Calving every two years places enormous biological strain on those females that conceive regularly. But the warm waters of tropical breeding grounds may help sustain both females and their newborns. Twelve feet long and eighteen hundred pounds at birth a young humpback grows rapidly over several months nourished by a rich mill that contains up to fifty percent fat and protein.
Before it weans the young humpback may increase its weight by five times feeding on a hundred fifty gallons of milk each day. Apart from the occasional snack a mother will not feed while nursing its young even though a huge amount of energy is used up to produce such a large offspring.
A mother must also protect its young from threats that can come from any direction. To a pack of hungry killer whales any newborn whale is a tempting target. Of course the greatest threat to all whales comes from another species of mammal altogether.
Humans began whaling during the first migrations from Siberia to the Americas. These early settlers survived in a hostile environment by making full use of dead or stranded whales as a rich source of food oil and shelter. Recognizing the whale’s value they soon developed hunting techniques to keep themselves supplied for the long winter months.
Today, subsistence whaling is still part of life in the frozen North. This narwhal will provide good eating for the weeks ahead. The skin and blubber will be cut and dried providing food that is rich in Vitamin C. In earlier days the slower species that came close to the shore such as the bowhead and right whales were hunted in open boats using hand-crafted spears.
Most of the animal would have been used including dried bones used to construct frames for shelters. The annual catch of whale populations was small and life in the Arctic remained relatively stable for many centuries until the coming of a new threat the commercial whalers. But today the mass slaughter of the great whales is all but over. Conservation groups fought long and hard to close the whaling stations but by the time mass whaling had ended over three-quarters of the world’s population of great whales had been obliterated.
Communities that once depended on the whaling trade are now sustained by a new industry. Whale Watching Eco-Tourism. Even though many of the whales are protected as endangered species it may be a century or more before the most heavily hunted can recover One positive step came in 1994 with the creation of a Southern sanctuary in the seas surrounding Antartica a haven for eighty percent of the world’s remaining great whales. During the fifty million year odyssey myriad sea mammals evolved from a terrestrial creature that hunted the shores of ancient oceans.
They gradually lost those features that associated them with the land now spawning their young into the oceans where they would spend their entire lives. Adaptations to new food sources create a mammal without teeth the baleen whale. New ways evolved to navigate the immensity of the sea to dive to the bottom of the ocean and overcome the dangers of the deep. They became social animals that now hunt together play together and call out across the ocean vastness
THE END