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The Whale - Ellie’s Essay

Hi all, does anyone remember the starting few lines of Ellie’s school essay? I’ve been racking my brain but can’t remember.. it’s for a page of my scrapbook

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blue whale , ( Balaenoptera musculus ), the most massive animal ever to have lived, a species of baleen whale that weighs approximately 150 tons and may attain a length of more than 30 metres (98 feet). The largest accurately measured blue whale was a 29.5-metre female that weighed 180 metric tons (nearly 200 short [U.S.] tons), but there are reports of 33-metre catches that may have reached 200 metric tons. The heart of one blue whale was recorded at nearly 700 kg (about 1,500 pounds).

The blue whale is a cetacean and is classified scientifically within the order Cetacea as a rorqual (family Balaenopteridae) related to the gray whale (family Eschrichtiidae) and the right whales (Balaenidae and Neobalaenidae) of the baleen whale suborder, Mysticeti.

Blue whales are blue-gray in colour with lighter gray mottling in the form of large spots, which appear as if they were dabbed on with a huge paintbrush. The lower surfaces of the flippers are lighter gray or white in some instances. The blue whale has been called the sulfur -bottom whale because of the yellowish underside of some individuals that is reminiscent of the pale yellow colour of that chemical element ; this coloration is imparted by certain algae ( diatoms ) living on the whale’s body. The blue whale has a wide head, a small dorsal fin located near the fluke, and 80–100 long grooves running lengthwise down the throat and chest. Its mouth contains up to 800 plates of short, wide, black baleen , or “whalebone,” with thick, coarse bristles used for catching food. Females are generally larger than males, and the largest animals live in the Southern Ocean around Antarctica .

The blue whale is found alone or in small groups in all oceans, but populations in the Southern Hemisphere are much larger. In the Northern Hemisphere, blue whales can be seen regularly in the Gulf of St. Lawrence and off the coasts of Monterey , California , and Baja California , Mexico . They spend the summer in polar waters, feeding on shrimplike crustaceans called krill . During a dive, the blue whale may engage in a series of turns and 360° rolls to locate prey and rapidly reorient its body to sweep up large concentrations of krill in a single open-mouthed lunge. A single adult blue may consume as much as eight tons of krill per day. In the winter blue whales move toward the Equator to breed. After a gestation of about 12 months, one calf about 8 metres (about 26 feet) long is born in temperate waters. While nursing, calves gain up to 90 kg (about 198 pounds) per day on the rich milk of their mothers. Young are weaned after seven to eight months, when they have reached a length of about 15 metres (about 49 feet).

Once the most important of the commercially hunted baleen whales, the blue whale was greatly reduced in numbers during the first half of the 20th century. In the 1930–31 season alone the worldwide kill of blue whales exceeded 29,000. The species has been protected from commercial whaling since the mid-1960s. Populations of blue whales appear to be recovering and are estimated worldwide at between 10,000 and 25,000 animals. However, the International Union for Conservation of Nature still lists the blue whale as an endangered species .

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Introduction

Toothed and Baleen Whales

There are two basic kinds of whale: toothed and baleen. Toothed whales have sharp teeth and eat mainly fishes and squid. There are about 70 species, or types, of toothed whale. These include the sperm whale, the beluga, the killer whale, the narwhal, beaked whales, and pilot whales. Dolphins and porpoises also belong to this group.

There are about 10 species of baleen whale. These include the blue whale, the gray whale, the fin whale, the humpback whale, the sei whale, and right whales. Baleen whales do not have teeth. Instead they have blade-shaped plates hanging from the roof of the mouth. These plates are called baleen, or whalebone. The inner sides of the baleen have bristles that trap food. A baleen whale feeds either by swimming with its mouth open or by gulping water. The baleen acts as a filter, letting out water but holding in small fishes, shrimps, and other creatures.

Where Whales Live

Whales live in oceans and seas all over the world. Some species can be found in rivers. Large species often migrate , or travel from one place to another, at certain times of the year. Some types travel thousands of miles.

Physical Features

Whales are usually black, gray, black and white, or white. Some types are bluish gray. A whale’s skin is smooth. A thick layer of fat, called blubber, beneath the skin protects the animal from cold water.

A whale’s torpedo-shaped body helps it to move quickly through the water. It pushes its tail up and down to move. Thetail is divided into two broad sections called flukes. These extend horizontally (side to side) instead of vertically (up and down), as the fins of a fish do. A whale also uses two flippers on the front of its body for steering.

Whales go to the surface of the water to breathe. A whale takes in air through one or two openings, called blowholes, on the top of the head.

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What Have We Done to the Whale?

Last November, drone footage was posted on Instagram of a gray whale swimming near the surface just off the coast of Dana Point, California. In the video, the whale, a juvenile maybe twenty-five feet long, cruises slowly into a lineup of surfers, its undulating tail casting arcing ripples, and then emerges from the water, exhaling through its blowhole. A few surfers paddle off in alarm, though most seem oblivious. The whale dips below the surface again, a ghostly silhouette, and glides out beyond the surfers, away.

I had been surfing in that spot just a few weeks before. Had I been in the water that day, and suddenly seen the whale’s body beneath me, gargantuan and silent, I would have, for a moment, gone cold with dread. How could I not? To be close to a whale, in the wild, not in a boat but in the water itself, is to encounter an embodied agency that exists, across every dimension, on a scale that swallows our own: its physical size, its evolutionary age, its polar voyages. The fear evoked by the whale is not a judgment on its character. Whales almost never harm humans, and when they do it is invariably the humans’ fault. And yet: what am I to a whale? After the whale passed, terror would have melted into an abiding thrill: of having met life in its largest, ancient form. Of having been blessed, in the most pagan sense of that term. In drawing close to those surfers, the whale drew them closer to its own alien dominion, offering the watery communion for which every surfer quietly longs: to be absorbed, returned, dissolved into the sea.

‘‘Would we know it, the moment when it became too late; when the oceans ceased to be infinite?” Rebecca Giggs asks in her masterly “ Fathoms: The World in the Whale ” (Simon & Schuster). She means the moment when the oceans become so disfigured by human activity that, seeing them, we will see only ourselves. Her answer is that this moment is already here, and most of us are missing it. For Giggs, the whale is a potent but misleading symbol of the ocean’s infinity, its alterity and expansiveness. We tend to think of the whale as a story of human redemption: a creature almost hunted out of existence by the commercial whaling industry in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and then saved by our collective recognition that, as activists told the United Nations in 1972, whales are “the common heritage of mankind.” Since 1986, when the International Whaling Commission began enforcing a global moratorium on commercial whale hunting, many whale populations, once near extinction, have rebounded. The laying down of harpoons and the return of the whale appear to speak not just to our empathy for creatures that, like us, care for their young, create culture, and sing songs but also to the part of our humanity that respects what lies beyond it. In truth, Giggs argues, our mass consumption and globalized supply chains, our carbon emissions and throwaway plastics threaten to bring us a sea that is “not full of mystery, not inexplicable in its depths, but peppered with the uncannily familiar detritus of human life.” In 2017, a beaked whale washed up onshore near Bergen, Norway. In its stomach were some thirty pieces of plastic trash, including Ukrainian chicken packaging, a Danish ice-cream wrapper, and a British potato-chip bag. This is the “world in the whale” of Giggs’s title: not an alien dominion but the totalized reality of human domination.

The size of whales has made them, for most of human history, extremely difficult to kill. Adult grays can grow up to fifty feet long and weigh forty tons. Blue whales, the largest creatures ever to have lived, can grow almost a hundred feet long and weigh a hundred and ninety tons. When whales exhale through their blowholes, the vapor is so dense that it produces rainbows. The earliest evidence of whale hunting is perhaps as old as eight thousand years, in South Korea, where Neolithic-era shale carvings depict marine animals being hunted with lances and makeshift floats. Traditional whale hunters typically had to harass their prey to death over many days and nights. They used bludgeons and spears, sometimes tipped with poison, to serially wound and exhaust the animals, while floats were used to prevent them from diving—“sounding”—out of reach. The Inuit created their floats by inflating gutted seals, their orifices stitched shut. All the indigenous cultures that hunted whales for subsistence—on the coasts of the Korean Peninsula, the Pacific Northwest, Alaska, Zanzibar, Siberia, Canada, Greenland, Iceland, Norway—did so at their peril, and with elaborate ritual and frugality, using the whale’s many parts for food, shelter, and amulets.

Then, in the sixteenth century, Basque whalers created a global whale trade. This was made possible by a technological advance: the attaching of a two-flued iron harpoon to a braided rope that could be uncoiled at great speed off a boat’s deck. Although the harpoon was unable to pierce through to a whale’s vital organs, it was, with its flared barbs, almost impossible to dislodge from the animal’s blubber. Thus tethered to the boat, the whale could not escape the hunters’ lances.

Soon Basque whalers depleted shoreline populations in the Bay of Biscay. Bigger ships, in turn, allowed the whalers to hunt in the open seas—what’s known as “pelagic whaling”—and to pursue various species at different points in their migration routes. Near Newfoundland, Basque whalers killed as many as forty thousand whales between 1530 and 1610, becoming, for a time, the world’s dominant whaling force. Their preferred method was to harpoon calves first, followed by the mothers that rushed to their rescue.

Whale hunting became a year-round business. The Dutch, the Danes, and the British joined in; by the late eighteenth century, commercial whaling had spread to South Africa and New Zealand. American colonists pioneered the onboard rendering of oil from whale blubber. In this process, a whale carcass was chained to the side of the ship, and rotated with pulleys as sickle-shaped blades peeled it like an orange; the blubber was then separated from flesh and skin, and liquefied in huge cast-iron cauldrons, underlaid with water to avoid setting fire to the ship. By turning their vessels into mobile slaughterhouses, American whalers were able to hunt whales that were then abundant in equatorial waters, whose carcasses would have otherwise rotted by the time the ships returned home. The whalers also came to use shoulder guns and bomb lances, increasing the possible distance between hunter and prey. By the mid-nineteenth century, pelagic whaling was the fifth-largest industry in the United States.

Why whales? Like traditional whale hunters, early commercial whalers sought out whales largely for their flesh, a food approved by the Vatican for meatless Fridays. By the nineteenth century, though, whales had become prized as a source of a much more valuable commodity: oil. In 1854, whale oil, extracted from blubber, traded at, in today’s terms, eighteen dollars a gallon. A single mature right whale could yield seven thousand gallons. Whale oil greased factory cogs, lit shop floors and streets, and, deployed as an insecticide, spurred industrial agriculture. Sperm whales were hunted for the waxlike spermaceti found in their heads, which was used as a lubricant in looms, trains, and guns, and, most significant, as a raw material in fine candles. New Bedford, Massachusetts, the center of sperm-whale hunting, was called “the city that lit the world.” Baleens, the bristly combs that certain whales, including humpbacks, have in place of teeth, were used in corsets, parasols, hairbrushes, fishing rods, shoehorns, eyeglass frames, hat rims, sofa stuffing, police nightsticks, and the thin canes used to beat misbehaving schoolchildren, which may explain the phrase “to whale on.” Increasingly, whales were seen not as prey but as a natural resource to be mined; whalers talked about migrating sperm whales as veins running through the ocean, like gold.

An estimated two hundred and thirty thousand sperm whales were killed in the nineteenth century. In the twentieth, that number grew to more than seven hundred thousand. In total, nearly three million whales of all species were killed in that century. (Human hunting has reduced the world’s great-whale biomass by as much as eighty per cent.) Early-twentieth-century whaling was a truly international concern, run by conglomerates of Norwegian, British, Dutch, German, Japanese, Australian, and American fleets and capital. That whaling became more aggressive is a departure from the trajectory one might have expected: the previous century’s whaling had depleted whale populations, and abundant substitutes for whale oil—cheaper vegetable oils and petroleum products—had been found. But nautical technology advanced; coal-powered and then diesel-powered ships allowed whalers to hunt species that had previously been too quick—blue, fin, sei, minke. Ships were also equipped with mechanized weapons that could detonate or electrocute, and with improved tools for processing whale carcasses, including hydraulic tail grabbers, pressure cookers, and refrigerators. These ships were noisy machines, but radar and spotter planes, perfected in wartime, allowed them to home in on whales, called “the listening prey.” At the same time, new commercial uses were found for whale oil: in explosive munitions, a trench-foot treatment, soap, margarine, lipstick, burn gel. General Motors used spermaceti in its transmission fluid until 1973. During the Cold War, the substance was used in intercontinental missiles and submarines. Whaling had become a matter of military interest.

The International Whaling Commission (I.W.C.) was set up, in 1946, to regulate whale hunting in international waters. But the quotas that the commission initially imposed backfired, sparking a mad rush by whalers who were keen to stockpile whale oil, anticipating a scarcity-driven price surge. Commercial fleets raced to take all the whales they could get, harpooning animals and then abandoning them when fattier specimens were spotted. Whalers hunted out of season and in whale sanctuaries, and illegally targeted whale calves. Aristotle Onassis’s lucrative whaling enterprise ended when his own sailors testified, in the Norwegian Whaling Gazette, to practices on his factory ships: “Shreds of fresh meat from the 124 whales we killed yesterday are still lying on the deck. Scarcely one of them was full grown. Unaffected and in cold blood, everything is killed that comes before the gun.”

The commercial whalers of the postwar period hunted Southern Hemisphere whales to near “commercial extinction,” the point at which the cost of killing an animal is no longer worth the returns. American and European whaling operations shrank, but the cause was taken up by two countries driven by nationalist rather than by commercial prerogatives. The U.S.S.R.’s whaling industry, which had begun in the nineteen-thirties, expanded during the Cold War. The Soviet military needed spermaceti, because Western embargoes cut off its access to synthetic substitutes. More than that, the Soviet state felt that it had not taken its “share” of the world’s whales, and set quotas for its whaling industry that far exceeded domestic demand for whale meat and oil. Soviet ships, frantic to keep up with state mandates that specified the total raw mass of animals to be killed, would often bring back carcasses too decayed for human consumption, or would simply throw them overboard, unprocessed. Between 1959 and 1961, Soviet ships harvested nearly twenty-five thousand humpback whales in the Antarctic.

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Japan, meanwhile, was suffering from a postwar food crisis that lasted into the nineteen-sixties, triggered by the destruction of supply chains and agricultural land. On the advice of the U.S. overseer, General Douglas MacArthur, the country turned to whaling. Whale meat was served as a cheap source of protein to elementary- and middle-school children, and became a symbol of national resilience. Though whale is eaten in very small amounts today—just one and a half ounces per person a year—whaling is still heavily subsidized by the state, with most of its output stored, uneaten. In 2019, a researcher at Rikkyo University estimated the Japanese stockpile of whale meat at thirty-seven hundred tons. After the I.W.C. imposed its global moratorium on whaling, Japan was undeterred. Until 2019, when the country withdrew from the I.W.C., Japan openly exploited a loophole that allows whales to be killed for research purposes, and any leftover whale meat to be sold as food. Between 2005 and 2014, around thirty-six hundred minke whales were killed by Japanese whalers in the Southern Ocean, resulting in just two peer-reviewed scientific papers.

The I.W.C.’s moratorium, perhaps the greatest triumph of the postwar conservationist movement, was spurred by decades of dire news. In 1964, an independent committee of biologists had warned that Southern Hemisphere whale populations faced “a distinct risk of complete extinction.” The scientists reported that there were fewer than two thousand Antarctic blue whales left. A decade later, that number was three hundred and sixty, representing a population decline of 99.85 per cent since 1905. This is the sort of mass destruction that biologists refer to as a “bottleneck” event, a decisive shrinking of a species’ gene pool that may well be irreversible. Once anti-whaling advocates helped bring non-whaling (including many landlocked) nations into the I.W.C., the group’s scientists were able to take a more explicitly conservationist stance. They were also buoyed by a worldwide outcry against whale killing. Greenpeace, employing a strategy that one of its leaders called “more an imagology than an ideology,” used footage of its theatrical high-seas tactics to evoke public sympathy and outrage. A fifteen-thousand-person anti-whaling rally was staged in London, and photographs of it were broadcast around the world. Popular books were written that celebrated whales and mourned their death; Farley Mowat’s “ A Whale for the Killing ,” from 1972, called whaling a “modern Moloch.” Whale songs—first recorded by accident in the nineteen-fifties by U.S. naval engineers sweeping for Soviet submarines—became, in the nineteen-seventies, a big commercial success. The 1970 album “Songs of the Humpback Whale” went multi-platinum. It provided a natural soundtrack for the decade’s faddish embrace of Eastern spirituality, promising an auditory portal to higher spiritual planes, repressed memories, and past lives. And it was taken as proof of the animals’ intelligence and sensitivity. Animal protectionists, appearing before Congress during a 1971 hearing on whale conservation, played the record as part of their testimony. One of them said, “Having heard their songs, I believe you can imagine what their screams would be.”

This mass gestalt shift, from whales as an extractive resource to whales as symbols of a global inheritance, is striking in part because whales are not typical of what conservationists call “charismatic” animals. Animals that win human sympathy tend to be readily anthropomorphized (elephants, chimps, dolphins), or cute (baby tigers, pangolins), or—the holy grail of animal conservation—both (otters). Whales, by contrast, are too large to be taken in easily by the human eye, let alone imaginatively given human form. They are magnificent but hardly cute. Philip Hoare, in “ Leviathan or, The Whale ” (2008), notes that the “blue marble”—the photograph of Earth captured by the astronauts aboard Apollo 17, in 1972—became famous before the first photograph of a free-swimming whale did. “We knew what the world looked like before we knew what the whale looked like,” he writes. Human uncertainty about the whale is reflected in the stories we have long told about the animal. Ancient cartographers used drolleries—hybrid monsters, part whale, part sea serpent—to indicate the limits of their knowledge. In the thirteenth century, Norse sailors said that whales fed on rain and darkness. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when taxonomists began classifying animals according to their internal structures as opposed to their outward appearance, they were stunned to discover the signs of whales’ evolutionary history as land-dwelling mammals: fin bones, a physician wrote in 1820, that resembled “a man’s hand . . . enwrapped in a mitten.”

And there is still much we do not understand about whales. They navigate tremendous distances—some humpbacks swim more than sixteen thousand miles each year, three-fifths the circumference of the earth—aided by unknown sensory apparatuses, and according to migratory routes that are passed, somehow, from parent to child. Scientists know that whale vocalization—the singing of humpbacks, the chattering of belugas, the powerful clicks of sperm whales (at up to two hundred and thirty-six decibels, the loudest animal noise on the planet)—performs an important communicative function. Whales converse, and perhaps commune, at great distances. Songs of humpbacks off Puerto Rico are heard by whales near Newfoundland, two thousand miles away; the songs can “go viral” across the world. Some scientists believe that certain whale languages equal our own in their expressive complexity; the brains of sperm whales are six times larger than ours, and are endowed with more spindle neurons, cells associated with both empathy and speech. Yet no one knows what whales are saying to one another, or what they might be trying to say to us. Noc, a beluga that lived for twenty-two years in captivity as part of a U.S. Navy program, learned to mimic human language so well that one diver mistook Noc’s voice for a colleague’s, and obeyed the whale’s command to get out of the water. A recording of Noc’s voice can be heard online today: nasal and submerged, but also distinctively like English. ( Oooow aaare you-ou-ou-ooooo ?) At the very least, it’s a better impression of a human’s voice than a human could do of a whale’s.

The whale’s aura lies in its unique synthesis of ineffability and mammality. Whales are enormous and strange. But—in their tight familial bonds, their cultural forms, their incessant chatter—they are also like us. Contained in their mystery is the possibility that they are even more like us than we know: that their inner lives are as sophisticated as our own, perhaps even more so. Indeed, contained in whales is the possibility that the creatures are like humans, only much better: brilliant, gentle, depthful gods of the sea.

The I.W.C. moratorium on commercial whale hunting has some important exceptions. It grants special whale-hunting rights to indigenous communities, including the native peoples of Alaska and of Russia’s Chukotka Peninsula, the Greenlanders, and the residents of the island of Bequia, in St. Vincent and the Grenadines. It also excludes species classified as “small cetaceans,” such as the long-finned pilot whale, a species of dolphin hunted off the Faroe Islands, an autonomous Danish territory about two hundred miles north of Scotland. (The Faroe Islands, unlike Denmark, are not part of the European Union, which prohibits the hunting of whales and dolphins.) The grindadráp —or the grind , for short—is a traditional Faroese drive hunt that dates back to at least 1298, when the first law regulating the hunt was introduced. Records of the hunt have been kept since 1584 (the longest such archive), and show that an annual average of eight hundred and thirty-eight pilot whales have been killed by the Faroese during the past three centuries. The grind has long been the focus of anti-whaling advocacy: gruesome photographs showing rows of black whale corpses, their necks slit, floating in a sea bright red with blood, spark outrage on Facebook and Twitter. Faroese defenders of the grind argue that the hunt is not only a traditional part of their culture but also a sustainable and ecologically friendly practice. They point out that they monitor the pilot-whale population, and hunt only a small proportion each year, consuming what they kill. In an extreme northerly landscape that does not support agriculture, the Faroese maintain that they still depend on the ocean for their food.

The irony is that pilot whales, like whales the world over, are becoming inedible. Whale blubber stores toxins that have made their way to the sea, in the form of agricultural and mining runoff or condensed emissions—an effect magnified by whales’ longevity. Mercury levels in pilot whales are so elevated that scientists have advised the Faroese to drastically reduce their consumption of whale meat, which might in turn force them to import farmed protein from elsewhere, increasing their carbon impact. The breast milk of Inuit women in Greenland, one of the least industrialized places on earth, has, because of mercury levels in beluga whales and other marine animals, become a dangerous substance. Some studies suggest that the Inuit’s mercury exposure is comparable to that of people living downstream from gold mines in China. Orca in Washington’s Puget Sound have been declared among the earth’s most toxified animals; the carcasses of beluga whales that wash up on the shores of Canada are classified as toxic waste. The most prolific whale killers are no longer the whale hunters. They are, instead, the rest of us: creatures of late capitalism whose patterns of consumption make us complicit, however unwittingly or unwillingly, in an unfolding mass biocide.

Whales consume much of the eight million metric tons of plastic that enter the oceans each year, which gather in swirling trash vortexes known as gyres and can extend for miles. Often, this plastic is from packaging that allows us to consume non-seasonal food year-round. A sperm whale that recently washed up on the Spanish coast had an entire greenhouse in its belly: the flattened structure, together with the tarps, hosepipes, ropes, flowerpots, and spray cannister it had contained. The greenhouse was from an Andalusian hydroponics business, used to grow tomatoes for export to colder climes. Food waste produced by the globalized supply chain accounts for eight per cent of carbon emissions (air travel accounts for only about 2.5 per cent), which melt the ice on which whales depend indirectly for their food. Since the nineteen-seventies, with the loss of ice-fixed algae, Antarctic krill populations have declined by between seventy and eighty per cent. Noise from industrial shipping—eighty per cent of the world’s merchandise is transported on cargo vessels—has shrunk the whale’s world: the distance over which a whale’s vocalizations can travel is just one-tenth of what it was sixty years ago. Whales have washed up on the Peloponnesian coast with ears bleeding from decompression injuries caused by anti-submarine-warfare training.

Ecologists have warned that the dramatic shifts associated with climate change could subject even relatively large whale populations to sudden extinction. There are signs that this is already happening. In 2015, three hundred and forty-three sei whales, an endangered species, were found dead on the coast of Chilean Patagonia, likely because of a toxic algae bloom. The seis, scientists said, could be “among the first oceanic megafauna victims of global warming.” Meanwhile, because whales are enormous carbon sinks, the era of commercial whaling hastened today’s climate crisis. According to one estimate, a century of whaling equates to the burning of seventy million acres of forest. The people of the Lummi Nation, who live on the coast of the Salish Sea, between the U.S. and Canada, have started to feed salmon to wild orca that are starving because of the effects of pollution and climate change. “Those are our relations under the waves,” one Lummi tribal member said.

On an Argentine beach in 2017, a stranded baby dolphin was killed by a mob of tourists intent on taking selfies with it. Something similar had happened in Argentina the year before, when a baby La Plata dolphin washed up at a Santa Teresita beach; the animal was passed from tourist to tourist until it died of dehydration. Ecological historians may one day write about the early twenty-first century as a time of frenzied cultural obsession with wild animals: anime-eyed lorises, badass honey badgers, “trash panda” raccoons. As Rebecca Giggs observes, this frenzy has been facilitated by the rise of social media. On Twitter and Facebook, animal cuteness has become the only antidote to political fury. Instagram encourages us to curate our encounters with the extraordinary, so that we may ourselves seem extraordinary. Driven by a search for the perfectly “grammable” shot, ecotourism is everywhere on the rise, though it rarely delivers on the promise of its name, which is to reconcile the impulse to consume nature with the desire to conserve it. At least thirteen million people worldwide have been going on whale-watching tours each year, leading to more and faster diesel-powered boats. Wildflower superblooms are trampled by social-media influencers. Thousands of recreational drones—like the one that produced that video of the whale swimming through the surfers off Dana Point—disturb the wildlife they so rapturously capture.

Future historians will have the task of explaining how our performative love for animals relates to our relentless extermination of them. It is not simply a lack of knowledge. Could the Argentine tourists not sense the dolphin going limp in their arms? Don’t many of us acknowledge the contradiction of flying across the world to lose ourselves in nature? Who doesn’t grasp the vulnerability of the world to our collective power? Perhaps it’s something more like willful self-deception: a refusal to believe what it is we know. Or perhaps we are simply embracing what we sense will soon be gone, memorializing what does not really exist, as social media has taught us to do. Here is my fabulous holiday; here is my happy wedding day; here is the vast ocean; here is a whale. ♦

Smithsonian Ocean

Introduction

Anatomy, diversity & evolution, human connections, conservation, at the smithsonian.

When we think of whales, the enormous ones that filter tiny plankton from seawater with their baleen-fringed upper jaw often come first to mind (like the right whale in the picture above). But cetaceans also include dolphins, porpoises and other toothed whales, and in total contain more than 80 different species. They are found in all of the world’s oceans, and even in some freshwater rivers. Despite their very different diets and sizes, both baleen whales (Mysticeti) and toothed whales (Odontoceti) share a common (and perhaps surprising) ancestor—land-dwelling mammals related to today’s hippos that lived over 50 million years ago. On this page, we will generally refer to all cetaceans as whales, and in some instances specify when referring to traits or behaviors unique to toothed whales, baleen whales, or specific species. 

Whales have always captured our hearts—the moans that come from humpback whales and the clicks from common dolphins remind us of our own human conversations. We even sent humpback whale songs into outer space with the spacecrafts Voyager 1 and 2 , engraved on golden records for another civilization to decipher. We know that cetaceans are intelligent, but there is still so much to learn about how they think and communicate. Their long migration routes and deep dives mean that they are not easy to track. Despite the popularity of whale watches and long-term interest in protecting whales, even knowing something as basic as the number of whales over time is a challenging question to answer.

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Anatomy & physiology, what makes a whale a whale.

Whales are mammals which means that, like humans and other land mammals, they have three inner ear bones and hair, they breathe air, and the females produce milk through mammary glands and suckle their young. Mammals typically have hair to maintain body heat, but because cetaceans have insulating fat in the form of blubber they are often born with minimal hair that is lost as they grow older. They also share other characteristics with land mammals, but they have evolved numerous traits that allow for their full-time life in the water. 

Body Structure

Whales may be large, but their bodies are streamlined to help aid in efficient swimming. Cetacean flukes move vertically through the water (unlike fish that typically move their tails horizontally back and forth). Their flippers (or pectoral fins) are modified forelimbs with an immobile elbow joint and are used mainly for steering, whereas flukes help propel the animals forward. When present, the dorsal fin is helpful for stability and has no support in the way of bones.  

Whales are able to survive in deep or freezing polar water because of a layer of fat, called blubber , covering their entire body underneath the skin. Blubber is much thicker than the fat found in other mammals. Blubber is also less dense than the seawater cetaceans swim in, similar to wetsuits used for surfing or diving, which gives the animals buoyancy and helps them float. Blubber thickness has quite the range—varying from two to more than 12 inches thick depending on the species. The thicker blubber doesn’t necessarily mean that an animal is more insulated from the cold though—its main purpose is providing the animal with nutrition stores through winter months when food is scarce. 

Larger species also retain heat because their skin surface area is small compared to the size of their bodies. Smaller species make use of higher metabolism and a counter-current heat exchange system of blood vessels in their flukes and flippers to keep warm. This exchange allows for cold blood in the limbs to move from the animal’s extremities in veins directly along arteries carrying warm blood from the animal’s core, instead of losing heat at the surface of the animal’s skin. Their blood vessels are also able to constrict when an animal is in cold water, reducing the amount of energy needed to pump blood throughout the circulatory system and conserving heat.  

In addition to large bodies, cetaceans have large brains— sperm whales currently hold the title for the largest absolute brain size on the planet . The brain to body size ratio is also important, and the only animals with a brain to body size ratio larger than whales are humans. The result is a capacity for complex behaviors and societies, especially in oceanic dolphins, including orcas. 

Both baleen and toothed whales breathe through blowholes (the whale’s version of nostrils). These are found on the top of their head and connect to their lungs. Because cetaceans only eat through their mouths, which is not connected to their lungs, they are able to reduce the possibility of drowning from water moving into their lungs while eating a meal. Whales belonging to the group known as Mysticeti (baleen whales) have two blowholes, while toothed whales (Odontoceti) have only one. Unlike humans who breathe automatically, whales have active control of when they breathe. Cetaceans have specific control over a muscle called the nasal plug that closes the passageway of the blowhole—it remains closed when they are diving and is opened when they reach the surface. 

Air exchange through the blowhole at the surface is very quick, taking only a fraction of a second to exhale and then inhale to fill their lungs with air. Typically, whales will breathe several times before diving again and then can stay underwater for a period of time—usually 5-15 minutes. Sperm and beaked whales (both of which are kinds of toothed whales) can even last an hour underwater before coming to the surface for another breath. 

The telltale spouts that are formed on the surface occur when whales expel warm air that meets colder air on the surface and condenses into small water droplets. These spouts are unique to the different groups and species in part due to the different shapes that form from either one or two holes, but also because of varying blowhole shapes and animal sizes. The variations allow biologists and recreational whale watchers to identify cetacean species from a distance if they see a spout.  

Adapting to Water

Large lung capacity—the blue whale can hold an equivalent of 1,300 gallons of air—allows cetaceans to swim for long periods of time without coming to the surface for a breath. But, their respiratory and circulatory systems are also much more efficient than mammals on land. Humans can only absorb between 15 and 20 percent of the oxygen inhaled in one breath, but for whales that percentage jumps to over 80 percent, thanks to their blood makeup. When baleen and toothed whales dive, their heart rates slow down and higher amounts of myoglobin molecules in their blood allow for more efficient capture of oxygen. They are able to maintain more myoglobin due to special “non-stick” abilities that mean the surfaces of the blood cells won’t stick together and clog the bloodstream. Their streamlined bodies also help reduce the amount of oxygen needed. 

Despite their need to come to the surface regularly to breathe, cetaceans are able to dive to significant depths. Orcas usually only dive for less than a minute to five minutes before surfacing again, but even so they are able to reach depths over 300 feet (or more than 100 meters). Sperm whales are able to dive for over an hour and to depths greater than 6,000 feet (or 1,828 meters). Cuvier’s beaked whale has been recorded diving to 9,816 feet (2,992 meters) , equivalent to the height of the Empire State Building; that means that they are covering the distance of 16 football fields and have to deal with increased pressure the deeper they go. Sperm whales, Cuvier’s beaked whales , and bottlenose whales are all deep divers and (along with some other deep-diving seals) have certain adaptations that allow for high levels of pressure on their lungs , nasal cavities and other air-filled spaces. Because the whales aren’t breathing while diving (they are getting oxygen from stores in their blood) their lungs are able to collapse from the increased pressure, reducing the amount of nitrogen that makes its way into the blood stream and the risk of forming dangerous bubbles when returning to the surface (what SCUBA divers call the bends). They can also cut off blood flow to the extremities, keeping the oxygenated blood by the heart and brain. Other air spaces, like ear canals and sinuses, are lined with special tissues that reduce pressure.

Sleeping While Swimming

How do whales and dolphins get any sleep while swimming? They have several mechanisms that prevent water from flowing into their blowholes (see Eating and Breathing section) even while they sleep. But, whales have to consciously go to the surface and breathe, so they aren’t able to entirely shut down their brains for some shuteye. Dolphins will shut down half of their brain for short durations of time while they continue to swim and breathe with the opposite hemisphere functioning and keeping an eye out for danger. (Literally, one of their eyes is open at all times!). They will continue to switch the side that gets rest until they get a full night’s sleep, of around eight hours. Whales will also rest in a semi-conscious state with the orientation of their bodies either vertically or horizontally, typically in groups. Logging behavior is a rest state for whales and dolphins when they are at the surface. They don’t move and resemble a floating log.   (For information on cetacean vision and hearing see the Behavior section .)

SOUND PRODUCTION AND HEARING

Like other mammals, all whales can produce sound using a larynx, an organ in the throat. In baleen whales, between the blowhole and the lungs there is a special larynx called the U-fold that directly connects to a unique, expandable sac within the whale’s chest. When the whale “talks,” air flows from the lungs, through the U-fold, and then fills the sac. The vibrations made by the U-fold reverberate within the air-filled sac, a system that allows these whales to create a sound loud enough to travel thousands of kilometers. Whales can also sing as they expel air from the sacs back into the lungs, a process that recycles the air and eliminates the need to exhale.

Hearing involves the perception of vibrations and underwater sound vibrations cause the entire skull to vibrate , not just the membranes in the ears. This is why sound underwater sounds garbled to humans. Over millions of years, whales have evolved floating middle and inner ear bones that are separate from the skull as a way to hear more clearly. The ear bones that house the middle ear are actually separate from the skull, housed in a suspended chamber of the skull surrounding the ear bones. Hearing is important for both baleen and toothed whales, but the mechanisms they use to take in and interpret sound may be different.

Credit: Courtesy of Kait Frasier

Toothed whales receive high-frequency sounds through specialized “acoustic fats” that sit along their lower jawbone and lead to their internal ears. They use echolocation, or biological sonar, to navigate and “see” objects. Toothed whales can expand their sound repertoire into the high frequencies through the use of nasal air sacs and a fatty melon that sits within their forehead. As air moves through the air sacs via the nasal passage it vibrates small fat bodies that create sound; this sound then passes through the melon, which likely acts as a kind of acoustic lens to focus the sound, and its direction. The whale can change the shape of the melon to produce different sounds. This is how they can add complexity to the high-frequency sounds used in echolocation. Toothed whales then hear the echo of this sound through fat bodies lodged inside their lower jaws; fat transmits the high-frequency sound to their ear bones, which the whale’s large brain then processes to give a view of the world, and the objects in it, through sound.

Baleen whales specialize in hearing low-frequency sounds for long-distance communication. They also have fatty tissue that seems important to their hearing, but the specific mechanisms are not well understood. Smithsonian scientists are exploring how these two groups come to have such different ways of hearing . 

In all whales, the ear canal is plugged by a dense wax , which can tell us a lot about the life history of the whale it comes from. Unlike most mammals, whales do not have external ear flaps. 

The physics of light control how vision works. On land where light is abundant, humans see the world using three specific color receptors. But underwater light is filtered, and in deeper water, many wavelengths are lost so that colors lose their vibrancy, fading altogether at deeper depths. Whales, adapting to this environment, only have one color receptor—they see in greyscale, which allows them to see better in the low light and they have large pupils to allow as much light in as possible. However, the murky waters of the Ganges have proven too dark for the river dolphins that live there. Over time they have lost their vision altogether—with no lens it is thought they still use the eye to perceive light—and instead rely on echolocation to navigate and hunt for prey.

A close up of a grey whale eye.

Whales have also adapted the shape of their eye to better see underwater. Terrestrial animals, including humans, rely on the cornea—the clear outer layer of the eye—to focus images using a property called refraction , a bending of light as it crosses through different materials. As light travels through the air and enters the eye, it bends and creates a focused image on the retina with a bit of help from the lens. Underwater, terrestrial animals become far-sighted because the fluid of the eye and the water are so similar; light doesn’t bend enough and the image doesn’t focus effectively. To make up for this, a whale instead relies entirely on its lens to focus an image—which isn’t very effective. Whale lenses are circular to help focus, while ours are slightly flattened.

A whale’s vision is further differentiated from ours in that they have an eye on either side of their head, resulting in two distinct fields of vision, but as to how whales combine the two into a cohesive image, scientists are still unsure . Some species with more narrow face shapes, such as dolphins and beluga whales, can see with binocular vision—where they stitch together a single image, the way humans see.

Toothed versus Baleen Whales

The most species-rich group of whales alive is today are the toothed whales, or Odontoceti. There are over 70 different species that are found from cold Arctic waters to warm tropical ones. The odontocetes include dolphins and porpoises, as well as the larger beaked and sperm whales, as well as river dolphins. The group includes many extinct lineages as well, which represented different types of extinct toothed whales that in some cases still have close relatives, while in others represented uniquely extinct groups.   

Sperm whales ( Physeter macrocephalus ) are the largest of the toothed whales, reaching up to 66 feet (20 meters) long. Vaquita ( Phocoena sinus ), Hector’s ( Cephalorhynchus hectori ) and Maui’s ( Cephalorhynchus hectori maui ) dolphins are among the smallest toothed whale species, each reaching less than 5 feet long. Narwhals (Monodon monoceros) are known for their long unicorn-like tusk, which is a modified canine tooth. They are most closely related to the iconic white beluga whales ( Delphinapterus leucas ), which are in the same family. 

There are almost 40 members of the family Delphinidae, and some taxonomists consider it a bit of a grab-bag . These are the oceanic, or true dolphins, and include bottlenose dolphins ( Tursiops truncatus ), spinner dolphins ( Stenella longirostris ), pilot whales ( Globicephala spp. ), orcas or killer whales ( Orcinus orca ) and false killer whales ( Pseudorca crassidens ). In this overview, we will refer to Orcinus orca as orcas. Dolphins are known for their streamlined bodies, an elongated rostrum (or beak), and a curved dorsal fin. Orcas are the largest members of the dolphin family. 

Porpoises belong to the family Phocoenidae, of which there are six members. Porpoises have stouter bodies and shorter beaks than the true dolphins and are typically smaller, with triangular dorsal fins. 

Sperm whales, pygmy sperm whales ( Kogia breviceps ) and dwarf sperm whales ( Kogia sima ) make up the Physeteroidea group. The large heads of whales in this superfamily are where you can find the spermaceti, an organ used for communication and echolocation (see more in Echolocation and Communication sections). Male sperm whales are the largest of the toothed whales, reaching lengths of 60 feet, while the females only reach an average of 36 feet. This phenomenon, when the sexes are physically very different, is referred to as sexual dimorphism and this type of size difference among the sexes is found in many whale species. 

Beaked whales are some of the most enigmatic of the toothed whales, spending much of their time in deep water—the Cuvier’s ( Ziphius cavirostris ) and Baird’s ( Berardius bairdii ) beaked whales can dive to depths of more than 1,000 meters.

The filter-feeding baleen whales belong to the Mysticeti group of whales. This group has fewer species today than odontocetes—there are only 14 living species of baleen whales, belonging to four families. The Balaenopteridae family (also known as the rorquals) has the largest number of species and include blue whales ( Balaenoptera musculus ), the largest vertebrate that has ever existed. Blue whales can reach lengths of over 30 meters (98 feet) and weigh over 190 tons. Right whales include North Atlantic right whales ( Eubalaena glacialis ), their near relatives North Pacific right whales ( Eubalaena japonica ) and Southern right whales ( Eubalaena australis ). Other baleen whales include the enigmatic pygmy right whales ( Caperea marginata ) that live today only in the Southern Ocean and gray whales ( Eschrichtius robustus ). Pygmy right whales reach only about 20 feet in length, making them the smallest of the baleen whales. 

Generally, baleen whales are also found throughout the world’s oceans, and they are named for the plates of baleen in their mouth that filter out food from large gulps of ocean water ( see Feeding section ). Female baleen whales tend to be larger than males of the same species, another example of sexual dimorphism.

A Move to the Sea

The fossil record of whales helps scientists understand how the whales we know today have evolved over the past 50 million years , since the time of the earliest whales that lived on land. The earliest fossil whales, such as Pakicetus , walked on four legs and foraged in rivers and estuaries for fish around 50 million years ago in parts of South Asia that today belong to Pakistan and India. Over the next five to ten million years, the earliest whales diversified into a variety of extinct lineages that experimented with different kinds of specializations for living in the water: some looked more like today’s crocodiles, others looked more like sea lions or otters. Some of these species, such as Maiacetus , likely had webbed feet and could move through the water propelled by a strong tail, although their tails likely did not have a fluke. 

These first relatives of whales had many characteristics of land mammals—hind legs, nostrils for breathing near the front of their nose, and teeth of various sizes (as opposed to baleen or teeth of a single size, like modern whales have). Around 40 million years ago, early whales such as Maiacetus and Peregocetus , a recently described fossil whale found in Peru , possessed weight-bearing hind limbs. These fossils preserve the ankle bones, including a bone called the astragalus, which has a double-pulley structure like other even-toed hoofed mammals, such as cows, camels, pigs, deer, and hippos.

Around 40 million years ago, the first fully aquatic whales, such as Basilosaurus appeared. These whales had reduced hind limbs that could not support their weight on land, and they had elbow joints in their flippers. Small hind limbs show the Basilosaurus’ link to its land predecessors, but its inner ear shows more similarities to the modern whale. Whales today still bear the marks of their ancient land ancestors—they retain tiny remnants of hind leg bones in their hip region. Fossils of Basilosaurus were found in the United States in 1840s, and the Smithsonian has displayed a skeleton of this early whale since the late 19th century. A complete skeletal mount of Basilosaurus can be seen on display today in the Sant Ocean Hall.

Follow the Food

But why did these land animals move to the water? Since the end of the Cretaceous period when large marine reptiles went extinct in the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event, the oceans were absent of major predators (except for sharks). This left a large gap, allowing for mammals—including the earliest ocean-going whales in the Eocene—to evolve and take advantage of new opportunities, such as in the ocean, where food was abundant. Equally, the earliest whales may have experienced pressures from other predators on land, or they returned to the ocean for reasons that we cannot fully test.

By the end of the Eocene, the earliest four-legged whales had gone extinct, and the descendants of the first fully aquatic whales, such as Basilosaurus , diverged into the two main groups of whales we see today: baleen whales (mysticetes) and toothed whales (odontocetes). The oldest mysticetes did not have baleen and probably were not filter-feeders. The oldest known fossil mysticete, Mystacodon selenensis , from Peru, lived about 36 million years ago, which means that the divergence between baleen and toothed whales happened before this time. (The oldest fossil toothed whale is Simocetus rayi from Oregon, which is housed in the NMNH’s Department of Paleobiology, and roughly 33 million years old). In 2018, researchers from NMNH and other institutions described Maiabalaena nesbittae , a fossil mysticete that fed with neither teeth nor baleen , and instead likely sucked its prey into its mouth, as other toothed whales, such as beaked whales, do today. Overall, the ancestors of today’s mysticetes and odontocetes were smaller than the extremely large sizes of some species today—they ranged roughly between the size of a bottlenose dolphin to the size of a killer whale.

Distribution

Cetaceans are ubiquitous in the ocean—they are found in shallow and deep water, cold and warm currents, from pole to pole, and the tropical latitudes in between. There are even whales that live completely in freshwater ecosystems. Some whales undertake great migrations depending on their needs. Many whales move to warm waters to mate and give birth in the winter, and then to colder waters in the summer where there is an abundance of food. These whales swim thousands of miles over several months, moving at around ten miles per hour, and even slower speeds when they are feeding. Dolphins and other toothed whales migrate as well, although their distances tend to be shorter than the larger baleen whales. However, not all whales migrate. Bryde’s (pronounced broodus) whales ( Balaenoptera brydei ) stay exclusively in warm tropical waters, and the extremely endangered vaquita can only be found in the northern part of the Gulf of California. 

With the large size of baleen whales, one would think tracking their movements might be an easy endeavor, but this is harder than you might imagine. Although the migration patterns of some species are well known, others still prove elusive. For example, Southern right whales breed and nurse newborn calves in warm tropical waters off of South Africa, Australia, and South America, but scientists aren’t positive of their winter feeding ground locations. 

Some dolphins and porpoises live closer to shore, making them easier to track. Two of the three recognized species of bottlenose dolphins—the Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphin ( Tursiops aduncus ) and the Burrunan dolphin ( Tursiops australis )—tend to spend most of their time in coastal near-shore habitats. However, the common bottlenose dolphin ( Tursiops truncatus , familiar to most from the TV show “Flipper”), can be found as two separate populations that spend their time either offshore or close to the coast. The more coastal dolphin population tends to be smaller in size and lighter in color. Porpoises tend to live close to shore; the harbor porpoise ( Phocoena phocoena ) lives in coastal waters and can be seen swimming in shallow harbors and bays. Dolphins and porpoises will travel to warmer waters when faced with cold temperatures, but not on the same long-distance scale that you see with larger whales. 

Population Size

Just how many cetaceans currently exist in our ocean, by species or population size, is a challenging but important question for scientists. Not only is it helpful to determine how many individual whales there are currently for conservation and management reasons, but population trends are also important in establishing an accurate baseline for any changes that happen over time, including population crashes or growths. To measure the current population size in cetaceans, scientists rely on a number of different methods. The International Whaling Commission, an internationally recognized organization that regulates whaling and organizes scientific discussions about whale conservation, has population estimation guidelines that use visual cues from ships and airplanes . Estimates can also be made using underwater acoustic recordings, mark and recapture methods, and visually identifying individuals based on their marks and scarring. Species found in the open ocean, rather than coastal ecosystems, are harder to study and therefore less is known about their life histories and population status. We know very little about beaked whales that spend much of their time in cold, deep waters, for example, and have few markings that identify individuals when they are seen.  

Not only are estimates of current whale populations important, but past, pre-whaling population estimates help scientists to better understand how (if at all) whales have recovered from large-scale population declines. One study estimates that three million whales were slaughtered during the advent of commercial whale hunting. Estimating whale populations before large-scale commercial whaling depleted their numbers in the 19th century is particularly difficult. Scientists use historical whaling records or genetic methods (comparing genetic diversity within current whale populations) to determine past population sizes. 

Cetaceans reproduce through internal fertilization. Typically, mating happens during specific seasons and in specific ocean regions—for most baleen whales that means mating and birthing in warm tropical waters in the winter (see Distribution section above). Orcas and other toothed whales are thought to mate throughout the year. Different species show various courtship behaviors, and both females and males will mate with several different individuals to increase their chances of reproductive success. 

With fewer than 450 individuals left, North Atlantic right whales are considered endangered and until 2013, researchers were unsure where they mated. In 2014, researchers determined that this species gathered to reproduce in waters off the Gulf of Maine during the Northern Hemisphere winter. The species can be seen in groups at the surface of the water nuzzling, rubbing, and generally jostling for a mate, in what researchers think is courtship behavior. Dolphins also show signs of courtship behavior, sometimes crossing over to aggressive mating behavior , and sexual behavior unrelated to reproduction .  

Similar to humans, female cetaceans have long gestation periods, typically ranging from 10 to 17 months. Females usually give birth to one calf at a time and have a small number of young over their lifetimes. The calf usually is born tail first, although earlier in whale evolutionary history, cetaceans gave birth like other land mammals—fossils of the extinct whale Maiacetus show that they gave birth headfirst (you can see a skeleton of Maiacetus in the National Museum of Natural History  Sant Ocean Hall ). It is unclear when whales first evolved tail-first birth, but it likely happened when they moved from land to the sea (see Evolution section above). For modern whales, the mother often helps the calf get to the surface of the water for the calf’s first breath and then continues to help it by deterring predators. Once a cetacean mother gives birth she feeds thick, nutrient-rich milk full of protein and fat to her young. Once a calf is born and nursing it will stay with its mother for six months to two years. This energy-demanding time means that whales often won’t have another calf for several years. Cetaceans grow quickly after birth—a blue whale calf can grow 100 pounds a day. Although the young grow quickly, it takes years for them to reach sexual and social maturity (ten years in the case of most baleen whales). 

Cetaceans lead long lives, but because they are difficult to track and research, the specifics of their life spans are a bit muddled. Most are thought to live at least 20 years, and some species much longer. Bowhead whales can live 200 years , fin whales live close to 100 years, and most toothed whales live for 20 to 60 years. Captivity may significantly reduce an animal’s lifespan. One study found that only 27 percent of captive orcas live to age 15 —in the wild 80 percent reach the same age.

Gaining information about the age of a whale or dolphin is difficult for scientists. Information can be gathered from dead animals that wash up on shore, or from bones that have been sitting in museum collections since the time of whaling. To learn the age of living whales researchers have turned to some surprising parts of the animal— earwax and skin cells . Whales gain earwax fairly consistently, adding layers throughout their life like tree rings. This allows researchers to age a whale and simultaneously see what sort of pollutants they are exposed to throughout their lives . 

Communication

Whales live social lives, and to recognize one another, coordinate group activities, and maintain contact over long distances, they’ve developed a complex system of communication. This range of signals includes pulsed sounds, whistles, songs, low rumbles, and body language that conveys different emotions. Belugas are especially vocal, and because of their cheery chirps they have been nicknamed the “canaries of the sea.” 

The vocalizations of bottlenose dolphins are some of the best studied among cetaceans. They use a diverse array of whistles, and in some places around the world “pops” and “brays.” Each individual also has a personal whistle, similar to a name, that it uses to broadcast its identity and location. These “names” are learned and developed when they are young. Dolphins can also learn the signature whistles of others, and will call back and forth to one another when they meet. 

Both orcas and sperm whales use group-specific calls that help them communicate with individuals in their social group. For orcas, calls are often used to identify one another and coordinate unified hunting. Sperm whales also produce a series of sounds that are unique to their specific social group. These codas, as they are called, are a series of rhythmic clicks with a broad frequency that the whales use during socialization. It is thought that mothers pass certain coda dialects to their young, allowing a coda to be transmitted through time from generation to generation.

For many baleen whales, including the bowheads, blue, minkes, and fin whales, communication occurs in the form of a song. The most complex whale vocalizations come from humpback whales which will sometimes sing for hours at a time. Each humpback song has a specific structure—the song is divided into up to eight themes, which are then further divided into phrases. A phrase is composed of individual sounds like rattles, whistles, moans, and grunts. Whales in one area will usually sing the same song, although it often will change gradually over time. But sometimes migrating whales will cross paths, prompting one set of whales to switch to the more popular tune. Scientists liken this phenomenon to a cultural revolution. As to why humpback whales sing? Scientists are still unsure, however, many hypotheses propose it has some benefit for mating. 

Getting Social

Whales, for the most part, are social creatures. The majority live in small-to-medium-sized social groups for at least some part of the year. Whales will often congregate for specific activities, which include breeding, traveling, feeding, or rearing young. Oceanic dolphins form unusually large groups, congregating in schools of over a thousand individuals. At the other end of the spectrum are the river dolphins, who live solitary lives, only meeting up to mate. 

The social networks of cetaceans can help to transfer information. In 1980, humpback whales were observed using a new feeding technique that added a slap of the tail at the surface. It turns out that the whales were switching from herring to the more populous sand lance, a fish species that was less affected by the bubble nets. But a resounding slap of the tail seemed to send the fish into a panic and bunch together, making the bubble nets more effective. By 1989, about half the Eastern humpback populations were using the trick and the whales were learning it from their peers. 

Sperm whales are some of the more social whales. Pods consist of roughly 20 to 50 individuals, and at times several pods join to create massive groups of up to 100 individuals. Pods can consist of just males, just females, or a combination of both. This grouping behavior was exploited for whaling during the 1800s.

The group dynamics of Pacific Northwest orcas are particularly well studied . These whales live in family groups of between two and 50 individuals. Some of the pods are residential, meaning they have a home territory, while other pods are transient and move from place to place as the seasons change. These two types of orcas even differ in what they like to eat . Resident whales predominantly eat salmon, while the transient groups eat seals, sea lions, porpoises, and other whales.

At the Surface

Whales are known for their surface antics—searching for a view of them at the surface is the basis for a booming tourism industry. Cetaceans need to spend a certain amount of time at the surface of the water to breathe air but, as those on whale watching tours know, they do more than just breathe there. While these marine mammals are at the surface catching a breath, they engage in many other behaviors for feeding and communication. 

Larger whales typically come to the surface to breathe every 10 to 15 minutes, while the smaller toothed whales, such as dolphins breathe more often—several times a minute. When releasing a breath at the surface there is often spray that results from the warm air (along with some mucus) released into colder water, which condenses and forms a water spout (more details in Eating and Breathing section ). These spouts vary in size and shape based on the species and can be used to identify a species from afar. 

The large jumps that bring almost the entire body out of the water are called breaching. Why whales perform these leaps is still not entirely clear , but there are several possibilities ranging from a warning or courting other whales in a group, physically removing unwanted parasites, getting better access to air in rough seas or simply playing. Whales may jump once or do a series of jumps, but the more that occur the more energy is used. However, porpoising—leaping out of the water over and over—is an efficient means of travel that dolphins and porpoises use to reduce the amount of energy used swimming over long distances. Dolphins will also ride the waves near the bow of a ship, a behavior that many think is just for fun.

Many other behaviors like lobtailing (when the fluke, or tail, is raised and flopped down on the water), pectoral slapping (when the side pectoral fins are raised and flopped down) and spyhopping (when the whale pops out of the water vertically to look around at the surface) can be observed in cetaceans. These behaviors are seen in all cetaceans but more often in groups of larger baleen whales like the humpback, sperm, and gray whales. Their purposes vary depending on the species and the circumstances. For orcas, spyhopping is likely used to better see prey at the surface  (PDF) or on floating ice. 

In the Food Web

Feeding mechanisms.

Cetaceans are large animals that need to maintain enough energy to swim, reproduce, care for young and evade predators. To do this they have to ensure they get enough food. Baleen whales get their name from their feeding strategy. They use large plates of baleen to filter through thousands of gallons of seawater laden with prey for their meals. Hundreds of these plates are lined up in a row and attached to the whale’s upper jaw. The baleen is made of keratin, which is also what makes up human nails and hair. The keratin frays at the edges producing comb-like strands that help to filter out small animals. These large baleen whales (including the largest vertebrate on Earth—blue whales) eat some of the smallest creatures found in the ocean. Their baleen filters out water and captures krill (small planktonic crustaceans), other plankton and small fish. The whales tend to seek out high-density patches of prey to increase feeding efficiency. 

Most baleen whales take their large gulps of seawater close to the surface—species such as rorquals lunge-feed in a single gulp, while right whales skim continuously with their mouths agape. Researchers have found that blue whales complete 360 degree turns while lunging with wide open mouths to align their mouths with the swarm of prey and get the most possible krill. A blue whale can eat as much as one ton  of krill per day at the peak of feeding time in Antarctica and fit as much as 150 percent of its body weight worth of water in one gulp. Groups of humpback whales will band together when feeding. One whale will dive down and begin to produce bubbles in a circle below the surface of the water. The bubbles will merge together and rise to the surface, causing confusion and producing a de facto net that surrounds schooling fish they have encountered. Then, other whales will rise up through the center forcing the fish towards the surface where they are gulped like fish in a barrel. Bubble net feeding , as it’s called, is only seen in humpback whales during the feeding season. Gray whales, in contrast, feed close to the seafloor where they suck up prey in the muddy sediment that they filter through their baleen. 

For toothed whales, it’s not one-size-fits-all either. There is a huge range of feeding behaviors largely based on a variety of tooth arrangements—teeth in toothed whales are mostly for seizing prey, not for chewing. Toothed whales mainly feed on single prey items, as opposed to baleen whales that filter tiny prey by the hundreds to thousands of individuals. Most dolphins have cone-shaped teeth, while porpoise teeth are flattened. Tooth numbers range from a pair, to dozens to hundreds. 

Narwhals have two teeth, but  in females they rarely erupt through the gums and in males only one typically does—growing into the long, unicorn-like protrusion for which they are famous. There are exceptions—occasionally females have erupted tusks; some males have two erupted tusks, and some none. Most beaked whales also have one pair of teeth, which tend to be tusk-like, and visible only in males, while the teeth in females stay hidden in their gums.  

Most toothed whales feed on one prey item at a time, grabbing it and swallowing it whole. Dolphins and porpoises eat a variety of fish, squid and crustaceans, like crabs and lobsters. Dolphins use their beak and conical teeth, while porpoises have shorter mouths and squarer teeth, both allowing them to grip their prey—no need to chew. One population of dolphins has learned to cover their beaks with conical sponges to dig up fish hiding on the seafloor, a skill that is passed from mothers down to their offspring. Dolphins will also thrash octopuses at the surface as a way to stun them before they attempt to eat them. Beaked whales suck their prey into their mouths in order to swallow them. Larger toothed whales, like orcas, eat fish and cephalopods, but also sharks and larger marine mammals including sea otters, seals, sea lions and smaller whales. Different populations of orcas tend to make their meal choices based on their locations—salmon in waters off the Pacific Northwest, herring in waters off of Europe and minke whales in waters off Antarctica. 

Narwhals have never been observed feeding, so what we know about their prey is only from research on their stomach contents . Their diet consists mostly of halibut, cod, squid and shrimp, and they tend to stock up on their food in the winter, making deep dives to find their prey. Sperm whales require a large amount of food—over a ton a day. To meet this need they eat all sorts of animals: octopus, fish, shrimp, and squid. Sometimes meals are made up of larger creatures—colossal and giant squid.

Finding Food

Baleen whales find prey by using a mixture of sound, sight and special reception organs. In 2012 researchers discovered a sensory organ in the bottom jaw of some whale species . Smithsonian scientist Nick Pyenson and his colleagues hypothesize that the organ helps blue, fin and humpback whales to take their giant scoops of water via lunge-feeding. 

Toothed whales have another tool to find prey that baleen whales lack—echolocation. Odontocetes produce sonar pings that are sent out and echoes are returned when they hit an object, allowing the animal to better know its surrounding environment and what prey is nearby. Echolocation is quite exact and can help detect tiny size differences and even fish burrowed in the seafloor. 

Most cetaceans have no natural predators. Baleen whales and larger toothed whales, like the orcas and sperm whales, almost never face predation from the sea—humans are their greatest threat (see Whaling section ). Orcas occasionally will work together in a group to attack large baleen whales, primarily focusing on juveniles or weak, injured adults. There are instances of flesh being bitten off of whales by cookie-cutter sharks , but no recorded deaths from their bites. Sharks, walruses and polar bears sometimes consume smaller toothed whales. Although never observed, there is some evidence that sperm whales and giant squid engage in epic battles. It appears that the whales will eat the squid (their hard beaks are found in the whales’ stomachs) but from the giant sucker scars often found on the face and backs of sperm whales, it’s clear the squids fight back.

Cetaceans include the largest living animals on the planet, but some of the smallest can be found living on and in whales, dolphins, and porpoises. Small crustaceans called whale lice live in folds and rough patches of their skin, as well as in their lesions and nostrils. Most whale louse species have an exclusive corresponding cetacean species that acts as the host for their entire life cycle. Male and female sperm whales even have different unique lice species that they host. 

Barnacles mooch off of whales in a commensal relationship—hitching a ride on their backs. The barnacles don’t harm the whale but take advantage of the moving home that brings meals directly to them. Remora fish also take advantage of the ride, attaching to the large mammals with a modified fin. They don’t seem to harm cetaceans—research indicates that they likely help whales remove other external parasites , although any substantial benefit remains unclear. Some seabird and fish species that follow whales take advantage of these leftovers. 

A large diversity of internal parasites also infest cetaceans. A variety of parasitic worm species can be found in the blubber, intestines, stomach, liver, and lungs of whales. One roundworm species lives in the placenta of sperm whales and reaches lengths of over eight meters, and pygmy sperm whales host a similarly long roundworm in the tissue under the whale’s skin. 

The first record of whaling dates back to 6000 BCE in Neolithic petroglyphs found in South Korea. Similarly, engravings that depict men pursuing a spouting whale show that by 2000 BCE the Norwegians had begun the practice of whaling. Evidence of early whaling also exists for people in Greenland, from the islands off of Japan, and residents of the Aleutian and Phoenician Islands. These early whalers predominantly used whales for food, fuel, and tools. To ensure bountiful harvests, they honored and gave thanks to whales in a variety of ways.

By the 11th century, harpooning whales was a way to get rich. At this time, Basque whalers of Iberia (Spain) hunted right whales, which later earned their common name because they have the right suite of traits for whaling, such as congregating near shore, being relatively slow-moving, having ample blubber, and floating after being killed. A single right whale could yield 5,247 liters (1,386 gallons) of oil plus 293 kilograms (647 pounds) of baleen. In Norway and Iceland, whalers would corral whales into fjords and then block their exit with nets. Spears were dipped in blood from previous hunts so that the wounds would become infected and eventually kill the whale. Among the most successful hunters were the Basques. They started hunting whales in western Europe in the 11th century using boats and harpoons and continued until whales in the region were depleted. Basque whalers then moved across the Atlantic to Labrador, where from 1520 to 1630 they hunted right and bowhead whales along their migration routes. By the 1600s those whale populations, too, had plummeted. So, the Basque fishermen turned to cod and seals.

In the United States, whaling did not reach its height until the mid-19th century. Known as Yankee whaling, the American industry dominated with 735 of the world’s total 900 whaling vessels in 1846. The U.S. alone killed more than 100,000 whales total during peak years, with sperm whales—especially those in the South Pacific Ocean—the primary target. Sperm whale oil was highly desired for its exceptional lubricating quality and ability to burn brightly and without odor. Sperm whales also contained a special liquid in their head called spermaceti or “head oil” and a wax-like substance in their intestines called ambergris that was used in medicine and perfume. Baleen whales, including gray, bowhead, humpback, and right, were also targeted despite having inferior quality oil. Their baleen was used in buggy whips, carriage springs, corset stays, fishing poles, umbrellas, and hoop skirts. Life at sea was long and arduous for whalers, and many filled the hours of idleness by taking up carving and engraving. Scrimshaw is a traditional, nineteenth-century pastime that included the engraving of whale teeth, bones, and baleen (also called whalebone), with decorative artwork.

In the 1860s a Norwegian entrepreneur revolutionized the whaling process and ushered in a new, modern era of whaling . Sven Foyn’s boats were steam-powered and equipped with deck cannons that shot harpoons that exploded on impact. The Norwegian whalers initially hunted close to home, but by 1904 they began to expand throughout the world, establishing whaling stations as they went. In the 1920s, they also introduced pelagic-factory ship whaling where the entire whale was hauled on deck to be processed at sea. Other advances included processing machinery, radio, the use of fleets with many specialized vessels, and aircraft spotting. Whaling became so efficient that by World War II many species were on the brink of extinction. Between 1900 and 1999 an estimated three million whales were killed by the whaling industry .

Today, most nations observe the whaling ban put in place by the International Whaling Commission (see Conservation section ). Only a few nations, including Iceland, Japan, and Norway, object to the ban and continue to whale. The IWC also allows certain aboriginal groups from Canada, the U.S., Greenland, Russia, South-Eastern Asia, and the Caribbean to whale since it has been deemed an integral part of their nutritional and cultural life.

The documentary The Cove was instrumental in spreading awareness about a particular slaughter event that occurs in Taiji, Japan. Every March thousands of dolphins are secretly corralled in a particular cove. A few are selected and sold to dolphinariums and the rest are slaughtered and their meat sold in local supermarkets. Although it did spark an international outcry for a few years, the fishers of Taiji still capture and slaughter dolphins every year and the city is planning to turn one of the larger bays into a dolphin park and research facility .

The first recorded cetacean in captivity was a beluga whale that lived in the Boston Aquarial and Zoological Gardens  (PDF) in 1861. Later that year, P.T. Barnum (the eventual founder of the Barnum and Bailey Circus) displayed two beluga whales in the basement of his New York City American Museum (not the American Museum of Natural History), followed by at least nine whales that lived and died while on display by Barnum between 1861 and 1865. 

Throughout the 1870s several aquariums in the United States and in Europe began to showcase particular whale species, such as beluga whales and oceanic dolphins, though few were able to keep them alive for very long. In 1938, Florida’s Marine Studios, initially built as a film location for underwater productions, was quickly reinvented into a tourist attraction once the owners discovered the dolphins’ theatrical talents. It wasn’t until the 1950s and 60s that people realized dolphins could be trained to perform elaborate tricks and routines. The U.S. Navy Marine Mammal program began in 1960 and studied the animals as well as trained them to help with military procedures. But the true popularity of viewing dolphins in captivity began after the release of the movie Flipper in 1963, and a subsequent TV show. Prior to the popularity of Flipper there were only three designated dolphin parks or dolphinariums—now there are over a hundred worldwide . 

Although the first successful captures of an orca occurred in 1961 and 1964, methods had yet to be perfected and many whales died from entanglement or other injury. By the late 1960s two successful methods emerged, but even those could cause various trauma to the whales. By the 1970s, public awareness halted the capture of orcas off the coast of British Columbia and Washington, and in 1976 the last orca was taken from the region. Iceland then became the main source of whales for marine parks— between 1955 and 1972, 300 orcas were captured from Icelandic waters for the marine park industry. In later years marine parks resorted to breeding their captive whales, and in 2004 the first live births from artificial insemination occurred.

Life for a captive whale is very different than in the wild. Confined to small spaces, whales attack one another to assert dominance and the victim, unable to escape as they would in the wild, can become severely injured. Captivity can also lead to poor health. Male whales experience a condition called dorsal fin collapse. Although scientists are still unclear as to why this occurs, it likely is associated with structural changes in their collagen over time. The chemicals in pool water can cause health problems like blindness, and about half of captive dolphins die (PDF) in the first 90 days after they’ve been captured.

Today, the live dolphin trade is illegal in the United States, Mexico, and Europe, however, live dolphins are still captured in other countries to minimize inbreeding among the dolphins already in captivity. 

In 2013, the release of the documentary Blackfish, a depiction of orca treatment at Sea World, changed the public’s perception of whales in captivity. Many people became upset by the revelations of the documentary, and attendance at marine parks has since dropped. Sea World has since ended the breeding of orcas in captivity.

Whale Watching

Whale watching is a popular pastime around the world. The enterprise first started in California in the 1950s and has continued to grow in popularity. In 2009, the industry generated around 2.1 billion dollars from 13 million whale watchers and supported 13,000 jobs. 

The trend not only helps raise awareness about whale conservation by exposing people to the rarely seen creatures, but it also provides an alternative source of income for communities where fishing may not be as profitable as in years past. In Laguna San Ignacio on the Baja Peninsula, fishermen began supplementing their income in the 1980s by taking tourists to see the curious and friendly gray whales that come to the protective lagoons to rear their calves. Now, the whale tourism industry there is one of the most important contributors to the local economy. Marine tourism in Baja California Sur generates 300 million dollars a year and supports roughly 2,000 people. Only 16 boats are allowed in the lagoon at once, and fishing is suspended when the whales come for the season, a management strategy that hopes to ensure the whales will continue to return. 

However, whale watching also has its downsides. The presence of whale-watching boats can alter whale behavior , including scaring them off from important feeding areas, and boat noise and pollution are other sources of stress. On occasion, a tour boat will collide with a whale , injuring or even killing it. According to data collected by the International Whaling Commission, whale-watching vessels collide with whales in the highest numbers compared to all other vessels. However, it is important to note this may be skewed by the likelihood of a vessel type to report a collision. 

Books, Film & Music

For hundreds of years, whales have been described by seafarers as fearful beasts. Confined to observe whales from the shore, many influential writers and naturalists like Aristotle and Pliny had inaccurate information about whale behavior and anatomy . Dicuil, a monk and geographer among Charlemagne’s court in the 800s, wrote, “About, leap numerous whales as large as mountains, fed by the vast Red Sea. Over their back and shoulders runs a terrible spine, bringing death and fate beneath their savage mouths. They are wont to suck down both ship and crew alike.”

It is likely that these accounts influenced the stories we are familiar with today. In the Bible, Jonah becomes imprisoned in a whale’s stomach for three days, a theme that is mirrored in Disney’s Pinocchio from 1940. Herman Melville’s famous story of Moby Dick , published in 1851, also features a villainous sperm whale that Captain Ahab chases to enact revenge.  

It wasn’t until recently that humans began to see whales as charismatic and intelligent creatures. It was a surreal experience for scientist Roger Payne when he first heard the haunting songs of humpback whales in the 1960s. According to Payne, “That’s what whales do; they give the ocean its voice, and the voice they give it is ethereal and unearthly.” The music industry agreed. In 1970 Roger Payne’s Songs of the Humpback Whale climbed music charts. Soon musicians began incorporating their haunting melodies into mainstream music, a trend that helped change the perception of whales from expendable commodities to charismatic creatures, worthy of protection. Whale song was even included on the Golden Record aboard the Voyager space probes that were launched in 1977 .

Whales have since graced the big screen as friendly companions. The film Flipper , about an injured bottlenose dolphin, aired in 1963 and instantly became a classic, in addition to beginning a TV show. In 1993, the movie Free Willy , a story about the special bond between a young teenager and a charismatic, captive orca, captured young audiences and went on to become a successful series of movies. In the 2002 movie Whale Rider , a young Maori girl follows the path originally set forth for her brother to become tribe leader, using her special connection with Southern right whales to prove that she is worthy. 

Myths & Legends

Mysterious creatures from an underwater world, whales have inspired many myths and legends across the globe. Peruvians from the Amazon believe drownings are caused by boto, the Amazon river dolphin ( Inia geoffrensis ), as a shape-shifter who transforms into the image of a beautiful man or woman to lure victims to their death. In China, the now-extinct Yangtze River dolphin ( Lipotes vexillifer ) is viewed as the reincarnation of a fabled princess. Refusing to marry the man chosen for her, the Princess of the Baiji is thrown into the Yangtze River and later emerges as the dolphin. In a similar Inuit legend, the Princess Sedna falls for the bird spirit, much to the dismay of her father. In an effort to hide her, the father takes her out to sea, but in outrage, the bird spirit creates a terrible storm. Forced to sacrifice his daughter, the father tosses her overboard. As the princess clings to the side of the boat he cuts off her fingers, and each finger becomes one of the sea mammals, one of which is the whale.

It may come as a surprise that the tale of the unicorn was most likely inspired by a whale. Historians think the first description of a horned horse comes from Greek physician Ctensias of Cnidus in 398 B.C., though it also finds its way into the Bible through a series of mistranslations. Then during the Middle Ages, Viking traders likely introduced narwhal tusks to European markets . Unfamiliar with this Arctic whale species, the existence of the narwhal tusk became proof of the unicorn. Evidence for this theory includes depictions of unicorns in artwork with a spiraled horn. The narwhal tusk is the only animal horn or tusk with such unique anatomy. 

All marine mammals in U.S. waters are protected under the Marine Mammal Protection Act, federal legislation that was enacted in 1972. Protecting cetaceans in international waters is more difficult. With an international ban on whaling in effect since 1986 (allowing for some exceptions) many whale populations have bounced back from low numbers. However, several species populations remain extremely low. In early 2020, fewer than 450 individual North Atlantic right whales remain and they are considered critically endangered, as are their sister species, North Pacific right whales , with fewer than 100 individuals remaining. The vaquita, a small porpoise found only in coastal waters of the Gulf of California off of the Baja Peninsula in Mexico is also extremely endangered, mostly because of getting caught accidentally in fishing gear. There are now less than 20 of these porpoises left .

Entanglement & Marine Debris

One of the biggest threats to whale survival is entanglement from fishing gear. Once made with biodegradable wood and ropes, fishing gear is now predominantly made of synthetic materials, like plastic. Gear often gets lost at sea and will continue to injure or kill animals whether they were the intended target for the gear or not, a phenomenon called “ghost fishing.” Over 300,000 whales die each year due to entanglement, a problem that can cause starvation, drowning, infections from cuts and deeper lacerations, increased risk of ship strikes, or increase the risk of becoming another whale or shark’s prey. It can also limit a female whale’s ability to birth young. Today, female right whales are giving birth every 9 years as opposed to every three years as they were in the 1980s, a trend that is likely not only influenced by entanglement but other stressors as well. 

Consumption of plastic debris can also kill whales. Not only can the whales die from blockage of their stomach or intestines, sharp plastic shards can also pierce intestinal lining, and they can starve due to feeling falsely full from a stomach full of plastic with no nutrients. As filter feeders, baleen whales suck in large volumes of water to catch the fish and krill required to sustain their massive sizes, and discriminating between food and plastic is impossible. Toothed whales can also unknowingly consume plastic hidden within their prey. In 2019, a large sperm whale was found beached with over 200 pounds of trash in its stomach . 

Shipping Vessels

Right whales live and migrate along coastal shores and so they frequently pass and congregate near bustling ports. They are also slow swimmers, a trait that has proven deadly in the 21st century. Between 1970 and 1999, 45 North Atlantic right whales were found dead in coastal waters of the U.S. east coast—and ships killed one-third of them. Other whales, like the fin whale, blue whale, and humpback whale, are also struck by passing ships. A study of humpback whales that live off the Gulf of Maine found that 15 percent of humpback whales in the region have injuries related to ship strikes . These findings prompted negotiations between the New England Aquarium, the National Marine Fisheries Service, the International Maritime Organization, and the shipping industry to move shipping lanes away from known whale congregation areas and to decrease ship speed limits. 

In 2008, United States regulations were modified to limit the speed of larger ships to 10 knots (11 miles per hour) when at a distance of 20 nautical miles (23 miles) offshore during whale calving season, a time that changes according to the location along the coast. It seems as though the rule is limiting whale death caused by ship strikes. Between 2008 and 2013 only two right whales were killed by ship strikes within U.S. waters, and neither one was within 50 miles of the protected areas. Comparatively, ships killed 15 right whales between 1990 and 2008, and 13 of those were found in areas now protected by speed limits. Unfortunately, although this effort has reduced deaths caused by ship strikes, the right whale population continues to decline due to gear entanglements.

Noise Pollution

As humans continue to increase their presence at sea, it becomes a noisier place to live. Ship and submarine sonar pings, military tests and drills, seismic testing, the churning of boat motors, and drilling on oil rigs are just a sample of manmade noises that contribute to noise pollution in the ocean. Whales rely heavily on sound for communication, but in this new noisy reality they struggle to have their voices heard. Whale behavior is also harmed by the presence of human noise. Beluga whales were observed vacating a feeding area and swimming 50 miles (80 km) away for several days to avoid an approaching ice-breaker ship. Some Blainville’s beaked whales ( Mesoplodon blainvillei ) will stop hunting in the presence of navy sonar, and sperm and pilot whales stopped vocalizing during the Heard Island Feasibility Test of 1991, a study that aimed to determine how far manmade acoustic signals could travel in the ocean. Beaked whales and blue whales are particularly sensitive to sonar, and several mass strandings have been tied to related military exercises . 

But there is cause to be hopeful. In an effort to reduce the impact of sonar on whales, the U.S. Navy agreed in 2015 to end mid-frequency sonar training in specified areas where whales congregate, and in 2016 they extended the exclusion to low-frequency hunting sonar . In waters near British Columbia, Canada, a voluntary speed reduction policy during the season when endangered orcas migrate through Haro Strait was put in place for the first time in 2017. The initial policy successfully decreased noise pollution from commercial ships and was continued in 2018.

In 1946, the International Whaling Commission (IWC) was formed to “provide for the proper conservation of whale stocks and thus make possible the orderly development of the whaling industry.” The commission’s main duty is to govern whaling practices around the world. This work includes completely protecting certain species, designating sanctuary areas, setting catch limits for specific species, deciding on appropriate whaling seasons, and prohibiting the capture of mothers with their calves. But as whaling populations continued to decline, the Commission evolved to fill a conservation role. In 1982, the IWC officially banned commercial whaling, however, aboriginal whaling and the issuance of scientific whaling permits are still allowed.

Because of these efforts, in 2016 most humpback whale populations were removed from the endangered species list . Only the population that breeds in Central America remains on the list, and the California blue whale population is also making a comeback. In 2014, a study determined that this subset of blue whales is at about 97 percent of what it was prior to whaling , offering hope that other whale species and populations, with continued protection, can rebound. 

Since 1850, whales have found a home at the Smithsonian Institution . At that time Spencer Fullerton Baird was a curator and avid naturalist who made whale research a top priority for the Institution. In 1871, he convinced Congress to create the Commission of Fish and Fisheries, the precursor to today’s National Marine Fisheries Service and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The agency was run by Baird himself, in addition to his other duties at the National Museum (what is now the National Museum of Natural History), and later when he was elected as Secretary of the Smithsonian in 1878. While Baird was at the Museum he acquired many marine mammal specimens, including those from the U.S. Exploring Expedition of 1838 to 1842.

Today, the museum’s whale collection includes over 30,000 specimens, the largest in the world. The museum is also home to Phoenix, a 45 foot, 2,300 pound full-scale model of a female North Atlantic right whale that hangs in the Sant Ocean Hall. She is one of many whale models that have graced the halls of the Museum, including the 1903 blue whale that was the first-ever cast of a whale , and the 1963 blue whale that replaced it. 

Today, the National Museum of Natural History has two curators who specialize in the topic of whales. Nick Pyenson , author of the critically acclaimed Spying on Whales, is a specialist on fossil whales, and Michael McGowen is a whale geneticist.  

Exhibits: Past & Present

The 1903 blue whale.

In May 1903, little was known about whale biology, but the National Museum’s curator of mammals, Frederick W. True, dispatched exhibit staff to obtain the world’s first full cast of a whale, which the Smithsonian would display at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in 1904. The race to display a full cast of a whale had more than just to do with population declines, as the head of exhibits at the National Museum was also hoping to set the record straight that the National Museum had successfully cast the “outward form” of a whale. The process wasn’t easy—it involved casting the dead animal while it was floating in water—but a full cast of a blue whale went on display at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition and was then displayed from the roof trusses of the South Hall in the Art and Industries Building. After the new U.S. National Museum (today the National Museum of Natural History) opened in 1910, it was moved across the Mall, mounted on a pedestal, and placed at the center on the Hall of Marine Life. For fifty years the seventy-eight-foot cast of the blue whale enchanted visitors to the Museum.

The 1963 Blue Whale

The 1903 blue whale model met its end around 1960, when it was replaced by a new, even bigger blue whale model. In the 1950s the Smithsonian began an institution-wide exhibits modernization program, and many halls of the Natural History building were completely renovated at this time. The new hall dedicated to Life in the Seas was to have as its centerpiece a state-of-the art model of a blue whale in mid-motion.

Modeling techniques had advanced considerably in the decades since 1903, and lightweight plastics and fiberglass allowed for a more dynamic posture. Museum director Remington Kellogg wanted a “scientifically accurate” model, but this proved challenging, as whale science—particularly the biology and behavior of blue whales—was hindered by the difficulty of tracking and observing whales in their natural habitat. Most whales could only be studied after they had washed up on a beach or at whaling stations after they had been killed and hauled to shore. Scientists could not agree as to whether or not the ventral plates of the mouth expanded when diving or rising, and this issue presented a significant problem in designing the blue whale model.

Luckily, scientists were just beginning to capture some of the first underwater footage of whales and the Smithsonian used footage from Jacques-Yves Cousteau’s 1956 French documentary film “Le monde du silence,” or “The Silent World,”to inform their design of the new model.

The 94-foot-long model was suspended thirty feet above the floor and attached to two steel brackets jutting out from the wall. The exhibit opened in February 1963 in time for the First International Symposium on Cetacean Research. Suspended in air, visitors could imagine that “she has just risen from dark waters, expelled her breath, drawn in another, and is now about to lift her powerful tail in an upward swipe that will send her plunging to the icy depths.”

In 1976, a new exhibit label was added, explaining that there was an error with the model. New scientific data about whale behavior led Smithsonian biologists to reevaluate the accuracy of the blue whale model’s diving posture. Photographs of living blue whales still did not exist at this time, but there were a few photographs of other rorquals or baleen whales, including sei and minke whales, that revealed much slimmer, streamlined bodies than expected. “Only after a whale takes a mouthful of food and is about to swallow it, would its throat be expanded in this way,” the label explained. The 1963 blue whale model was eventually removed in 2000 as renovations began for the new Kenneth E. Behring Family Hall of Mammals.

The 2003 Right Whale – Phoenix

Currently suspended at the center of the Sant Ocean Hall is a life-size model of a North Atlantic right whale named Phoenix . The result of four years of work, and collaboration between exhibit fabricators, whale biologists, sculptors, painters, engineers, and many others, this exhibit is unique and exciting in that it represents a live animal. Phoenix has been tracked in her Atlantic Ocean environment by marine biologists at the New England Aquarium in Boston, ever since her birth off the coast of Georgia in 1987. Phoenix was chosen because so much is known about her and her family (her mother’s name is Stumpy). She is the mother of three calves and became a grandmother in 2007.

She got her name Phoenix from her ability to rise again, like the mythical bird, after a life-threatening entanglement with fishing gear in 1997. She still bears a scar below her right lip from that encounter, which you can see on the model and which scientists use to help identify her in the waters of the Atlantic.

Narwhal: Revealing an Arctic Legend

The Narwhal: Revealing an Arctic Legend exhibit opened at the National Museum of Natural History in 2016 and closed in 2019. The exhibit highlighted how traditional Inuit knowledge and scientific research can be combined to reveal new insights about these difficult-to-study whales —and the rapidly changing environment they live in. The exhibit displayed a life size model of a male narwhal, skulls and tusks (including a rare double-tusked skull), and intricate Inuit artwork. 

How did whales get so big?

This is one of the many questions paleobiologist Nick Pyenson is researching at the National Museum of Natural History. By measuring the skulls of baleen whales throughout evolutionary history he and his colleagues were able to create a timeline of when whales began to grow in size. Baleen whales didn’t start getting so huge until roughly 4.5 million years ago , at the transition of the Miocene into the Pliocene, according to their study. The hypothesis is that during the Ice Ages krill and other zooplankton that whales consumed started to become more concentrated in their seasonal occurrence than prior to that geologic time. If concentrated food sources were far apart, it would help to be very big: a large body size not only helps you push through water more efficiently but also increases the capacity to store food for energy. A patchy ocean also means that food is grouped together in a dense area, allowing the whales to efficiently eat up large quantities in one sitting.

Tracking Whales from Space

The Gulf of Panama is a bustling place where tens of thousands of ships cross to pass through the Panama Canal. It is also a popular breeding ground for whales. Tragically, whales often get hit by passing ships and sometimes the collisions are deadly. But in December 2014, new shipping lanes were implemented with the aim to limit the number of ship-whale collisions. The change was guided by research conducted by Hector Guzmán from the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute . Guzmán compared the course of hundreds of commercial ships with satellite tracking data that showed the movement of humpback whales. This is the first instance where satellite tags were used in the planning of new shipping lanes, and the hope is that it will limit the number of deadly strikes.

Cerro Ballena

Cerro Ballena is a unique paleontological site located in the Atacama Region of Chile, north of the town of Caldera, along the Pan-American Highway. During road construction that started in 2010, paleontologists discovered a rich fossil site containing dozens of whale skeletons, along with the remains of other extinct marine mammals and marine vertebrates. In 2011, paleontologists from Chile and the United States, including Smithsonian’s Nick Pyenson, conducted rapid documentation and digitization of the site, before road construction was completed in early 2012. At the site the team documented the remains of ten different kinds of marine vertebrates, including billfishes, seals, aquatic sloths, and several different species of whales. The skeletons of over 40 individual large baleen whales dominated the site and included an extinct sperm whale and an extinct walrus-like whale (Odobenocetops), both of which were previously only known from Peru. A 3D print of one of the most complete fossils from this site now hangs on the wall of the Q?rius Theatre at the National Museum of Natural History. 

Learning From Mysterious Baleen

There are many hidden mysteries in the collections of the National Museum of Natural History . One had been a group of over 3,000 baleen plates—the large bristly plates grow from the roof of a whale’s mouth and are used to sieve out the tiny krill that they feed on. Several feet long, the baleen in this collection was crammed in 30 cases at the museum’s offsite storage facility and nobody knew where they came from. With some tenacity and lots of research, the origins of the mystery collection were discovered and the baleen can be used to answer scientific questions. Studying the molecular composition of the baleen will enable scientists to determine what kinds of food the whales ate and which oceans they swam in. Taken together, this information can paint an accurate picture of what life in the ocean was like for these whales some 75 years ago and enables us to understand how the ocean and its whales have changed over time.

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Rice's whale.

Scientists with NOAA and the Natural History Museum examine the whale skeleton in the museum's massive whale vault. This specimen is now considered the Rice's whale holotype, meaning it is the specimen all other potential Rice's whales will be compared to.

In January 2019, a rare whale washed ashore in the Florida everglades. The whale, then known to be from a population of Bryde's whales in the Gulf of Mexico, was thought to be its own species, however, scientists rarely studied the whale due to its shy nature. Smithsonian scientists carefully transported the whale carcass across the country to the Smithsonian whale warehouse so that it could be properly studied. After examining the skeleton, researchers determined the whale was not a Bryde's whale. Several features on the whale's head, including the bone around the blowhole, were significantly different from other Bryde's whales from around the globe.  In 2021, they named this whale the Rice's whale ( Balaenoptera ricei)  after whale scientist Dale W. Rice, who first discovered the presence of the large whales in the gulf. 

Rice’s whales can weigh up to 60,000 pounds (that is 30 tons), which is  about five times as heavy as an elephant, and they can grow up to 42 feet long. There are only about 100 individuals in the Rice's whale population, making the species a critically endangered species. The biggest threats to the species include vessel strikes, ocean noise, energy exploration, development and production, oil spills and responses, entanglement in fishing gear, and ocean debris. As the only baleen whale to live exclusively in American waters it has been nicknamed America's whale.

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Home — Essay Samples — Science — Zoology — Whale

Essays on Whale

The importance of writing an essay on whales.

Writing an essay on whales is important for several reasons. First, whales are fascinating creatures that have captured the imagination of humans for centuries. By researching and writing about whales, you can contribute to the understanding and conservation of these majestic animals. Additionally, writing an essay on whales allows you to practice and hone your writing skills, as well as develop your ability to research and analyze information.

Writing Tips for an Essay on Whales

When writing an essay on whales, it is important to start by conducting thorough research. Look for reliable sources of information, such as scientific journals, books, and reputable websites. Take notes and organize your research so that you have a clear understanding of the topic before you begin writing.

Once you have gathered your research, create an outline for your essay. This will help you organize your ideas and ensure that your essay has a clear and logical structure. Your outline should include an , body paragraphs, and a .

When writing your essay, be sure to use clear and concise language. Avoid using jargon or technical terms unless you are confident that your audience will understand them. Use descriptive language to paint a vivid picture of whales and their habitat, and provide specific examples and evidence to support your points.

Finally, be sure to edit and proofread your essay carefully before submitting it. Check for grammatical errors, spelling mistakes, and ensure that your writing is clear and coherent. Consider asking a friend or classmate to read your essay and provide feedback before you make any final revisions.

Popular Whale Essay Topics

• The Evolution of Whales: From Land to Sea

Whales are fascinating creatures that have evolved from land-dwelling mammals to the massive marine mammals we know today. This essay will explore the evolutionary history of whales, including their transition from land to sea and the adaptations that have allowed them to thrive in their aquatic environment.

• The Importance of Whales in Marine Ecosystems

Whales play a crucial role in marine ecosystems, serving as both predator and prey. This essay will discuss the importance of whales in maintaining the balance of marine food webs, their role in nutrient cycling, and the impact of their presence on the health of ocean ecosystems.

• The Cultural Significance of Whales in Indigenous Communities

Whales hold significant cultural importance in many indigenous communities around the world. This essay will explore the traditional beliefs, practices, and stories surrounding whales in different cultures, as well as the contemporary efforts to protect and preserve these cultural connections.

• The Threats Facing Whales: Human Impacts on Marine Mammals

Whales are facing a multitude of threats from human activities, including habitat destruction, pollution, climate change, and direct exploitation. This essay will examine the various ways in which human actions are impacting whale populations and the efforts being made to mitigate these threats.

• The Ethics of Whaling: Balancing Tradition and Conservation

Whaling has been a contentious issue for decades, with some cultures continuing to practice traditional whaling while others advocate for the protection of whale populations. This essay will explore the ethical considerations surrounding whaling, including cultural traditions, conservation efforts, and the potential for sustainable use of whale resources.

• Whale Watching: Balancing Conservation and Tourism

Whale watching has become a popular form of ecotourism, providing economic benefits to coastal communities while raising awareness about the importance of whale conservation. This essay will discuss the impacts of whale watching on whale populations, the ethical considerations of wildlife tourism, and the potential for sustainable practices in the industry.

• The Intelligence and Social Behavior of Whales

Whales are known for their complex social structures and communication abilities, raising questions about their intelligence and emotional lives. This essay will explore the cognitive abilities of whales, their social behaviors, and the implications for their welfare in captivity and the wild.

• The Conservation Success Stories of Whales

Despite the many challenges facing whale populations, there have been notable successes in their conservation, including the recovery of some species from the brink of extinction. This essay will highlight the success stories of whale conservation, the lessons learned from these efforts, and the ongoing work needed to ensure the long-term survival of whales.

• The Role of Technology in Studying Whales

Advancements in technology have revolutionized the study of whales, allowing researchers to gather data on their behavior, movements, and physiology in ways that were previously impossible. This essay will discuss the role of technology in whale research, the innovative tools being used to study whales, and the potential for technological advancements to inform conservation efforts.

• The Future of Whales: Challenges and Opportunities

Looking ahead, whales face a range of challenges, including climate change, habitat loss, and continued human impacts. This essay will explore the future of whales, the potential for new conservation strategies, and the role of public awareness and advocacy in shaping the fate of these remarkable marine mammals.

Whales are a diverse and fascinating group of marine mammals that inspire curiosity, wonder, and concern for their well-being. By exploring the various facets of whale biology, ecology, conservation, and cultural significance, we can gain a deeper understanding of these extraordinary creatures and the complex challenges they face in a rapidly changing world.

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Table of contents

What is the whale about, movie guide table of contents, guilt, grief, control, fear. , the lies we tell ourselves .

• Why is the movie called The Whale?

Confinement

Light and space, food and more, the facecam, is ellie really evil, what is the opening scene.

• Is The Whale connected to other Aronofsky movies like The Wrestler or Black Swan?

Now it’s your turn

Welcome to our Colossus Movie Guide for The Whale . This guide contains everything you need to understand the film. Dive into our detailed library of content, covering key aspects of the movie. We encourage your comments to help us create the best possible guide. Thank you!

The Whale is a reflection on guilt, consequences, self-deceit and the power of honesty. Specifically the way in which these things can erode someone’s life. For Charlie and Liz, it’s the loss of Alan. For Alan, it was feeling abandoned by his father. Ellie, Charlie’s daughter, also feels abandoned by her father. And Thomas stole from his church, ran away, and is too scared to look back. We see how easy it is for each of them to lie to themselves about the pain they feel. They fall back on distraction. It’s only once they start being honest with themselves, with one another, and with others, that any progress is made. 

• Charlie – Brendan Fraser
• Ellie – Sadie Sink
• Mary – Samantha Morton
• Liz – Hong Chau
• Thomas – Ty Simpkins
• Written by – Samuel D. Hunter
• Directed by – Darren Aronofsky
• Based on the play – The Whale

The ending of The Whale explained

The ending of The Whale begins when Thomas comes over and tells Charlie that he, Thomas, is going home thanks to Ellie. The conversation takes a turn when Thomas tries to “save” Charlie. Charlie pushes back on the idea of God and an afterlife and explicitly states his shame, guilt, and frustration with himself over his weight. 

The next day, he tells his online class that he’s been replaced. This is the consequence of posting an assignment to be honest where he used cuss words. During this “last lecture”, Charlie makes a big point about honesty and being yourself. This culminates with him turning on his facecam for the first time, revealing to the class what he looks like. Some are shocked. Some are awed. Some are concerned. Embarrassed. Stunned. “These assignments don’t matter. This course doesn’t matter. College doesn’t matter. These amazing, honest things that you wrote, they matter.” As a sign off, he throws his laptop across the room. It breaks. 

Liz shows up with food. Charlie doesn’t look good. He’s audibly wheezing. These two now have their final talk. Liz is upset at the revelation that Charlie has over $100,000 in the bank he’s refused to use to get himself medical help. She compares what happened with Alan dying from not eating to Charlie dying from overeating. “I can’t do this anymore.” Charlie says he told Alan he didn’t need anyone else, not God, not anyone else. Liz says, “I don’t think I believe anyone can save anyone.” Which leads to Charlie talking about Ellie and Thomas. “Do you ever get the feeling that people are incapable of not caring? People are amazing.”

 Ellie bursts into the house and confronts Charlie about the essay he gave her. It received an F. When she finally reads it, she realizes what it is. It’s an essay she wrote in eighth grade English class. It’s the whale essay Charlie has obsessed over since the opening of the movie. Charlie apologizes to Ellie. He breaks down Ellie’s own self loathing. “This essay is you.” He tells her she’s perfect, that she’ll be happy, that she cares about people. His condition quickly deteriorates. Charlie begs her to read the essay. Ellie’s about to go but opens the door and bathes herself and the room in light. She says, “Daddy, please.” Then turns and begins to read the essay. 

Charlie calms. Suddenly motivated, he rolls, he struggles, he stands. He steps. He steps. Closer and closer to Ellie. He flashes to a day of being back at the beach. His feet in the water. Ellie and Charlie share a moment. Then Charlie’s feet lift off the ground, he gasps, and ascends. We get a final wide shot of him on the beach, standing in the surf, young Ellie behind him. It’s a bright, lovely, picturesque day. 

There’s a good amount going on here, narratively and thematically. 

Charlie’s death

First and foremost, the obvious implication is that Charlie dies. But how should we take his feet lifting off the ground? The flash of light? The final shot? The Whale had been a very grounded, realistic movie. But that ending brings in aspects of the surreal. 

There’s an argument to be made that it’s a subjective visual. At that moment Charlie has a sense of peace. He reconnected with Ellie in a major way, breaking through the angry wall she had kept up for so much of the movie. To Charlie, his death isn’t this bleak, horrendous thing. It’s transcendent. The visual supports his sense of the weight lifted from his shoulders, and the grace and peace he feels. It’s similar to the end of Iñárritu’s film Birdman or scenes in Tár . In both those films the filmmaker allows the main character’s subjectivity to influence the film’s form. Aronofsky isn’t a stranger to this tactic, employing similar techniques in The Fountain and   Black Swan . The benefit of the subjective visual is that you can do dynamic things with it. The con is how subjective moments can create confusion around how literally something should be viewed. 

On the flip side of the subjective visual is the literal visual. In Birdman , we’re not supposed to believe the main character has telekinetic powers and can fly. It’s surreal subjectivity. But in Justice League , yeah, those things are literal. The Fountain , subjective. Inception , literal. Fight Club , subjective. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind , literal. Mulholland Drive , incredibly subjective. Hereditary , literal. 

The literal visual means that what we see has to be taken at face value. It’s not metaphoric. Like all the transcendent, crazy stuff we see in The Fountain is just a way to demonstrate the grieving process. It’s not literally what Hugh Jackman’s character does. But representative of his journey. In Inception , everything that happens is what happened. The dream-sharing isn’t some euphemism. The memory erasure in Eternal Sunshine is not merely a representation of getting over an ex. It’s a “real” procedure the character’s going through. 

So in The Whale , if we read the ending as literal, then we have to try to explain how Charlie leaves his feet. What the flash of light means. And what that last image on the beach is. The clear, primary answer is that it’s a confirmation of God. That at the moment of his death, Charlie has this divine moment, a kind of personal rapture, as his soul leaves his body. Faith is one of The Whale ’s major themes. Thomas embodies that theme. His belief and quest to save Charlie creates a means by which the narrative can explore Charlie’s relationship with religion. It’s not a coincidence that the arc between those characters ends with Charlie decrying God, hoping there isn’t an afterlife. That conversation happens when it happens for a reason. 

The nuance here would be that Thomas thinks Charlie must atone for his sexuality. Something Charlie rightfully rejects. If Thomas was right, Charlie shouldn’t have such a divine conclusion. Instead of a light turning on, you’d expect a descent into darkness. It seems the atonement Charlie needed to make was with Ellie. Having done that, he’s redeemed. 

It probably doesn’t matter whether the end is surreal or literal. Either way, the point is the same: guilt, fear, and shame can lead us down a dark path where we lie to others and ourselves. If you walk that path, you’re damned. Through honesty, we find redemption. We improve our relationships. We liberate the mind, body, and soul. And it’s never too late to give yourself and those you love that closure. Thomas had the right idea in that it wasn’t too late for Charlie to be saved. But Thomas was wrong in what that meant. And how to apply it. As Liz says, “I don’t think I believe anyone can save anyone.” The Whale makes the point that others can’t know what we need. What will save us. Especially not a random niche religious off-shoot. Only you know what you need to do. If you’re honest with yourself, the answer is clear. If you’re not honest, then it won’t be easy. 

Ellie and her essay

We never hear the end of Ellie’s essay. It always cuts off at the same point: This book made me think about my own life, and then it made me feel glad for my…

While objectively we don’t know what Ellie says next, the visuals seem to imply the last word is “dad”. Just in the way that Charlie walks over to her. How she walks up to him. That when she reaches that point we see a shot of Charlie and he smiles. It cuts back to Ellie and she looks at him and smiles. It would also make sense why Charlie cherished that essay so much. Because it’s the one physical reminder he has that his daughter loved/loves him. She was glad for him. 

Whether she says “Dad” or not at the end of the essay, the important thing is that it ends with Ellie being glad. That embodies her narrative arc. She starts off so angry. She’s mean to everyone. Her own mom calls her evil. The implication is that she’s so upset about Charlie leaving that she’s been taking it out on everyone else. There’s a lot of fear of abandonment and self-loathing. Charlie slowly breaks down that wall. He keeps telling Ellie she’s amazing. She’s beautiful. Smart. Perfect. Even at the end. He’s adamant about the good in her. That she can be happy. He even says that she is that essay. The essay is ruminative, serious, slightly sad. But it builds to a point of finding joy. And the hope is that Ellie herself will now be able to do the same. 

Near the end of The Whale , Charlie and his ex-wife, Mary, get to reconnect. It’s not always pretty but it is cathartic. Eventually, they end up sitting next to each other. Mary lays her head on Charlie. They share a moment. Then Charlie begins to reflect. 

When Ellie was little, when we took that trip to the Oregon Coast together, Ellie played in the sand and we laid out on the beach. I went swimming in the ocean. That was the last time I ever went swimming actually. I kept cutting my legs on the rocks. The water was so cold. And you were so mad that my legs bled and stained the seats in the minivan and you said for days after that I smelled like seawater. You remember that? 

It’s not a profound moment. Nor a perfect moment. But it is a time Charlie remembers fondly. Through that subjective lens, it would represent simply a time of peace and potential. It’s probably one of many happy memories Charlie would die with. through the literal lens, it would imply something more heavenly, something afterlife-y. 

Zooming out from the narrative reasons, two things come to mind. First, most of The Whale is very interior. Aside from the opening shot, the entire movie takes place in Charlie’s house or on his front porch. There’s a claustrophobia to the mise-en-scene. That also influences the color palette. The Whale is a very muted film, full of grays and shows. Typically, art finds the most power through escalation or contrast. So if a story starts in a sad place, the most powerful ending is either complete desolation or a true reversal of fortune. Often you build up the potential of the story going either way. The movie Atonement is a good example of this. It sets up the romance between Kiera Knightly and James McAvoy. But they’re separated by war. You spend the movie uncertain if they will or won’t end up together. The eventual conclusion is insanely emotional. 

For The Whale , if it was going to have a negative ending, we’d expect it to double down on the claustrophobia and color palette. It would take those things to the extreme. But since it goes for a positive ending, it embraces aspects of contrast. Which is why when Ellie opens the door it’s such a surprising moment. For her, for Charlie, for the viewer. The light. The air. The sense of space. It’s lovely. The beach is about as opposite from Charlie’s apartment as it gets. It’s open. It’s bright. It’s full of energy. It’s also a time when Charlie had his family. All things that have been missing from his life. 

So ending with the beach just has that visual energy that leaves the viewer with a better feeling than seeing Charlie on the floor of his house. 

Of course, the movie’s also called The Whale and wants us to use that as a metaphor for Charlie. Not just in terms of his physical size. But as it relates to Ellie’s essay. Given the association with whales and the ocean, ending with Charlie on the beach feels like a way to try and visually connect person and cetacea. 

The themes and meaning of The Whale

Deep into The Whale we find out that Charlie’s boyfriend, Alan, passed away from complications arising from starvation. The starvation was a direct consequence of a falling out between Alan and his father, the leader of the New Life church. When Alan lost his father, he also lost his faith. The existential backlash caused a depression that manifested in a lack of appetite. Both Charlie and Liz (Alan’s sister) struggled to motivate him. Alas, nothing worked. Alan eventually passed away. 

Charlie and Liz both suffered with guilt, grief, and a lack of control. A person they loved very much is gone. It’s easy for them to blame themselves for their inability to save Alan. Could they have said more? Done more? It’s easy to imagine them caught in a cycle of what ifs. The lack of control they felt in regard to what happened with Alan ends up manifesting around their relationship with food. Charlie begins to overeat, as if eating for both Alan and himself. While Liz facilitates Charlie’s gorging by bringing him food. Even though she knows what Charlie’s doing is unhealthy, she gives in because of everything that happened with Alan. She can’t abide someone being hungry. Even if it kills them. 

These same emotions plague Ellie and Thomas, too, just in different ways and for different reasons. Ellie is angry about Charlie’s disappearance from her life. The pain of losing her father has made it hard for her to form and maintain relationships. Her form of control is to distance herself before others can distance from her. Or even push them away through insults and disturbing behavior. For Thomas, he also had conflict with a parent. In trouble for smoking too much pot, his father forced Thomas to go on a mission. He went but was upset by the mission leader only wanting to hand out pamphlets. It was too little. Thomas ended up stealing $2,436 from the mission and running off to do his own work. Which is what brought him to Idaho. Does he want to be there? No. But he’s also too scared to go back home. 

Charlie, Liz, Ellie, and Thomas all find ways to justify their behavior. 

For Charlie, he convinced himself that no one would want to be around him. This is why he keeps his camera turned off while teaching online courses. It’s how he reasoned staying out of Ellie’s life. And it fuels his eating. Because the more he eats, the more he can defend running away from any kind of accountability or confrontation. 

Liz is in a similar boat. She knows Charlie isn’t doing well. But he’s the only attachment to her brother that she has left. By feeding Charlie, it’s like she’s feeding her brother. She could put her foot down. Maybe she used to. Maybe there was a time she didn’t bring him two meatball subs with extra cheese or an entire large bucket of KFC? Maybe she used to try to get him to exercise? But it became easier to not fight him. She’d rather enjoy that part of Charlie that reminds her of her brother and gives her a sense of comfort rather than put her foot down and do what’s best for Charlie’s health. 

Ellie yells and screams that she wants nothing to do with Charlie. She says a lot of horrible things about him. Not just to his face but on social media. Yet she keeps coming back to his house. Ostensibly, it’s because he’ll do her homework and give her $120,000. But really it’s because she truly does want a relationship with her father. It’s just hard for her to work through those emotions. She’s been upset with him for so long that the process of forgiveness isn’t easy. And you can imagine there’s part of her that wonders if she did something to cause her dad to leave. By continually threatening to go, she causes Charlie to, over and over again, declare he wants her around. Slowly, she begins to believe it. 

And then Thomas lies about being from New Life and on a sanctioned mission. He ran away because he messed up and is scared to face the consequences. What will his father say? What will his church do? Will he go to jail? Will his family abandon him? To prevent that, he, much like Ellie, abandons them first. He tells himself and others that it’s the mission that’s important. But the minute he has an opportunity to go home: he does. That says a lot. 

The Moby Dick essay that Charlie’s so obsessed with is something Ellie wrote four years earlier. 

In the amazing book, Moby Dick , by the author Herman Melville, the author recounts his story of being at sea. In the first part of his book, the author, calling himself Ishmael, is in a small seaside town and he is sharing a bed with a man named Queequeg. The author and Queequeg go to church and later set out on a ship captained by a pirate named Ahab, who is missing a leg, and very much wants to kill the whale which is named Moby Dick, and which is white. 

In the course of the book, the pirate Ahab encounters many hardships. His entire life is set around trying to kill a certain whale. I think this is sad because this whale doesn’t have any emotions, and doesn’t know how bad Ahab wants to kill him. He’s just a poor big animal. And I feel bad for Ahab as well, because he thinks that his life will be better if he can just kill this whale, but in reality, it won’t help him at all. 

I was very saddened by this book, and I felt many emotions for the characters. And I felt saddest of all when I read the boring chapters that were only descriptions of whales, because I knew that the author was just trying to save us from his own sad story, just for a little while. This book made me think about my own life, and then it made me feel glad for my…

There are a number of resonances with The Whale . It helps to look at these not through the lens of “Why did Ellie write this?” but in terms of “Why did the filmmakers include this? What are they trying to say to the viewer?” First, the reference to Ishmael and Queequeg sharing a bed is reminiscent of Charlie and Alan. The reference to church brings us back to how much religion is a part of the film. Then the way in which Ishmael’s “entire life” is dominated by this one thing. Lastly, it’s the idea of the author attempting to “save us from his own sad story” through the descriptions of the whales. 

As Ellie says, “This book made me think about my own life…” We’re supposed to do the same with the film. Each of us probably has some whale that shapes our life. And other whales we use save others, even ourselves, from the saddest parts of our story. 

To put it another way: you have some guilt, some fear, that influences you, that causes you to seek control in ways that can often be detrimental. Maybe not to the extreme we see with Charlie. But problematic nonetheless. This can be minor like procrastinating on mundane things like laundry, texting back, being on time, going to bed, looking for a new job, etc. You get to it eventually, but not in a way that allows you to feel ahead of the curve rather than behind. Or it can be as large as neglecting responsibilities completely, abandoning relationships, hoarding, overconsumption of food and/or alcohol, etc. 

We all have some kind of Moby Dick that shapes up. And we all have the boring chapters about whales that distract us and others from the problems in our lives. They are the excuses we make. The lies we tell. 

There’s irony to how much Charlie keeps harping on Ellie and his students about being honest. At first, it feels like the basic sort of thing an English professor would want. Artists often talk about the need for honesty in the work. But as we learn more about Charlie, we realize how dishonest he’s been. To his students. To Ellie. To Liz. To his ex, Mary. And to himself. 

While he’s the one who’s the most vocal about honesty, the theme is a major part of Thomas’s character arc. He’s not really from New Life. He’s lied to Charlie, Liz, and Ellie. But finally comes clean to Ellie about his addiction to weed, the resulting fallout with his father, going on a mission as punishment, then stealing money and running away. He doesn’t know what he’s doing. He’s just trying to help someone, anyone, so he can tell himself everything that happened had some kind of meaning. He’s desperate for that sense of catharsis. It’s similar to Charlie saying, “I need to know that I have done one thing right with my life!” But he’s at a far later stage than Thomas. 

What happens with Thomas? In his own words: “And your daughter, she took these pictures of me smoking pot, and a recording or something like that, and she found my church in Waterloo somehow, and then she sent it to them, and they sent it to my parents. And you know what they said? ‘It’s just money.’ And they forgive me. And they love me, and they want me to come home. How awful is that? I can’t tell if she was trying to help me or hurt me or…I’m going home tomorrow.”

Ellie facilitated an honest conversation between Thomas, his church, and his parents. The very thing Thomas had been avoiding. He hadn’t wanted the confrontation, the consequences. Because he feared the worst. But the reality wasn’t so bad. Honesty gave him a path back home. 

We see a similar thing with Charlie and Ellie. Charlie spent years hiding from Ellie because he didn’t want to be honest with her about what he looked like now. And he didn’t want to have the inevitable confrontation about his leaving with Alan. But knowing he only had such a short time left to live, he made the effort, finally. And, yes, Ellie was mean, cruel, petty, and in some ways evil. But she was also there. And simply being there gave father and daughter an opportunity to heal. If only he had done this years earlier, what would have happened? Would Ellie be the angry person she is? The “evil” person Mary describes? And would Charlie still be so large? Would he have had the capacity to forgive himself for what happened to Alan? Would he be in a much better place?

The end of the movie seems to imply that, yes, by being honest, Charlie finally finds some form of redemption. 

Why is the movie called The Whale ?

The most obvious application of the title is the size of Brendan Fraser’s character, Charlie. He is an immense man. Narratively and thematically, his obesity is a primary point of concern. Given the film is a character study, the title of The Whale seems like a poetic alternative to something more mundane like Charlie . It grounds us in the literary “what” rather than the more straightforward “who”. 

But there’s more to it than that. In the film itself, references to “the whale” have nothing to do with Charlie or his size. They originate with an essay written by Ellie.

Two key takeaways from this essay, The first is the dynamic between Ahab and Moby Dick. The second is how Ellie interpreted the descriptions of whales. 

Regarding Ahab and Moby Dick, notice how Ellie says Ahab’s “entire life is set around trying to kill a certain whale.” And how the whale is completely oblivious to it. When you look at the characters in the film, each of them has their own white whale that haunts them and influences their life. For Charlie and Liz, it’s the death of Alan. For Alan, it was his father’s rejection. For Ellie, it’s feeling abandoned by Charlie. For Thomas, it’s fear of judgment from his family and former church. Really, all of them are dealing with guilt. Guilt and fear. 

That brings us to how the descriptions of whales equate to the author “trying to save us from his own sad story”. That description demands we reconsider what the title means. Clearly there’s more to it than Charlie’s size. Rather, it seems to refer to the stories we tell others, or even ourselves, to spare them from our feelings and emotions. In other words: our guilt and fear cause us to distance ourselves from others. Rather than letting them see us for who we are, rather than letting them in and letting them help us, we look to save them from our weaknesses. 

This is exactly what we see with Charlie. He keeps his facecam off so his students don’t have to look at him. He refuses to see his daughter or ex. He doesn’t leave his house. All because he wants to protect others from seeing him. We hear the lies he tells. ONe of his first lines of dialogue is “And, yes, the camera on my laptop still doesn’t work.” It does. He’s just not being honest. 

What we see between the start and end of The Whale are a bunch of characters who weren’t being honest with themselves in some way or another. And they’re dishonestly presenting themselves to others. By the end, they all start coming clean and being more true to who they are. Warts and all. 

So the title The Whale refers to, I believe, not just Charlie, but these stories we tell to distract others. And the grief and fear that cause us to do so. 

Important motifs in The Whale

99% of The Whale is spent in Charlie’s house. It’s dim, messy, and sad. There are some weak, orange-bulb lamps. Some windows. But the curtains are drawn. So the characters and viewer are crammed into this space for nearly two hours. Psychologically, it creates a sense of claustrophobia and pressure that lends itself to the viewer experiencing tension. Most of us don’t know what it’s like to be the size Charlie is, but we can identify with that sense of mental and physical stagnation and confinement. 

It makes sense then that at the very end of the movie that light becomes a powerful motif. The turning point between Ellie and Charlie happens after Ellie opens the front door and fresh air and sunshine flood the room. She reads her whale essay to him and we have these close ups of them washed in this light. And when Charlie dies, a bright light blossoms around him. The last shot of the beach is also very bright and open and seems to be symbolic for either a literal afterlife or just the final sense of peace Charlie has as he passes. Either way, its a stark contrast to the house that had become so much like a jail cell. 

Charlie holds the whale essay in high regard. At first, it seems like that’s just because it’s a simple, well-written, honest essay. A thing any teacher might have a soft spot for. Eventually, we find out the essay is something Ellie wrote four years earlier and Mary sent it to Charlie. So there’s the personal connection to it as well. It reminds him of Ellie. It has been, for eight years, his sole link to Ellie. When he hears it, he hears her. It also serves Charlie as a kind of compass. When Ellie returns to his life, she’s incredibly mean. Brutal. Mary even describes her as evil. Charlie rejects that. He’s convinced there’s more to Ellie. That she not only can be better but is better. That’s because of the essay. For Charlie, the essay is Ellie being honest. While everything else is performative, a consequence of the pain she doesn’t know what to do with. It’s acting out. It’s through the essay he seems to break through to her and, hopefully, change her future for the better. 

Alan starved himself. It got bad. Both Liz and Charlie watched this person they loved whither. Eventually, Alan jumped off a bridge. The entire experience changed the relationship Charlie and Liz had with food. For Charlie, he started overeating. While Liz, a caregiver, started overfeeding. Even though they knew what they were doing wasn’t good, it provided both a sense of comfort and control. So they lied to themselves about how bad it was. This mutual enablement was a coping mechanism that represents an inability to process grief, guilt, fear, and anger in a healthy way. 

Charlie has his facecam turned off when he teaches the online courses. He knows how shocking his appearance is. So he lies and says his camera is broken. In that way, he spares his class from having to look at him. The camera being off becomes the embodiment of not being honest with yourself or others. This false presentation that allows us to get through each day. Charlie turning the camera on becomes symbolic of finally getting honest with himself. It’s only by being honest that he can find peace before death. It’s just a shame he waited so long. Otherwise, he might have never been in such a dire place to begin with. That’s why he’s so adamant that Ellie and his students embrace honesty sooner rather than later. 

Questions & answers about The Whale

I don’t think Ellie’s evil in the way that Michael Myers is evil, though Mary seems to think so. But Ellie is very cruel. Her Facebook post about Charlie is pretty mean. Her breaking the plate that has the bird food—jerk move. Her taking the video of Thomas and sending it to his church—terrible. 

Thematically, though, there’s more going on. The Whale explores ideas of honesty and deceit. Especially self-deception. So even though you can perceive what Ellie’s doing as cruel, she’s often cutting through the lies we tell others and ourselves and getting at the truth of a situation. Which can hurt and create conflict. But as we see: that conflict is sometimes the thing we need the most to move beyond stagnation. 

It’s Thomas getting off the bus from Iowa and deciding to start his missionary work. 

Is The Whale connected to other Aronofsky movies like The Wrestler or Black Swan ?

Narrative-wise, absolutely not. But there are similar themes. All three of those films end with the main character giving their life in some cathartic final act. It’s just The Wrestler and Black Swan focus on performance and the demands of high performance. The Whale doesn’t share that concern. With that said, all three movies deal with parent/child relationships, redemption, and self-destruction. And all end in very similar ways. So there is a conversation to be had, especially in terms of Aronofsky’s filmography. I just don’t think The Whale should be looked at as part of a thematic trilogy with Black Swan and The Wrestler . 

Have more unanswered questions about The Whale ? Are there themes or motifs we missed? Is there more to explain about the ending? Please post your questions and thoughts in the comments section! We’ll do our best to address every one of them. If we like what you have to say, you could become part of our movie guide!

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Essay on Blue Whale

Students are often asked to write an essay on Blue Whale in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on Blue Whale

Introduction.

The blue whale is the largest animal on Earth. It’s a marine mammal, part of the baleen whales family. They are known for their impressive size and blue-grey color.

Physical Features

Blue whales can reach lengths of 100 feet and weigh as much as 200 tons. They have a long, slender body, and their skin is a beautiful mottled blue-grey.

Habitat and Diet

Blue whales live in all the world’s oceans. They feed on tiny shrimp-like animals called krill, consuming up to 4 tons a day.

Conservation

Once hunted to near extinction, blue whales are now protected. Their numbers are slowly recovering, but threats remain.

250 Words Essay on Blue Whale

The Blue Whale, scientifically known as Balaenoptera musculus, is the largest animal ever known to have existed on Earth. Despite its massive size and unique characteristics, it remains an enigma due to its elusive nature and the vastness of its habitat – the world’s oceans.

Physical Characteristics

Blue Whales can reach lengths of up to 100 feet and weigh as much as 200 tons. Their bodies are long and slender, enabling them to swim at speeds of up to 20 miles per hour. Their skin color ranges from mottled blue-gray to lighter shades underneath. They possess a broad, flat head and a small dorsal fin located towards the rear of their body.

Behavior and Diet

Blue Whales are baleen whales, meaning they filter their food through baleen plates. They primarily consume krill, a small, shrimp-like creature. During feeding season, a single Blue Whale can consume up to 4 tons of krill a day. Despite their size, Blue Whales are generally solitary creatures, with the exception of mother-calf pairs.

Conservation Status

Blue Whales were nearly driven to extinction by commercial whaling in the 20th century. Today, they are classified as endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). Current threats include ship strikes, entanglement in fishing gear, and the impacts of climate change on their food supply.

The Blue Whale, a marvel of the marine world, continues to captivate scientists and enthusiasts alike. Despite their endangered status, ongoing conservation efforts offer hope for the survival of these magnificent creatures. Their story serves as a stark reminder of our responsibility to protect and preserve the world’s biodiversity.

500 Words Essay on Blue Whale

The blue whale: a majestic marine giant.

The blue whale (Balaenoptera musculus) is a marine mammal that belongs to the baleen whale family, known for its exceptional size. As the largest animal ever to have existed, it has fascinated scientists, environmentalists, and animal lovers alike. This essay illuminates the blue whale’s biology, behavior, and the threats it faces, providing a comprehensive understanding of this majestic creature.

Biological Features

The blue whale’s body is streamlined and elongated, with coloration varying from bluish-grey to a lighter grey. The average adult measures around 25-30 meters in length, with the largest recorded specimen being an astonishing 33.6 meters long. Its heart is the size of a small car, and its tongue is so massive that fifty people could stand on it. Despite its colossal size, the blue whale feeds mostly on tiny shrimp-like animals called krill, consuming up to 4 tons daily during peak feeding periods.

Behavioral Characteristics

Blue whales are solitary creatures, although they sometimes form small groups, particularly during feeding season. They communicate using low-frequency pulses, groans, and moans, which can be heard by other whales up to 1,000 kilometers away. Blue whales are also known for their impressive migrations, travelling thousands of kilometers between their feeding and breeding grounds annually.

Reproduction and Lifespan

Blue whales reach sexual maturity between the ages of 5-15 years. The gestation period lasts about a year, with females giving birth to a single calf every two to three years. The calf, weighing up to 3 tons and measuring up to 7 meters at birth, is nurtured with mother’s milk for about six months. Blue whales have a lifespan of 70-90 years, although some have been known to live over a century.

Conservation Status and Threats

The primary threats to blue whales today are ship strikes and entanglement in fishing gear. Climate change also poses a significant threat as it affects the distribution of krill, their primary food source. Noise pollution interferes with their communication and navigation abilities, exacerbating their vulnerability.

Conclusion: The Imperative of Conservation

The blue whale is a symbol of the oceans’ bounty and the dangers of human exploitation. The survival of these magnificent creatures depends on our ability to reduce threats and protect their habitats. As we learn more about these giants, we are reminded of our responsibility to coexist with the myriad species that share our planet. The blue whale’s story serves as a potent reminder of the power of conservation and the ongoing struggle to preserve the world’s biodiversity.

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Whale Essay Examples

An overview of the humpback whale.

On a planet that’s more than a billion years old, one might think that the biggest animals alive today would probably be apex predators. While this is true, the humpback whale (one of the largest whales in the world) is far from earth’s killing machine....

Whaling and the Impact of Humans on Whale Population

The influence of human behavior on our planet is evident through the effects of climate change. Many ecosystems are destroyed and animals brought to extinction because of our thoughtlessness. Only recently have we as species begun to notice, and therefore, try to bring about change...

Whaling: the Industry’s Importance to Diversity and Wealth  

Before the industrial revolution, when the New England states relied on the ocean for their profits, large ships sailed far and wide in search for one of the oceans grandest creatures. While the Southern states made their living off of their farm-land, along the East...

The Animal Welfare of the Faroe Islands: Whaling Tradition

Imagine a world where your tradition and culture are restricted by the uninformed views of others. A world where a happily living group of people face discouragement in preserving their own heritage because of other people’s oppressive actions. Unfortunately, this is a reality for the...

The Sea Shepherd and Anti-whaling Campaign

People have been whaling and consuming whale meat and other products for generations. Many whale species are almost endangered due to excessive whaling, and many species are still considered endangered species. According to the International Whaling Commission (IWC), many species, including the right whale in...

The Flaws in Regulation of Japanese Whaling

The issue of whaling activities across the world has been contentious in nature, with these activities coming under intense scrutiny in recent times. The focus of this review regards how techniques initiated by the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society (SSCS), a non-government organisation (NGO), affects the...

Discussion on Whether Japan Should Resume Commercial Whaling

Whales are one of the most intelligent species in the world. They communicate via local dialects; they learn and share information among themselves; some have even displayed signs of grievance for dead offspring with an orca recently being observed carrying the body of her dead...

Why the Whaling Tradition in the Faroe Islands Must Be Stopped

It can be seen, in recent times, that the controversial topic of the wellbeing and welfare of animals has struck large debates across the world. The Faroe Islands have been a victim of such controversy sparking conversation about its seasonal whale hunts. To understand how...

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