Unusual hunting behavior of humpback whales

Scientists first discovered humpback whales hitting two flippers as birds flapped their wings to accelerate when hunting.

Scientists at Stanford University, USA in a study published in the journal Current Biology on July 10, said they first discovered the act of smashing two flippers like birds flapping humpback whale's wings when hunting, according to National Geographic.

Whales beat flippers to move forward, movements similar to birds flapping their wings.

Jeremy Goldbogen, associate professor of biology at Stanford University, attached a video recording device to the back of humpback whales in the South Atlantic Ocean in hopes of learning more about the marine life of this species. The result he obtained was the unprecedented movement of this animal.

"We often assume that whales use their tails to create swimming force, and flippers are only used for navigation," said Dr. Paolo Segre, the study's lead author . "However, in this case we first recorded a whale hitting the flippers to move forward, the same movement as the bird flapping its wings."

Humpback whales have two flippers with rough and slender surfaces than other whales. Previous researchers could only observe the structure of flippers from humpback whale carcasses and thought they were used primarily to correct the direction of swimming.

According to scientists, the feature of flippers can explain technical movements capable of producing relatively large repulsive forces of this species in newly discovered behavior. According to Segre, the humpback whale is the only whale that can perform this behavior due to its length and large range of flippers.

The act of flapping the flippers like birds flapping extremely rare wings of humpback whales.(Video: Stanford).

However, flippers' behavior is rare, appearing only twice in videos of about 200 individuals after hundreds of hours of shooting."It is possible that this activity is very energy intensive and only used when accelerating in a short time , " Segre surmised.

Humpback whales are nearly 15 meters long, weigh about 60 tons by widening their mouths, rushing forward to filter small shrimps and floating organisms. They need a lot of energy to carry out hundreds of hunts every day. It seems that flogging acts provide the necessary support to push the body up during these hunts.