setting female humpback was recently discovered traveling from Brazil to Madagascar, a voyage of at least 6,090 miles (9,800 km) — the longest documented migration by any mammal ever.

To learn more about these remarkable migrations, scientists embedded radio tags in the skin and blubber of 16 humpbacks and used satellites to track them from 2003 to 2010. (The tags, about 8 to 12 inches long — 20 to 30 centimeters — were designed to fall off their bodies over time.) [Images of whales being tagged]

The humpbacks were tracked migrating southeastward from Brazil in the Atlantic Ocean and New Caledonia in the Pacific Ocean and west-northwestward from the Pacific island of Rarotonga. [Top 10 Most Incredible Animal Journeys]

"The Brazil and New Caledonia whales were clearly migrating away from low-latitude calving grounds towards high-latitude feeding grounds," said researcher Travis Horton, an environmental scientist at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand. "The movements of the Rarotonga whales are anomalous and remain difficult to explain, as we would expect them to be moving in an overall southerly direction by late winter."

The whales each traveled distances of at least 120 miles (200 km). They moved in astonishingly straight lines, with most straying off course by 1 degree or less. The humpback that swam the most, a 28-day voyage of 1,386 miles (2,232 km), veered just 0.4 degrees off.

It remains a mystery how these whales are capable of such exceptional precision. For instance, buoys along their routes showed that highly variable sea currents were capable of significantly deflecting their headings.

Animals are known to figure out direction over long distances from the Earth's magnetic field or the direction of the sun. For instance, researchers of tiger sharks and thresher sharks recently said cues from Earth's magnetic fields may what enables those sharks to orient themselves and travel spot-on toward a far target.

In the case of the humpback whales, however, magnetic cues by themselves might not help, as the Earth's magnetic field varied widely along each whale's voyage, with magnetic north changing by as much as 12 percent and as little as 0.5 percent across these journeys. Similarly, the sun alone could not explain the whales' success. Humpbacks from the same area were found to follow similar headings despite seeing the sun in different positions in the sky, and they also followed different headings despite seeing the sun in similar positions.

"Although we saw no clear relationship between solar and magnetic directional cues and whale headings, it is entirely possible that they are using both the sun and magnetic field in a coupled system of orientation," Horton said.

The scientists detailed their findings online April 20 in the journal Biology Letters.

"We have a reasonable handle now on what they are doing, but very little information on how they are doing it," Horton told Live Science. "As more data becomes available, we will transition from 'what they're doing' studies to more process-oriented 'how they're doing it' interpretations."

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Whale Tag

The Cook Islands whale research team tags a humpback whale as it surfaces off the island of Rarotonga. The whales are being tagged as part of "The Great Whale Trail." The project is a collaboration between Greenpeace and Nan Hauser, who studies humpback whales in the Cook Islands.

Straight and Arrow

Researhers have found humpback whales, like this one off Rarotonga, Cook Islands in the South Pacific, are extremely precise navigators.

Whale Tail

Marine mammologist Ygor Geyer tags a humpback whale while the director of the Cook Islands whale research team, Nan Hauser, records the event in Rarotonga, Cook Islands.

Tagging Humpbacks

Humpback whales (Megaptera novaeangliae) regularly swim roughly 3,000 miles (5,000 kilometers) between breeding and feeding grounds.

Marine Giant

Humpback whales can reach some 40 to 50 feet in length, here one is shown along the Cook Islands in the South Pacific.

Behemoth Undertaking

The tags embedded in the skin and blubber of humpback whales are about 8 to 12 inches long and naturally fall off over time.

Radio Tag

The Cook Island whale research team tag a humpback whale as it surfaces off Rarotonga, Cook Islands. The radio tag is embedded in the skin and blubber so scientists can track the animal's movements.

The endangered humpback whale was once on the brink of extinction due to the whaling practices of the first half of the 20th century. Now, thanks to international protection, their numbers have dramatically increased  to about 20,000 whales. But where they all of them went to breed during the winter has been a mystery.

The primary breeding grounds for humpback whales in the north Pacific are the main Hawaiian Islands, with 8,500 to 10,000 whales migrating to Hawaii every winter. However, researchers now find, thanks to devices that detect whale song, that these grounds extend throughout the Hawaiian archipelago into the northwestern Hawaiian Islands.

"A mystery for whale researchers has been where the whales feeding in the summer in the Bering Sea and in the Aleutians off Alaska went in the winter to breed — many just didn't show up in the known wintering grounds," said researcher Marc Lammers, a marine biologist at the University of Hawaii. "This area in the northwestern Hawaiian Islands might very well be the missing wintering ground people are talking about."

The increase in whale populations is something one definitely can hear in the ocean depths during the winter breeding season, as male humpbacks sing during courtship. All males at a wintering ground sing roughly the same song any given year, although the song changes annually. These elaborate songs might be serenades to females or ways to compete with other males.

With the aid of a network of underwater microphones known as ecological acoustic recorders, or EARs, scientists found that the humpback whale song was prevalent throughout the northwestern Hawaiian Islands.

These remote isles extend 1,000 miles northwest from the main Hawaiian island of Kauai and are rarely visited by people, especially during the winter, when the seas are very rough. Altogether, the area is part of Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument, one of the largest marine-protected areas in the world.

The timing and abundance of the whale songs off these islands were very similar to those seen in the main islands, suggesting the whales are using the northwestern Hawaiian Islands as wintering grounds, too.

The researchers are now analyzing the structures of the whale songs from the northwestern and main Hawaiian Islands to see if the humpbacks in this new area are an extension of the existing population or a separate breeding stock altogether.

"Understanding if they're separate populations or not is very important, as right now regulatory agencies are discussing whether humpback whales should be delisted from the Endangered Species Act or not, and they want to get a good idea of all the stocks of whales out there for such a decision," Lammers said.

The scientists detailed their findings Feb. 10 in the journal Marine Ecology Progress Series.

This story was provided by OurAmazingPlanet, a sister site to LiveScience.

To catch a meal, humpback whales dive at high speeds with mouths open to engulf large volumes of water filled with prey. Now scientists have detected the unique bone adaptations that allow the whales to do this without being injured by the torrents of water and pressure they face.

The study involved rorqual whales, a family of species that includes humpback whales and blue whales – the largest animals on Earth. These creatures feed on small fish and shrimp-like krill by sucking in water during dives deep into the ocean – a practice called lunge feeding.

The whales have a special stretchy tissue attached to their jaws called ventral groove blubber. When they lower their jaws to extreme angles and swim very quickly, a drag force on this blubber causes it to expand to encompass a volume that can be bigger than the whale itself. This enables rorqual whales to capture enough food in a few hours to sustain them for the rest of the day.

Yet this feeding takes a toll. The extreme force of the inrushing water pulls on the blubber, which exerts an extremely strong drag on a whale's lower jaw – called a mandible. Scientists have been unsure how the mandible can actually withstand such force.

"We were interested in finding out whether the mandibles exhibit a specialized mechanical design that would enable to them to not break during the stresses," said zoology student Daniel J. Field of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. "The fact that they can withstand such gigantic forces is truly remarkable."

For his undergraduate thesis, Field worked with his supervisor Robert Shadwick and fellow researchers to measure the mandible bones of humpback whales. The team used a process of X-ray scanning called quantitative computed tomography (QCT) to calculate the jaw bones' three-dimensional geometry and density distribution.

The scientists discovered that humpback whale mandibles are shaped in a unique way, different from the mandibles of humans and right whales – the only other species for which QCT data is available.

In particular, the scientists measured a feature called flexural rigidity – a combination of high bone density and large cross-sectional area that allows a bone to resist bending. The researchers found that humpback whales' jaws are formed with a unique pattern of flexural rigidity – highest at the edges attached to the skull, and lowest at the center – that is optimized to resist the strain from lunge feeding.

"Just by having a look at the data it's really surprising how beautifully adapted the whales' mandibles are to withstand the forces it's exposed to on a daily basis," Field told LiveScience. "It was surprising and quite interesting to discover."

The researchers published their findings in the July 2010 issue of the journal The Anatomical Record: Advances in Integrative Anatomy and Evolutionary Biology.

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Humpback whales were previously believed to be less social than other whales, but a new study found that they actually form friendships that last for years.

The researchers determined that the same whales reunited each year during the feeding seasons, according to the Mingan Island Cetacean Study, which was published in the journal Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology.

Using photographs to identify the whales, the researchers recognized the same individuals coming back to meet up in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, where they feed and swim together every year during the summer season. While they also reunite in groups, the whales buddies separate into male/female or female/female pairs, the scientists found.

The longest recorded friendships spanned up to six years and occurred between mature female whales. Friendships between females and males never lasted this long, according to the study. Friendships between females have been shown to be beneficial to the humpbacks, as those that had the most stable and long-lasting relationships gave birth to the most calves.

"I was very surprised by the prolonged duration," Christian Ramp, a researcher with the Mingan Island Cetacean Study told the press. "I was expecting stable associations within one season, not beyond. I was particularly surprised by the fact that only females form these bonds, especially females of similar age."

Researchers are unsure of how exactly the baleen whales are able to locate and identify one another every year. Ramp theorizes that they whales seek out and detect their friends by using sounds called whale songs.

Scientists already knew that toothed whales, such as sperm whales, form strong relationships and associate with one another, but they had no previous records of baleen whales such as humpbacks maintaining long-lasting bonds.

Baleen whales are the largest of all whales and filter their food from water through baleen plates that resemble long, fine-toothed combs. Because of their specialized filter-feeding mechanism, these gentle giants mostly consume plankton and small schools of fish.

The Mingan Island Cetacean Study group, based in St. Lambert, Canada, has been documenting whale behavior in the Gulf of St. Lawrence since 1997. In cooperation with researchers from Germany and Sweden, the group also analyzed whale migration pattern data that stretch back 30 years.

The study's findings pose a question regarding whether baleen whales' social groups are being torn apart by commercial whaling.

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Whales are one of nature's most magnificent aquatic animal groups. You can read about the haunting songs of humpback whales, squid-hunting sperm whales and the largest animals on Earth, blue whales. Live Science publishes the wildest whale facts and stories, whether it's baleen whales in a record-breaking feeding frenzy, the tragedy of a blue whale's daily intake of microplastics, or a sighting of a real-life Moby Dick, so our expert writers and editors will always have compelling news, articles and features about whales for you to explore.

Discover more about whales

—Humpback whales: Facts about the singers of the sea

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The calls of three whale species have been heard in the waters around New York City for the first time.

Scientists had never listened so intently before. So after installing sound recorders 13 miles from the New York Harbor entrance and off the shores of Fire Island, a team of researchers heard the calls of fin, humpback and North Atlantic right whales.

"These are some of the largest and rarest animals on this planet trying to make a living just a few miles from New York's shores," said Chris Clark, director of the Bioacoustics Research Program at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.

The whales were known to migrate through the region. The new information about the seasonal presence of whales will help policymakers develop management plans to protect them, according to a statement released today.

Whales are known to sing complex love songs and to have different dialects that vary regionally. They can hear one another across hundreds, if not thousands, of miles, scientists say, but increasing ship noise may threaten their ability to communicate.

In the New York area, knowing the whales' travel paths will help ship traffic managers avoid whale collisions in area waters. Further, the study will characterize New York waters' acoustic environment and determine whether underwater noises, including shipping, affect the whales.

"With data generated by acoustic monitoring, we can better understand New York's role in the life history of these endangered whales and make more informed conservation decisions," said James Gilmore, chief of the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation's Bureau of Marine Resources. "This is especially important for the survival of right whales."

Acoustic monitoring began in the spring to record the right whales' northward migration from their calving ground off the Florida eastern coast to their feeding grounds off Maine, New Hampshire and Massachusetts. And acoustic monitoring has begun for the whales' southern migration in the fall, back to the calving areas. The study will continue through February and is expected to reveal which species occur in New York waters throughout the winter months.

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