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Whale info
Name: Albert Y Kim
Location: N/A
Country: N/A
Date: N/A
Question:
I am a 5th grader and 11 years old. I would like to find anything about
whales especially on humpbacks. My class is doing a newspaper on whales and we need info.
Replies:
There are more than 82 different kinds of whales that we know of.
Humpback whales are special for many different reasons. The following
are some of the special features of the Humpbacks:
* their pectoral flippers are about 1/3 of their body length, no other
whale has pects this long, so they're easy to identify!
* humpbacks, like many other whales, catch their food with long baleen,,
that hangs from the roof of their mouth, but they are special because
humpbacks cooperate when hunting, some will hunt together in a line and
lunge through a school of small fish , krill or shrimp, making sure that
they get the whole school. Others, together or alone, will circle
UNDERNEATH a school of prey, letting out bubbles as they swim, which
float up forming a "BUBBLENET" around the prey. This scares the animals
into a smaller, dense school, and then the whale simply swims through with
with its big mouth open, swallowing the entire school at once! Because
humpbacks hunt in several different ways, and because they cooperate when
they hunt, we think they are probably very intelligent.
* humpbacks make some of the longest and (to humans) most beautiful songs
of all the whales. (All whales make their sounds in their blowholes -
they don't have vocal cords like we do)
Tom F Ihde
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Update: June 2012
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