A lesson in cetacea

Unfortunately the past two days have heralded poor weather so I haven't gone out on any boat trips, today the weather has been perfect! The consequence of nice weather is that the tourists come out to play and so all the boats until this evening are fully booked, we will try in the evening but taking pictures and data in the evening is very difficult.

So in the absence of any aquatic adventures I will take the opportunity for a bit of educating, I've mentioned and shown you many pictures of the humpback whales that wander around the bay but not told you all that much about them. It is time for that to change.

The humpback whale (Megaptera novaeangliae) belongs to a group of whales known as rorquals, other well known cetaceans in this group are the blue whale, fin whale and minke whale. The humpback is unique in being assigned its own genus, Megaptera. It can grow to around 17m long and can live up to 50 years. Their population is estimated to be around 35,000 worldwide, the populations are slowly recovering after mass landings occurred during the early 20th century. (There has been discussion in Iceland lately about resuming hunting humpbacks)
They tend to produce some remarkable surface displays, they will perform all manner of stunts. I hope to not miss any more of these stunts as I rue missing a full body breach last week!
Humpback whales can be individually identified by the patterns of white on the underside of their fluke, their dorsal fin and any body scarring can also help identify specific whales.

That is as much as I can tell you without doing some serious research, I hope it was informative and not too dull!

Thanks for reading! As thanks, here is a cute whale!