Humpback Whales Research Paper

The Humpback Whale (Megaptera novaeangliae) is one of the largest of the Cetaceans. They are fairly well known, even outside of the scientific community. They are identifiable by their dark grey dorsal color, white underbellies, very long pectoral flippers and by their habits of breaching and raising their tales above the water before diving. Their range expands tropical, temperate, and sub polar waters all around the world. They migrate in search of breading grounds and feeding grounds. Humpbacks are baleen whales that use bristles to filter their food out of mouth fuels of seawater. Their diet consists mainly of plankton and krill, as well as small schooling fish. Whales, include the largest animals in all of life on Earth, and are a curtail part of the ecosystem today. They have high metabolic demands and when they were in larger populations, before industrial whaling, whales would have had a strong influence on marine ecosystems, even greater than today. They play several environmental roles including, consumers of several species, prey to large bodied predators, reservoirs of nutrients, and detrital sources of energy and habitat in the deep sea.

However, lack of information on past populations makes it difficult to compare the current recovery in this species, to that of pre-exploitation abundance. Estimates based on genetic diversity suggest they are still only a fraction of their pre-whaling numbers. The purpose of this paper is to examine the humpback whale’s role in the oceans, their populations, and the need for it’s conservation and the manor in which to do