Earthquake Sensors Help Track Endangered Fin Whales
April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online The second largest, and one of the least understood, animals to ever live on the Earth is the fin whale. The animal has a huge body and a global range that makes its movements and behavior...
Latest Fin Whale Stories
Southwest Fisheries Science Center: NOAA Researchers have identified areas off southern California with high numbers of whales and assessed their risk from potentially deadly collisions with commercial ship traffic in a study released today in the scientific journal Conservation Biology. Scientists from NOAA Fisheries, the Marine Mammal Commission and Cascadia Research Collective analyzed data collected over seven years by NOAA on marine mammal and ecosystem research surveys in the...
Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online A beach in southern Chile is being overwhelmed by millions of stranded prawns that have taken up two miles worth of the coastline. According to a report by AFP, millions of the small prawns are covering a beach 300 miles south of Santiago, creating giant "red spots" on the sand. Fisherman said at first the red spots appeared just off the shore, but by Tuesday of this week the prawns had moved to land, and "millions" were stranded...
Lawrence LeBlond for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Fossil discoveries are nothing new. And finding new species is just as common. But when you find a fossil of an animal new to science, things start to get more interesting—especially when that discovery includes not one, but four new species from the same genus. This is exactly what occurred in the Laguna Canyon outcrop, a fossil bed unearthed during a highway construction project in California in 2000. The site, which was...
Lawrence LeBlond for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online A nearly 60-foot-long whale that had been found stranded along a New York City beach on Wednesday was confirmed dead earlier today. The marine mammal, an endangered finback whale, washed up on the beach sometime Wednesday morning where it was found by a passerby, who dialed 9-1-1. Biologists rushed to the scene and discovered the animal was still breathing, yet did not have good news. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric...
Brett Smith for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online As humpback whales struggle to recover from 20th century whaling that severely depleted their numbers, scientists have found that the aquatic mammals reside in the bays along the Western Antarctic Peninsula into late austral autumn where they feast on a bounty of cold-water krill. According to a new study by Duke University scientists, these habits contradict previous theories on humpback whale behavior, which stated that the whales...
Brett Smith for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online The fin whale, like many other whales, was decimated by whaling throughout the 19th and 20th century — to the point of being considered officially endangered and being placed on the IUCN Red List. This status is determined primarily by calculating a species population and a new study suggests that scientists may have overestimated the whale’s already diminished numbers in the Mediterranean. For years, it was believed that fin...
Scientists with the Smithsonian Institution and the University of British Columbia (UBC) have discovered a new sensory organ in the rorqual family of whales -- a discovery which sheds new light on their unique feeding behavior and explains why they grow to such massive sizes. The US and Canadian biologists involved in the study located the organ at the tip of the chin of blue, humpback, minke and fin whales, contained within a batch of ligaments connecting the lower jaw bones, according to...
University of Massachusetts Amherst fish biologists have published one of the first studies of deep-sea fish sounds in more than 50 years, collected from the sea floor about 2,237 feet (682 meters) below the North Atlantic. With recording technology now more affordable, Rodney Rountree, Francis Juanes and colleagues are exploring the idea that many fish make sounds to communicate with each other, especially those that live in the perpetual dark of the deep ocean. Though little is known at...
YARMOUTH PORT, Mass., Dec. 6, 2011 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW; www.ifaw.org) is urging Japan to recall its whaling fleet which today left port for Antarctica to train its harpoons on around 1,000 whales. According to Japanese media reports, the country's whaling fleet is en route to the pristine Southern Ocean Sanctuary to kill up to 935 minke whales and 50 endangered fin whales, in defiance of global opposition and several...
NOAA researchers offer a novel explanation for why a type of Antarctic killer whale performs a rapid migration to warmer tropical waters in a paper published this month in the science journal Biology Letters. One tagged Antarctic killer whale monitored by satellite traveled over 5,000 miles to visit the warm waters off southern Brazil before returning immediately to Antarctica just 42 days later. This was the first long distance migration ever reported for killer whales. "The whales are...
Latest Fin Whale Reference Libraries
The Humpback Whale (Megaptera novaeangliae) is a mammal, which belongs to the baleen whale suborder. It is a large whale: an adult usually ranges between 40"“50 ft (12"“16 m) long and weighs approximately 79,000 pounds (36,000 kilograms, or 36 tons. It is well known for its breaching (leaping out of the water) and its unusually long front fins. The Humpback Whale lives in oceans and seas around the world, and is regularly sought out by whale-watchers. Feeding The Humpback Whale...
The Minke Whale or Lesser Rorqual is a marine mammal belonging to the suborder of baleen whales. The Minke Whale was first identified by Lacepede in 1804. Taxonomy Most modern classifications split the Minke Whale into two species; the Common or Northern Minke Whale and the Antarctic or Southern Minke Whale. Taxonomists further categorize the Common Minke Whale into two or three subspecies; the North Atlantic Minke Whale, the North Pacific Minke Whale and Dwarf Minke Whale. All Minke...
The Sei Whale (Balaenoptera borealis) is a large baleen whale. Following large-scale hunting of Sei Whales in the Southern Ocean during middle part of the twentieth century when approximately 200,000 Sei Whales were killed, the Sei Whale is now an internationally protected species. The Sei Whale can grow to 20 m (66 ft) long. Taxonomy and naming This rorqual (The largest group of baleen whales) is in the order Cetacea. Like all the biggest whales it has baleen plates rather than teeth....
The Blue Whale (Balaenoptera musculus) is a marine mammal that is in the suborder of baleen whales. At up to 30 meters (100 feet) in length and 140 tons or more in weight, it is believed to be the largest animal ever to have lived on Earth. Blue Whales were abundant in most oceans around the world until the beginning of the twentieth century. For the first 40 years of the twentieth century they were hunted by whalers almost to extinction. Hunting of the blue whale was outlawed by the...
The Gray Whale (Eschrichtius robustus), more recently called the Eastern Pacific Gray Whale, is a whale that travels between feeding and breeding grounds yearly. It reaches a length of about 52 ft (16 meters), can reach a weight of 36 tons and age of 50"“60 years. Gray Whales were once called devil fish because of their fighting behavior when they are hunted. The Gray Whale is the sole species in the genus Eschrichtius. This animal is one of the oldest species of mammals, having been on...
