Humpback whales in singing position
[Picture source]
It’s an amazing story of 8000 km journey to breed, covering the distance in nearly 6 months. In a research by Cascadia Research Collective in Olympia, Washington, scientists have found that humpback whales travel that much or perhaps more to give birth to their offspring. This is fantastic because no other mammal is known to travel this big a distance at one go.
Whales are known to travel long distances. For example, grey whales routinely make impressive voyage from Mexican waters all the way to Arctic, and blue whales, the largest animal on earth, too journey from feeding grounds of Arctic to US eastern coast.
But humpback whales beat them all. Between feeding and breeding, when they travel the distance, they just don’t eat anything. All their energy is conserved for their yet-to-born calves as they search for sufficiently warm waters to breed.
Scientist Kristin Rasmussen, who led the team of researchers to make the stunning discovery, says that like human fingerprint, the humpback whales have unique marks on their tails. Her team photographed a group off Antarctica before their journey commenced.
161 days later, aided by ultramodern tools and remote sensing, the same group could be noticed off Costa Rica in Central America. The distance covered: 8426 km. Kristin believes if the water was not sufficiently warm, the humpback whales would have moved further south.
Humpback whales have always been an enigma for science watchers. The way the males sing through the nose, tunes changing from occasion to occasion, place to place and need to need, is something yet to be deciphered fully. The new discovery will be another addition to their uniqueness, another reason to stoke man’s quest to know more about them. [Collated from ABP, Apr 5]
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