Whale Facts - Your Online Source for Information on Whales

Some Interesting Whale Facts

• Whale facts tell us that even though whales live in the ocean, they are mammals and not fish.

• Whales must come to the water surface to get air to breathe. They take in air through a blowhole, which leads to the lungs.

• Whales sleep by resting in the water or by swimming slowly next to another whale.

• Pilot whales are the fastest whale, and can swim up to 30 mph.

• Whales, dolphins, and porpoises are all in the Cetacean family.

• Baleen whales are toothless whales. Instead they have plates of baleen, a very hard substance, sometimes referred to as whalebone.

• The Blue Whale is a baleen whale that reaches one hundred feet in length.

• Whales swim by moving their tails and their flippers.

• Whales have a heart that has four different chambers.

• The Blue Whale is the largest of all whales. They average ninety-four feet long. Each Blue whale eats four tons of krill every day.

• A Blue Whale is as long as nine-story building.

• The smallest whale of all is the Dwarf Sperm Whale, which grows on average to 2.6 feet long.

• Many whale watchers love to see a whale breaching. That is when they jump high out of the water and make a loud slapping noise as they hit the water on the way back down.

• When a whale lifts his head out of the water and looks around, it is called spyhopping.

• According to whale facts, a Sperm Whale has the biggest brain of any whale. It weighs twenty pounds.

• The Gray Whale migrates further than any other whale, from the Arctic Ocean to the Baha Peninsula, near Mexico and California. This round trip is 12,500 miles long.

• Sperm Whales can live to be seventy years old. They don’t reach maturity until they are forty-five years old.

• Pilot Whales and Killer Whales live in families called pods.

• Recorded whale facts tell us that the Northern Right Whale is an endangered species, with only three hundred left in the world.

• A Sperm Whale can dive as deep down in the ocean as two miles.

• Whales give birth to live young. They generally have one calf every three years. Their pregnancy lasts for around eighteen months.

• Someone calculated that one whale breath is so big the air could inflate two thousand balloons.

• The Humpback Whale has only one natural predator, and that is the Orca, or Killer Whale.

• Blue Whales can weigh 160 tons.

• Killer Whales eat other whales, dolphins, seals, salmon, sea birds, and even an occasional deer or moose caught swimming.

• The record for the largest Humpback Whale is fifty-seven feet long.

• The young of whales are called calves.

• The calf of the Blue Whale gains around two-hundred pounds every day when it is nursing. They drink around 130 gallons of milk a day.

• The Humpback Whale not only sings songs but has the most complex ones.

• The Narwhal Whale has a tooth piercing its upper lip.

• Whales are tagged and their migration is tracked via satellite.

• The song of a Humpback Whale can last thirty minutes.