أحمد الديب Free Membership
Everything in the whales is surprising, and it is no wonder that these creatures inspire one of the greatest novels in the history of American and international literature, "Moby Dick" by Herman Melville, impressed by what he saw and felt on the whaling trips he has already participated.
Hunters tell stories about whales, many of which are hard to believe. Despite the magnitude of the whales, humans - and even scientists - still do not know much about them today.
For example, a team of researchers at the University of Hawaii recently photographed one of the most surprising behaviors of humpback whales, in a precedent to document scenes of this kind in which the superior intelligence of the humpback whale is manifested.
A fantastic fishing trick learned by some humpback whales is to dive down the target fish or crustacean swarms in a group that swims in a circle that surrounds the fish, while firing a dense stream of air bubbles forming what looks like a "net" trapped inside their prey. Some whales penetrate the net from below, engulfing prey that has been confused by air bubbles.
Of air and under water
The team not only filmed the event from the air using drones, but also installed special cameras and pickups on the bodies of the whales to capture the picture from their perspective.
"We have two completely different angles," says Lars Pegder, an aquatic expert at the University of Hawaii's Mammal Research Program.
Whale-mounted cameras show what the whale sees as it blows bubbles underwater, and matching data received from both sides has been a very exciting process.
"These footage is important because it allows us to see how these skilled whales manipulate their prey, revealing details we have never seen before," says Bigder.
The documentation comes as part of research efforts to understand more about humpback whales and their eating habits, in an effort to protect them from the threat of extinction caused by international hunting since 1985.
Remarkably subtle
Migratory humpback whales usually visit Alaska in summer, where they have plenty of food, before returning in winter to the warmer waters around Hawaii, where they produce and pledge care in a time when they eat little, so they need to fill their stomachs from Alaska's bounties to form a food supply. Set it on the hard days ahead in Hawaii.
Interestingly, however, this bubble-hunting method is a technique that groups of whales learn and transmit. Not all humpback whales use this method, and not even the groups of whales that use it all do exactly the same way.
But it is clear that each whale that shares this collective ploy eventually gets its turn and its plentiful share of booty.
There are sightings of other species of whales using similar tricks, such as zip whales and dolphins of the coast of Florida, which is known to learn how to fish with silt rings, where dolphins with tails raise silt deposits in the bottoms of shallow areas to form rings within which trap fish.