Natural history

Distribution and migration

Cetaceans are distributed in all the world’s oceans from the far polar reaches to the Equator. They concentrate in areas of increased biological productivity, such as upwellings where there is an abundant supply of food. Some species are coastal, and some are pelagic, dwelling farther offshore. The centres of the ocean basins appear not to have any concentrations of whales or dolphins. Some small cetaceans are distributed in major river systems, particularly river dolphins of the family Platanistidae. Members of this family are found in the Amazon, Orinoco, La Plata, Yangtze, Ganges, and Indus rivers and surrounding drainage waters. Members of other families, particularly the Delphinidae and Phocoenidae, spend part of their time in fresh water.

As a rule, large whales have north and south seasonal migrations, spending summers in high latitudes near the poles, where there is an abundant food supply, and moving toward the Equator in the fall to breed. Some populations of these species, however, reside in one locality all year. One of the greatest migrations is undertaken by the California population of the gray whale, which summers in the Bering and Chukchi seas of the Arctic and winters in lagoons off the coast of Baja California—a journey of 5,000 km (about 3,000 miles) each way.

Migratory whales usually do not cross the Equator, and that has led to the development of genetically separate populations in the north and south ocean basins. However, one humpback whale (Megaptera novaeangliae) was photographically identified near the Antarctic Peninsula and was later sighted on the coast of Colombia, having covered at least 8,334 km in both the South Atlantic and North Atlantic ocean basins. Some sperm whales (Physeter catodon) sexually segregate on their migrations, with larger and older males going much farther in a polar direction during the summer.

Diet

All cetaceans are carnivores and do not consume plants or algae as food. The large baleen whales eat schooling organisms that range in length from minute drifting mollusks, copepods (1 cm or less), krill (1–5 cm), and small fish and squid up to about 40 cm. All these are consumed by whales in vast quantities with each concentrated mouthful. Certain smaller baleen whales, such as the minke whale (Balaenoptera acutorostrata), also pursue individual fish up to 1 metre long. Toothed whales, which range in length from about 1 metre for the finless porpoises (Neophocoena phocaenoides and N. asiaeorientalis) to 20 metres for the sperm whale, eat an enormous variety of prey ranging from small shrimp, fish, and squid to bluefin tuna (3 metres long) and giant squid.

Cetaceans void their solid digestive waste products as pastelike feces, enabling the retention of intestinal water. Liquids are excreted in the urine. Biologists do not entirely understand the function of ambergris, which seems to be a normal digestive secretion of the sperm whale.

Reproduction

Cetacean breeding is seasonal, usually in the winter, and females normally calve once every two years. As mammals, they reproduce by internal fertilization. The testes and penis of the male are internal, but the penis is capable of being extended and introduced to the female during mating. After the female’s egg has been fertilized, she carries the fetus for about a year, although some toothed whales have gestations of up to 18 months. Cetaceans give birth tail first, opposite of most terrestrial mammals. The mothers produce extremely rich milk for their young—50 percent fat is common. The mammary glands are paired and located at the lower abdomen, just forward of the anal-genital slits. One calf is born (multiple fetuses have been found, but never live twins), which is weaned at six months to a year but continues to grow rapidly until 5 to 10 years of age. The largest whale, the blue whale, is born with a length of about 7.3 metres and a weight of about 3 tons; it grows an average of 0.3 metre per week and gains weight at a rate of 90 kg (nearly 200 pounds) per day.

Age and growth

Generally, male cetaceans reach a slightly greater size than females, but there are many exceptions; female baleen whales and some of the beaked whales, river dolphins, and porpoises tend to be slightly larger than males of their species. Male sperm whales, on the other hand, are on average 50 percent larger than females. Physical maturity is defined specifically in cetaceans as the point when all of the vertebrae stop growing, which occurs at an age of about 8–25 years. Historical estimates of whale longevity are limited because of difficulty measuring age in older whales. Modern techniques have determined some fin whales to be 100 years old, some humpbacks 96, and some blue whales 90. But the longest-lived cetacean by far is the bowhead, a right whale that can survive for more than 200 years.

Sexual maturity occurs at an age of about 6–10 years and is defined in cetaceans as the age at which the females start ovulating and are capable of becoming pregnant. In most species, females continue to ovulate throughout their lives and thus can produce young until death. However, females in several toothed whale species—including killer whales, false killer whales, short-finned pilot whales, belugas, and narwhals—experience menopause (in which ovulation stops), and the rest of their lives are spent in a post-reproductive state. Authorities speculate that this adaptation may have evolved in order for older females to assist with the rearing of young.

Abundance

Counting animals that can be spread over a wide areas of the world’s oceans and are visible for only a few seconds while they breathe is extremely difficult and expensive. The largest populations existed in the oceans around Antarctica, where harsh and remote conditions make biological research difficult and infrequent. The abundance of cetaceans is thus hard to estimate accurately, but whale populations have varied over the years, depending largely upon human activities.

Biologists estimate that there were 228,000 blue whales and 548,000 fin whales in the world’s oceans when modern whaling began in the early 20th century. At the beginning of the 21st century, there were an estimated 14,000 blue whales and 120,000 fin whales left. California gray whales were thought to number 20,000 in 1847, then were hunted until they were thought to be extinct in the 1920s. Since then the species has recovered under protective legislation, and its population has been estimated to be more than 26,000.

Until the early 21st century, the only cetacean population to be completely exterminated was the Atlantic gray whale, which was gone in the early 1700s; however, the baiji, or Chinese river dolphin (Lipotes vexillifer), a species restricted to the Yangtze River (Chang Jiang), was widely believed to be extinct. In addition, some smaller cetacean species with limited distributions—such as the Gulf of California porpoise (Phocoena sinus), Indus susu (Platanista minor), and Ganges susu (Platanista gangetica)—could be in immediate danger of becoming extinct. (Some sources consider P. minor and P. gangetica as subspecies rather than separate species.) Furthermore, many other cetacean species, such as the gray whale and the northern right whale (Eubalaena glacialis), continue to be menaced by ship collisions, pollution, entanglement in commercial fishing equipment, and illegal hunting.

Diseases and parasitism

Cetaceans can suffer from many of the same diseases and parasites that afflict humans and other mammals: cancer, arthritis, pneumonia, lungworms, tapeworms, and roundworms, to name just a few. In the 1980s various dolphin species experienced epidemics of a morbillivirus, a disease similar to distemper and measles.

Of the parasites and commensal organisms, some are also found on fish and marine turtles, and others are specific to cetaceans. Commensal barnacles are most visible on humpbacks and gray whales, although they occur to a lesser extent on many other baleen and toothed whales. Xenobalanus globicipitis, a unique type of small pseudo-stalked barnacle, occurs on the appendages of cetaceans, including the common bottlenose dolphin. Stalked barnacles can also occur on exposed teeth and can be particularly striking on the tusks of beaked whales.

Different types of commensal or parasitic crustaceans inhabit whales. There is a small commensal copepod, Balaenophilus, that eats the algae on the baleen of some rorqual species. A specific family of amphipods (Cyamidae) called whale lice routinely infest right, humpback, and gray whales and also occur opportunistically on most species of baleen and toothed whales, particularly around wounds. They appear to eat sloughed skin. Another crustacean is clearly parasitic and is a member of the caligoid copepod genus Pennella. It is commonly about 2–10 cm long and lives with its body buried in the blubber or skin of cetaceans and fishes.

Small (4–7 cm) circular scars left in the skin of whales, dolphins, and fish were a mystery during the early 20th century. Explorers reported that the scars were created by an unknown organism that they called the “DWB” or “demon whale biter,” which cleanly removed hemispheric chunks of blubber as though extracting them with a razor-sharp scoop. The creature responsible was finally identified in the 1950s as a grazing predator, the cookie-cutter, or cigar, shark (genus Isistius).

Swimming

Cetaceans swim by using vertical tail movements that drive the horizontal flukes up and down, powered by the long epaxial and hypaxial muscles that lie along the spine. The tail flexes through a point between the dorsal fin and the anus, while the thorax and abdomen are relatively inflexible. The body itself acts like a spring to propel the animal through the water with minimal energy.

Much was written about the speeds of cetaceans in the mid-20th century. It seemed that cetaceans could exceed the speed at which turbulence would make locomotion energetically very expensive. However, the swimming-speed figures were estimates that turned out to be very high. Further investigation found that, regardless of size, the cruising speed of most cetaceans is about 2 metres per second (about 7 km, or 4 miles, per hour). A combination of biomechanical and hydrodynamic factors make this an efficient speed at which to travel. Maximum speeds, however, vary greatly between species.

Common dolphins (genus Delphinus) have been observed keeping pace with boats for a considerable period of time at 36 km/hr (kilometres per hour). Researchers trained Pacific bottlenose dolphins (genus Tursiops) to swim in an open-water environment, thus removing the spatial limitations of a pool while conserving experimental controls. They found that the dolphins could sprint at 29.9 km/hr for 7.5 seconds and could maintain speed at 21.9 km/hr for 50 seconds. When dolphins ride a bow wave, they coast at the speed of the ship while expending very little energy (see below). Fin and blue whales can swim fast enough that a boat must travel in excess of 30 km/hr to catch up to them, and they can maintain speeds of 33–37 km/hr for periods of up to 10–15 minutes. Sonar records indicate that fin whales can sprint at 48 km/hr. Right, humpback, and gray whales, however, can seldom swim faster than 9 km/hr. Sperm whales can cruise at 7.5 km/hr and swim up to 36 km/hr in spurts. The fastest cetacean appears to be the sei whale (Balaenoptera borealis), recorded moving at speeds up to 65 km/hr along the ocean surface.

Breathing and diving

Cetaceans surface periodically to breathe, and the intervals between breaths vary depending on what the animal is doing. Intervals may range from about 20 seconds for dolphins that are actively swimming to 5–10 minutes for a resting blue whale. A common breathing pattern in large whales is to breathe every 20 seconds for 8–10 breaths and then dive for about 10–15 minutes. Most whales stay in the upper 100 metres of water. Deep-diving whales—such as the sperm whale, which has been recorded diving to depths of 1 km—may stay down for an hour. The longest recorded dive is that of a harpooned bottlenose whale (Hyperoodon ampullatus) that dived for two hours, surfaced, and then dived again. Patterns of locomotion and breathing are very important to whale watchers identifying whales at a distance, as different species show different blow heights and shapes. Right whales, for instance, have an unequal inclination to their two nasal passages, so their blows appear in pairs. Humpbacks and gray whales have blows that appear low and wide (bushy), and sperm whales have a bushy blow that is angled to the left and forward.

Leaping and wave riding

Small cetaceans “porpoise” when they are swimming rapidly; that is, they rise out of the water in a low leap that keeps the head clear of the water for breathing. Spinner dolphins (Stenella longirostris) frequently leap out of the water while spinning on their long axis, hence their common name. Trained porpoises and dolphins can leap straight up as high as six metres. Leaping is very rare in large whales, but some rorquals (genus Balaenoptera) have been photographed jumping clear of the water.

Many small cetaceans play around moving boats, where they bow-ride, taking advantage of their ability to bodysurf and essentially enjoying the free ride in the bow wave created by the vessel. They also practice this behaviour around large whales that are swimming fast enough to produce a bow wave.

Social behaviour

All cetaceans are social to some extent. The minimum group of mother and calf is commonly expanded to a nuclear family or a group of closely related individuals. A group of cetaceans that normally feed and travel together is called by various names: school, herd, pod, or gam. It is often difficult to define or measure, as its members can be spread over kilometres of ocean but still be in contact with one another. Sometimes these schools coalesce into even bigger groups of more than 1,000. Groups of whales can persist for many years, and studies of coastal dolphins have shown long-term association of dolphins with their mothers. Groups (particularly of small toothed whales) frequently associate with other cetacean species. For example, associations between pilot whales and bottlenose dolphins have been observed, as have associations between common dolphins and fin whales.

Play is a common behaviour, especially among young animals. Play allows individuals to practice and perfect behaviour patterns, such as aggression, that will be socially useful later in life; a significant portion of play is sexually oriented. Captive dolphins have also been observed playing with fish, birds, and turtles.

Many cetaceans exhibit epimeletic behaviour, in which healthy animals take care of another animal that has become temporarily incapacitated. This is evident when a wounded or sick whale is supported by others or in cases when a dolphin (usually the mother) pushes a dead calf around.

Cetaceans show fright by fleeing from a situation or by bunching up and "milling." The former response has been utilized by fishermen, who drive a whale or school of dolphins into a situation where they can kill it. Milling has been seen in dolphin schools driven into an enclosure or caught in a net; the animals move in a circle or eddying mass, and at the height of this reaction they stop swimming, sink, and die.

Aggression and defense

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Aggression is common among cetaceans and is seen in normal herd behaviour and feeding. One form of aggression helps to establish social hierarchy: the dominant animal nips the less-dominant animal, which produces the tooth scars seen on every adult in the dolphin family (Delphinidae). Mating behaviour also involves biting, as one of the ways males compete for females is by biting and raking the teeth over another male. Adult male beaked whales (family Ziphiidae) have very densely ossified rostra (beaks) used as weapons in combat for females. Another more dangerous means of aggression is head butting. Cetaceans can ram their heads into other individuals and kill them. This has been seen in captivity and in aggressive behaviours toward other species such as sharks and accounts for many of the broken ribs and vertebrae seen in stranded animals.

Normally, aggression is associated with members of the same species or as a defense response to predation from other species. Although cetaceans can defend themselves by utilizing the behaviours of intraspecific aggression (biting, ramming, and butting), the primary weapon that cetaceans have for self-defense is the tail. Cornered whales slash sideways with their flukes and can incapacitate a bigger whale or a boat. Head butting as a form of defense was immortalized in the 1820 sinking of the whaling ship Essex by a sperm whale.

Courtship and mating

Sexual behaviour starts early in cetaceans. Young dolphins engage in exploratory sexual behaviour involving their mothers and other members of the school. Self-stimulation is common in both sexes. Male cetaceans perhaps use their penises as a manipulation organ in much the same way that people use their hands. This exploratory behaviour gradually becomes courtship and mating behaviour.

Courtship involves physical and acoustic displays, such as the elaborate songs of male humpbacks, and leads to contact with the flippers and other parts of the body. Successful courtship culminates in mating. Copulation is relatively brief in cetaceans. It can be secretive, or it can be boisterous as in the mating displays of right and gray whales, when a number of males attempt to mate with a single female.

Feeding

Cetaceans hunt as individuals or in schools. When hunting in schools, dolphins or whales herd their prey in order to concentrate a large volume before eating. Hunting alone is preferred where prey is more scattered.

Before they swallow their food, toothed whales disable it; biologists think that some can stun their prey by emitting a high-energy burst of sound. Normally, cetaceans eat animals that can be swallowed intact, as their teeth are shaped for holding, not chewing. If, however, the prey is too large to swallow in one bite, it is ripped into chunks. Killer whales (Orca orcinus) have been seen to grab seals and shake them in the air so hard that the bodies come apart.

Baleen whales also herd their prey like toothed whales, but they engulf it in either of two feeding methods: gulp or skim. In gulp feeding, the whale opens its mouth to take in a huge mouthful of water, closes its mouth, strains the water out through the baleen apparatus along the sides of the mouth, and swallows its prey. Gulp feeding is common in rorquals, which have ventral grooves that stretch to enlarge the oral cavity. One of the rorquals, the sei whale, as well as the nonrorqual baleen whales (right, bowhead, pygmy right, and gray), skim-feed by locating a concentration of zooplankton prey and swimming through it with the mouth open. Skimming may last up to several minutes until the whales close their mouths to swallow what they have filtered from the water.

Sleep

Breathing is a conscious activity in cetaceans; they must consciously breathe, or they will drown. Therefore, they cannot enter into what humans understand as unconscious sleep; instead, they have periods of little activity but not total inactivity. Studies of dolphins have revealed that they shut down half of their brain during sleep. The other half of the brain stays awake to signal when to rise to the surface to breathe and to watch for predators and obstacles. Large whales appear to surface-sleep. Floating horizontally just below the water’s surface, they move their flukes periodically to rise above the water for a breath.

Intelligence

Although several cetaceans are easily trained and much has been theorized about the possible intelligence of whales and dolphins, little is known for certain. Some researchers equate brain size with intelligence, reasoning that cetaceans should have the capacity for intelligence because they have relatively large brains. The human brain averages about 1.2 kg, the bottlenose dolphin brain about 1.8 kg. The largest cetacean brain recorded was a sperm whale’s, weighing 9.2 kg. However, cetaceans may use their increased brain weight for processing acoustic information. In any event, it seems unproductive to compare species with which it is difficult even to communicate until a definition of nonhuman intelligence has been refined.

Stranding

Stranding is a phenomenon that has long fascinated people, and there is fossil evidence of mass strandings from before humans evolved. Many stranded cetaceans are found already dead, and it is not known if they were alive and conscious when they stranded themselves. When a whale or dolphin dies offshore, it usually sinks; if the water is shallow enough to permit decomposition gases to form, it will float ashore, so some stranding represents normal mortality. If infection or some other factor interferes with a cetacean’s ability to navigate, it could come ashore while still alive—though most cetaceans have difficulty out of water and usually die. These cases are known (alive or dead) as single strandings. Sometimes up to several hundred toothed whales swim ashore, and this phenomenon is known as a mass stranding.

There are no records of the mass stranding of baleen whales; all such events have involved only toothed whales that normally live offshore and may not be familiar with physical borders. Perhaps not realizing that the ocean has a bottom and sides, they may somehow enter shallow water and find themselves unable to deal with the strange environment. Because they are also members of extremely social species and may be kept together by group ties, they may have even greater difficulty extricating themselves. In any case, biologists are beginning to realize that cetaceans are behaviorally complex enough that a simple blanket explanation of mass stranding is not likely to be valid. Biologists have tried to attribute mass stranding to a number of causes:

• 1. Something wrong with the leader of a group
• 2. Epidemic disease
• 3. Getting lost in pursuit of prey
• 4. Parasitic infestation that affects the hearing
• 5. Following migratory routes laid down by remote ancestors
• 6. Magnetic anomalies that lead the school astray
• 7. Behavioral reversion to a period when cetacean ancestors were terrestrial and land was a haven
• 8. Fright reaction to predators
• 9. Failure of echolocation signals to work properly in shallow water
• 10. Overpopulation
• 11. Suicide

Sound production and communication

All cetaceans produce sound, some more extensively than others, and they primarily use the larynx for this purpose. At one time it was argued that the cetacean larynx was incapable of generating sound because it does not have vocal cords. However, vocal cords are restricted mainly to primates; dogs and cats, for example, have vocal folds, and both baleen and toothed whales possess structures that modify sound. Baleen whales have laryngeal pouches, and toothed whales have accessory air sacs and fat bodies in their noses. In addition, toothed whales can generate high-frequency sounds in their nasal passages.

Cetacean sounds can be roughly divided into communication signals and echolocation signals. Communication does not necessarily imply language, and it can simply be one-way, as when one dolphin knows another is present because the second dolphin is vocalizing. Echolocation, which involves generating certain sounds and listening to the echoes of those sounds, has been recognized in toothed whales but not baleen whales. Toothed whales use extremely high frequencies, on the order of 150 kilohertz, for refining spatial resolution from their echoes. They are capable of “seeing” into and through most soft objects such as other dolphins, though the effectiveness of toothed whale echolocation drops off at distances greater than about 100 metres. To produce such high frequencies, toothed whales possess modified tissues associated with the blowhole on the right side of the head; the left side is not modified, and the result is skull asymmetry. This condition is extreme in sperm whales, which is not surprising, as most of the head is involved with sound production. The head of a 16-metre adult male sperm whale is about 6 metres long, 3 metres high, and 3 metres wide, a mass of tissue that can weigh about 20 tons. The bulk of it is occupied by the spermaceti organ and a fatty (adipose) cushion, both of which somehow function in the emission of sound for echolocation and were known by whalers as the “case” and the “junk,” respectively. The junk of the sperm whale is the fatty structure found in the forehead of other toothed whales and known by whalers as the “melon” because of its pale yellow colour and uniform consistency. Baleen whales generate sounds at frequencies that are audible to humans (sonic) or below that range (subsonic). Some of their vocalizations are very loud; biologists have recorded extremely low sounds (12.5–200 hertz) from a blue whale and have claimed they are the loudest sounds known from any animal. The songs that humpbacks use for courtship were brought to public awareness in 1971. Baleen whales (mysticetes) use calls like these for communication and possibly for low-frequency long-range echolocation in orientation and navigation. Their low-frequency sounds are powerful enough that mysticetes might be able to communicate across entire ocean basins.