The blue whale is a marine mammal and a baleen whale. Reaching a maximum confirmed length of 29.9 meters (98 ft) and weighing up to 199 tonnes, it is the largest animal known ever to have existed. The blue whale's long and slender body can be of various shades of greyish-blue dorsally and somewhat lighter underneath. Four subspecies are recognized: B. m. musculus in the North Atlantic and North Pacific, B. m. intermedia in the Southern Ocean, B. m. brevicauda in the Indian Ocean and South Pacific Ocean, B. m. indica in the Northern Indian Ocean. There is also a population in the waters off Chile that may constitute a fifth subspecies.
The orca, also called killer whale, is a toothed whale belonging to the oceanic dolphin family, of which it is the largest member. It is the only extant species in the genus Orcinus and is recognizable by its black-and-white patterned body. A cosmopolitan species, orcas can be found in all of the world's oceans in a variety of marine environments, from Arctic and Antarctic regions to tropical seas.
Whales are a widely distributed and diverse group of fully aquatic placental marine mammals. As an informal and colloquial grouping, they correspond to large members of the infraorder Cetacea, i.e. all cetaceans apart from dolphins and porpoises. Dolphins and porpoises may be considered whales from a formal, cladistic perspective. Whales, dolphins and porpoises belong to the order Cetartiodactyla, which consists of even-toed ungulates. Their closest non-cetacean living relatives are the hippopotamuses, from which they and other cetaceans diverged about 54 million years ago. The two parvorders of whales, baleen whales (Mysticeti) and toothed whales (Odontoceti), are thought to have had their last common ancestor around 34 million years ago. Mysticetes include four extant (living) families: Balaenopteridae, Balaenidae, Cetotheriidae, and Eschrichtiidae. Odontocetes include the Monodontidae, Physeteridae, Kogiidae, and Ziphiidae, as well as the six families of dolphins and porpoises which are not considered whales in the informal sense.
The Bering Sea is a marginal sea of the Northern Pacific Ocean. It forms, along with the Bering Strait, the divide between the two largest landmasses on Earth: Eurasia and the Americas. It comprises a deep water basin, which then rises through a narrow slope into the shallower water above the continental shelves. The Bering Sea is named after Vitus Bering, a Danish navigator in Russian service, who, in 1728, was the first European to systematically explore it, sailing from the Pacific Ocean northward to the Arctic Ocean.
Marine mammals are aquatic mammals that rely on the ocean and other marine ecosystems for their existence. They include animals such as cetaceans, pinnipeds, sirenians, sea otters and polar bears. They are an informal group, unified only by their reliance on marine environments for feeding and survival.
In zoology, megafauna are large animals. The most common thresholds to be a megafauna are weighing over 46 kilograms (100 lb) or weighing over a tonne, 1,000 kilograms (2,205 lb). The first of these include many species not popularly thought of as overly large, and being the only few large animals left in a given range/area, such as white-tailed deer, Thomson's gazelle, and red kangaroo.
Rorquals are the largest group of baleen whales, which comprise the family Balaenopteridae, containing ten extant species in three genera. They include the largest animal that has ever lived, the blue whale, which can reach 180 tonnes, and the fin whale, which reaches 120 tonnes ; even the smallest of the group, the northern minke whale, reaches 9 tonnes.
Baleen whales, also known as whalebone whales, are a parvorder of carnivorous marine mammals of the infraorder Cetacea which use keratinaceous baleen plates in their mouths to sieve planktonic creatures from the water. Mysticeti comprises the families Balaenidae, Balaenopteridae (rorquals), Eschrichtiidae and Cetotheriidae. There are currently 16 species of baleen whales. While cetaceans were historically thought to have descended from mesonychids, molecular evidence instead supports them as a clade of even-toed ungulates (Artiodactyla). Baleen whales split from toothed whales (Odontoceti) around 34 million years ago.
The humpback whale is a species of baleen whale. It is a rorqual and is the only species in the genus Megaptera. Adults range in length from 14–17 m (46–56 ft) and weigh up to 40 metric tons. The humpback has a distinctive body shape, with long pectoral fins and tubercles on its head. It is known for breaching and other distinctive surface behaviors, making it popular with whale watchers. Males produce a complex song typically lasting 4 to 33 minutes.
A harpoon is a long spear-like projectile used in fishing, whaling, sealing, and other hunting activities to shoot, kill, and capture large fish or marine mammals such as seals, sea cows and whales. It accomplishes its task by impaling the target animal and securing it with barb or toggling claws, allowing the fishermen or hunters to use an attached rope or chain to pull and retrieve the animal. A harpoon can also be used as a ranged weapon against other watercraft in naval warfare.
The minke whale, or lesser rorqual, is a species complex of baleen whale. The two species of minke whale are the common minke whale and the Antarctic minke whale. The minke whale was first described by the Danish naturalist Otto Fabricius in 1780, who assumed it must be an already known species and assigned his specimen to Balaena rostrata, a name given to the northern bottlenose whale by Otto Friedrich Müller in 1776. In 1804, Bernard Germain de Lacépède described a juvenile specimen of Balaenoptera acuto-rostrata. The name is a partial translation of Norwegian minkehval, possibly after a Norwegian whaler named Meincke, who mistook a northern minke whale for a blue whale.
Right whales are three species of large baleen whales of the genus Eubalaena: the North Atlantic right whale, the North Pacific right whale and the Southern right whale. They are classified in the family Balaenidae with the bowhead whale. Right whales have rotund bodies with arching rostrums, V-shaped blowholes and dark gray or black skin. The most distinguishing feature of a right whale is the rough patches of skin on its head, which appear white due to parasitism by whale lice. Right whales are typically 13–17 m (43–56 ft) long and weigh up to 100 short tons or more.
The sperm whale or cachalot is the largest of the toothed whales and the largest toothed predator. It is the only living member of the genus Physeter and one of three extant species in the sperm whale family, along with the pygmy sperm whale and dwarf sperm whale of the genus Kogia.
The pygmy right whale is a species of baleen whale. It may be a member of the cetotheres, a family of baleen whales which until 2012 were thought to be extinct; C. marginata has otherwise been considered the sole member of the family Neobalaenidae and is the only member of the genus Caperea. First described by John Edward Gray in 1846, it is the smallest of the baleen whales, ranging between 6 and 6.5 metres in length and 3,000 and 3,500 kilograms in mass. Despite its name, the pygmy right whale may have more in common with the gray whale and rorquals than the bowhead and right whales.
Shepherd's beaked whale, also commonly called Tasman's beaked whale or simply the Tasman whale, is a cetacean of the family Ziphiidae and the only species in the genus Tasmacetus. The whale has not been studied extensively. Only four confirmed at sea sightings have been made and 42 strandings recorded. It was first known to science in 1937, being named by W. R. B. Oliver after George Shepherd, curator of the Wanganui Museum, who collected the type specimen near Ohawe on the south Taranaki coast of New Zealand's North Island, in 1933.
The crista galli is a wedge-shaped, vertical, midline upward continuation of the perpendicular plate of the ethmoid bone of the skull, projecting above the cribriform plate into the cranial cavity. It serves as an attachment for the membranes surrounding the brain.
Whale was a ship that disappeared in 1816.
The bowhead whale is a species of baleen whale belonging to the family Balaenidae and is the only living representative of the genus Balaena. It is the only baleen whale endemic to the Arctic and subarctic waters, and is named after its characteristic massive triangular skull, which it uses to break through Arctic ice. Other common names of the species included the Greenland right whale, Arctic whale, steeple-top, and polar whale.
Whaling in Seychelles was established in the early 19th century, coming largely to a close by 1915 due to declining prices for sperm whale oil, as well as the lack of materials and freight congestion due to the onset of World War I. The primary quarry, sperm whales, were generally caught near Bird and Denis Islands, and towed to a whaling station on Saint Anne.
