World Whale Day

What the day is

World Whale Day is held on the third Sunday in February, so the date moves each year. It began in Maui in the late 1970s to mark the humpback whales that winter in Hawaiian waters, at a point when the species was in serious trouble.

Origin and background

The recovery since is one of conservation's genuine successes. Commercial whaling had reduced some populations to a few percent of their original numbers, and the moratorium agreed in 1982 allowed several to rebuild substantially. North Pacific humpbacks are the clearest case, climbing from a few thousand to tens of thousands. Not every species followed: the North Atlantic right whale remains critically endangered, with a population in the hundreds, and its main threats now are ship strikes and entanglement in fishing gear rather than hunting.

Whale song is stranger than the recordings suggest. Male humpbacks on a breeding ground sing the same elaborate song, and that shared song changes through a season, with every singer adopting the revisions. Versions have been documented spreading westward across the Pacific from one population to the next over a few years, which is cultural transmission on an ocean scale.

The other remarkable thing happens after death. A large carcass sinking to the deep seafloor delivers an enormous quantity of food to an environment that normally receives almost none. Scavengers strip the soft tissue over months, then enrichment-feeders work the sediment for years, and finally bacteria break down the lipids locked in the bones, supporting specialized communities for decades. Whole species are known only from whale falls.

Baleen, meanwhile, is keratin, the same material as fingernails, hanging in fringed plates that filter small prey from enormous volumes of water.

How to take part

• Choose a responsible whale watching operator that keeps legal distances.
• Listen to humpback song recordings and then to a version from a different year.
• Support measures on ship speed and fishing gear, which are what right whales need.
• Report entangled or stranded animals to the proper authority rather than approaching.
• Read about whale falls, which are among the strangest habitats on earth.