Humpback Whales

Megaptera novaeangliae

Humpbacks are among the most recognisable whales in the world — long-winged, barnacled, acrobatic, and unusually willing to approach boats. Their scientific name means "big wing of New England".

They were hunted to the edge of collapse in the twentieth century. Most populations have since recovered, which makes them one of the strongest arguments that protection works when it is actually enforced.

Length: Up to 60 ft (18 m)
Weight: Around 40 tons
Lifespan: 80–90 years
Migration: Up to 5,000 miles each way
Diet: Krill and small schooling fish

Conservation status

US Endangered Species Act: 4 populations Endangered, 1 Threatened, 9 not listed
IUCN Red List: Least Concern

In 2016 the United States split humpbacks into 14 distinct populations rather than treating them as one. Nine had recovered enough to come off the list; four remain endangered and one is threatened. It is a rare case of a listing being revised because the animals genuinely improved.

Song

Male humpbacks sing long, structured songs made of repeating phrases and themes. A single song can last twenty minutes or more, and a whale may repeat it for hours.

Every male in a population sings essentially the same song at the same time — and that shared song changes through the season, with all of them adopting the changes together. Songs have also been documented spreading from one ocean population to another, travelling east across entire ocean basins over a few years. Nobody is certain what the singing is for.

Bubble-net feeding

Humpbacks are among the very few baleen whales that hunt cooperatively. A group dives beneath a school of fish and swims upward in a spiral, releasing a curtain of bubbles that the fish will not swim through. The net tightens, the fish concentrate, and the whales surge up through the middle with their mouths open.

Individual whales take consistent roles in this — one blowing the net, others herding, others calling. The technique is learned, not instinctive, and it is not practised by every population.

Interfering with killer whales

Humpbacks are documented to actively interfere when mammal-hunting orcas attack. A 2017 review by Robert Pitman and colleagues examined 115 such interactions and found humpbacks initiated the majority of them, approaching the attack rather than avoiding it, and harassing the orcas.

The striking part is who they were defending. In only 11 percent of cases was the animal under attack another humpback. The other 89 percent were other species entirely — seals, sea lions, porpoises, grey whale calves, even a sunfish. Humpback interference sometimes allowed that prey to escape.

The researchers were cautious about why. Humpbacks may simply respond to the sound of attacking orcas before knowing what is being attacked, and defending your own calves would explain the instinct. But they could not rule out that the whales continue to intervene when there is no benefit to themselves at all.

What still threatens them

Recovery has not made humpbacks safe. Entanglement in fishing gear is now the leading identified cause of death among large whales, ahead of natural causes and vessel strikes.

An entangled whale is rarely killed outright. Rope wraps around flukes, flippers or mouth and stays there — a whale can carry gear for months or years, dragging weight that exhausts it, cuts into tissue, causes infection, or slowly starves it. Their coastal habits and their habit of feeding where fisheries operate put them directly in the way.

Sources

Population figures and listing statuses change. These were checked in August 2026 — follow the links above for the current position.