I want to see the star humpback whale _ I want to see the photos of the star humpback whale.

Humpback whales are not the largest whales in the world, but they are well-deserved behemoths in the ocean. They are obese and bloated, with a body length of 1 150 ~ 1900 cm and a weight of about 40 ~ 50 tons. Its head is relatively small, flat, its kiss is wide, its mouth is big, and there are 20 ~ 30 tumor-like protrusions on its mouth. Interestingly, there is a hair on each protuberance, but the rest of its body is hairless.

Whale whiskers are short and wide, with more than 200 on each side. The dorsal fin is low, short and small, and the back is not as straight as other whales, but arched upwards to form a beautiful curve, hence the name "humpback whale", also known as "humpback whale" or "humpback whale". The pectoral fin is extremely narrow, thin and long, about 550 cm, almost one-third of the body length. The flippers have four toes and a wavy notch at the trailing edge, which looks like a bird's wing, so they are also called "long fin whales", "giant arm whales" and "big wing whales". There are about 20 wide parallel longitudinal grooves or ridges from the mandible to the abdomen, and the abdomen is pleated. Usually the dorsal fin and pectoral fin of the body are black and the ventral surface is white, but some dorsal fins and pectoral fins are also white. There is a slender crack under the back of the female animal, which stops near the anus. It is said that when a female animal breeds, it wraps the genitals of a male animal to complete the mating action.

Humpback whales are distributed in the Pacific Ocean, Atlantic Ocean and other oceans in the world, and are also found in the Bohai Sea, Yellow Sea, East China Sea, South China Sea and Taiwan Province Province of China. It usually swims in a certain sea area between the cold zone and the tropical zone, and has a fixed swimming route. For example, around the Hawaiian Islands in the United States, about 400 fish gather in warm waters for the winter in June165438+1October every year, and set off for the north in late March of the following year. When it approached the land again, it was already in the North Pacific thousands of kilometers away. Some of them could reach the Bering Strait, while others could.

Incredibly, this behemoth actually takes krill, a small crustacean with a body length of less than 1 cm, as its main food, as well as small fish such as scaly fish, hairy scaly fish and tamarind fish. When its mouth is open, its special elastic ligament can temporarily make the mandible fall off, forming an angle of more than 90 degrees. Its mouth diameter can reach 4.5m, and it can swallow a lot of krill or smaller fish in one bite, but its esophagus is too large to swallow larger food, which may be one of the reasons why it can only eat small animals.

Because I don't eat for several months in winter, I have to eat a lot in summer, often 18 hours. Due to the abundant sunshine, the plankton in the northern glacier bay is flourishing, which breeds krill that feed on zooplankton, and the number is huge, often millions of them gather together, thus providing an extremely rich food source for humpback whales.

Humpback whales eat in a wonderful way. First, they eat in a sprint. They opened their jaws wide and rushed to the shrimp group sideways or upturned. Then, they close their mouths, the folds under their jaws open and swallow a lot of water and shrimp. Finally, they drain the water and swallow the shrimp. The second method is called explosive eating, which bounces the tail forward and drives the shrimp to the open mouth. This method is only applicable when the shrimp is particularly dense; The third method is to spit out many bubbles of different sizes upstream from the depth of 15m, so that the last spit out bubbles and the first spit out bubbles rise to the water surface at the same time, forming a cylindrical or tubular bubble net, which tightly surrounds the prey like a giant spider in the sea and pushes it to the center of the net. It opens its mouth almost vertically in the bubble circle and swallows the prey in the net. This predation method is the same as that of fishermen dragging large fishing nets with two fishing boats, gradually forcing fish and shrimp close to the water surface, and then catching them all. When the number of prey is small, humpback whales often feed alone or only 2 ~ 3 together. When the number of prey is large, they will form a larger group of about 8, and sometimes different groups will compete for food. Therefore, sometimes the quantity, distribution and variety of food will directly affect the number of humpback whales.

Humpback whales are gregarious animals with a very gentle and amiable temperament. Adults often touch each other to express their feelings. But when fighting the enemy, they will slam each other with their special flippers or powerful tails, and even hit each other with their heads. Therefore, their flesh and blood often breaks and flows. Its swimming speed is very slow, about 8 ~ 15 kilometers per hour. When it swims slowly on the sea, it is like an iceberg, most of its body sinks into the water, and sometimes it is like a free-floating island. People can also see its body above the sea on the coast.

The ability of swimming and paddling is excellent. Sometimes, I will swim a short distance underwater quickly, and then suddenly break the water surface and slowly rise vertically until my fins reach the water surface and my body begins to bend backwards slowly, just like an acrobat's back roll. It can dive into the water and swim very fast. It only takes a few seconds to disappear under the waves and enter the dark abyss. When breathing out of the water, a short, thick, hot gas mixed with oil and steam will be ejected from the nostrils, which will roll out of the sea with the surrounding seawater to form a spectacular water column, and at the same time make a huge sound similar to that made by a steam engine, called "tidal foam" or "fog column". Sometimes it is so excited that the whole body jumps out of the water, and the height can reach 6 meters. When it falls into the water, the splash can be heard several kilometers away, and its movements are leisurely and beautiful. On its skin, not only tendrils such as barnacles and lotus flowers are often attached, but also a variety of animals with suckers such as crucian carp are carried, which add up to half a ton. However, it doesn't seem to affect its movements and emotions at all.

Humpback whales' spouses are monogamous, and females give birth every two years, with a gestation period of about 65,438+00 months, and each bear 65,438+0 offspring. When a female animal takes her young, there are often 1 male following her. Its task is to intercept other invading whales or ships, but when it comes to fierce and cunning killer whales, it can do nothing. Like other mammals, females feed their young with milk. Milk is automatically squeezed out of the nipple and the baby is sucked into the water. Larvae develops rapidly, and its weight can increase by 40-50 kg every day. Even more amazing, the female provided all the nutrients for the growth of her young during breastfeeding, but she had not eaten for a long time and did not start looking for food until several months later. There are often feelings between women and young people. The larva touches the female with two fins, and sometimes it seems to be caught by the female. Humpback whales can live for 60 to 70 years.

Humpback whales cannot coexist peacefully, because besides human hunting, there are more and more whale-watching tourism activities around the world, which poses a new threat to the life of humpback whales. The noise generated by tourists interferes with humpback whales' foraging activities, and a large number of discarded plastic food bags and other wastes are accumulated in the gastrointestinal tract after being eaten by humpback whales by mistake, and the slapping sound from the propellers of large ships is not calm. However, some developed countries in whaling industry refuse to enforce the laws prohibiting whaling, which makes it even more endangered.

In the cetacean kingdom, humpback whales are authentic sea spirits.

Humpback whales have short dorsal fins and long pectoral fins. They often flap their pectoral fins like bird wings, so some people call them "giant-armed whales" and "big-winged whales". Humpback whales often perform various wonderful performances at sea. Humpback whales are not only strange in appearance, but also outstanding in intelligence. They will use the column network formed by bubbles to prey, and they are melodious and good at change and innovation. Therefore, people call humpback whales mysterious singers. Biologists praise it as the most outstanding "singer" in the ocean.

Hawaiian waters have been the wintering ground for humpback whales since ancient times. From18th century to 20th century. Under the large-scale killing of human beings, the number of humpback whales has decreased sharply. It was not until 1966, at the appeal of scientists, that the International Whaling Commission issued a decree prohibiting the killing of humpback whales. 1970, the International Union for Natural Resources and Conservation of Nature listed humpback whales on the list of endangered animals in the world. China has listed humpback whales as national second-class protected animals.

The best way to watch humpback whales is by boat, preferably when it is calm. Because it may take 2-20 minutes to go offshore, you'd better eat some heroin tablets. The most recommended trip is an ecological adventure with a scientific telescope. Telescopes can be ordered from the Pacific Whale Foundation, a non-profit organization in Maui. Generally, you can book the activities of the same day or the next day at the information kiosks of the Foundation near Lahaina and Eya ports in Magala Province. All the box office receipts of the Foundation will be used for fisheries research, education and protection. Whale watching is divided into three stages.

The first stage is to observe one by one. Look around the sea and find a place where you can find this docile mammal. A good way to start is to sail to a place where whales are found shooting in the distance. Another clue is to track the whale's "footprint"-even in the rough sea, humpback whales will leave a low and smooth hydrosphere on the sea surface after diving deeply.

The second stage-waiting. A group of whales waiting to be found swim near the cruise ship, and may swim into the legal limit line of-0/00 yards from whales/kloc that the cruise ship must abide by. This limit line is to leave space for whales to move. Cruise ships, crew and passengers must not do anything that will greatly change the way whales move. If you do this, it will be considered harassment.

The last stage-watching the war. Lucky viewers can see the activities of several groups of this endangered species. Once you witness a humpback whale swimming like a fly, turning around and flying gracefully like a ballet dancer in a grand theater, you will call this whale elegant. In order to take the best photos, the Pacific Whale Foundation suggested using a 35 mm single-lens reflex camera with a variable focal length of 80 ~ 200 mm, using printed film or slides with ASA sensitivity above 100 as the film, and controlling the shutter speed above 1/500 seconds, the whale's movement could be "frozen".

According to the latest research by biologists, the "song" used by humpback whales to communicate contains human language elements. However, although researchers believe that whales do not have their own language in essence, they have found similarities between humpback whales' songs and human languages.

Ling Mumutian, head of the research team, told reporters that both humans and whales communicate with abstract sound units. These sound units are composed of different levels of structure. It's like an article is composed of paragraphs; A paragraph is composed of sentences; A sentence is composed of clauses, and by analogy, they are all at different levels.

He added: "As far as the singing of humpback whales is concerned, a song is composed of songs; A song is composed of melody; Melody is composed of phrases; A phrase is made up of notes. " Summing up all these elements, we will find that humpback whales have some similarities with their own grammar, just like the words in a sentence are arranged in grammatical order.

Ling Mu and his colleague John? Booker, Peter? Tiak designed a computer program, through which the whale's song was divided into small segments and transformed into a mathematical model. Then, an information theory technique is used to analyze the average information content of each symbol and quantify its complexity and structure.

Both computer analysis and manual observation have found that whales' calls are not only hierarchical, but also can transmit a lot of information every second. Generally speaking, every word spoken by human beings conveys 1 bit of information, or even more. But whales communicate in the water, usually over long distances. Because sound travels four times faster in water than in air, water helps spread "songs".

Jennifer, a research partner at the University of Massachusetts? Mi, cassius? Oudes is also one of the few people in the world who study whale songs with information theory. She told reporters: "I very much agree with this new discovery. I am currently using information theory to study the communication of humpback whales, and I have reached the same conclusion. "

She also thinks that the songs and sounds of aquatic animals can't be classified by existing languages, and she admits that they still can't understand the meaning of whale songs, which needs further study.

Lingmu said, "This is what we know. (Humpback whales) Singers are usually men, and these songs are probably confessions of love. With the continuous development of courtship season, all animals in a group seem to use the same song. In other words, humpback whales are learning from each other. However, the details about this point are still unclear. And the meaning of these songs is not clear. "