Hi, welcome to the Hawaiian Islands
Humpback Whale National Marine Sanctuary.
I want to thank the Waikiki Aquarium for giving us this opportunity to present
some of our programming to you.
Today we're going to talk about humpback whales 101,
we're going to look at the biology of the whales
and also give you an opportunity to learn
how to draw one to scale.
So let's take a minute and I want you to go get a piece of paper,
any kind of paper is fine like this, a pencil, a pen,
a crayon, anything so that you can join me in this activity.
Now we are located actually here on Maui.
Maui is where the whales come during the winter time,
they come down here to frolic and play,
they give birth down here,
when the babies get big enough
the mom's swimming them back up to Alaska
and they spend the next about four months
just up there eating and they eat and they eat,
they eat and then turn around and swim back down here again.
Can you imagine being down here in Hawaii all that time and not eating?
Well it's a story of the humpback whale,
but today like I said we're going to learn
how to draw these, as we talk about it.
So I want you to take your piece of paper
hold it like this and then I want you to
kids know this is the hot dog fold,
I want you to fold it in a third of the way in
and then a third of the way in
and then crease it down those sides
so that you have split your paper into thirds not fourths but thirds.
So I've got three equal sections to my paper.
One more time, you're going to fold it
in a third of the way on this side,
a third of a way this way,
you kind of estimate where that is,
when they seem to line up you crease it down.
Okay now I have up here,
I'm using a chart over here to draw,
this is the representation of my paper,
I want you to notice that on the chart here it says 45 feet long,
so our actual whale is the adult whale
is an average of about 45 feet long.
Think about how you might draw this thing
and what all the parts are on this guy.
Okay on our paper we have three equal sections,
on these sections each section equals 15 feet.
So if you divide 45 by 3 you get 15.
So I want you here to think about the basic shape of the body
and the shape of this whale
the body shape is kind of like if you related it to a food
would be like a cucumber or a pickle,
so it's about two-thirds of the length of the body,
two-thirds of 45 is kids?
30 feet, so I want you to draw the basic shape of the whale
coming like that.
Okay that's your basic shape of your whale 30 feet.
Now we have to think about different parts of this whale,
let's take the tail first and the tail is also called the fluke.
Now the fluke is equal to one third the size of the body
which would be 15 feet this way and 15 feet that way,
so tail's a little harder to draw just do what you can,
but try to fill up the entire part of that drawing there
that space
so your tail is about 15 feet long , also big tail.
The tail is very powerful.
The tail also is where the scientists
actually learn to recognize the whales.
Each tail has a pattern on it.
It's either a color or it's an indentation of some kind
and this represents each individual whale.
It's like your own fingerprints.
Your fingerprints identify who you are they're separate on each whale.
So the scientists go out, they take a picture of these tails
and they come back in they compare it
to all the other pictures on their computers.
They sit for hours to do this and they see if they have a match.
If they've never seen that tail before then they know that
that's a new whale at least in our area of the world.
So your tail needs to have a little bit of a design on it.
My tail is going to have circles on it.
Mine's the circle whale, so my tails got
that's how I'm identifying my whale from the rest of them.
Now, let's take a look at the mouth of the whale.
Again guess how big the mouth is?
It is one third the size of the whole whale which is again 15 feet.
So let's draw your mouth comes down like this,
kind of goes like that and the eyeball goes about a third of the way back
and the eyeball is actually the size of a grapefruit.
So not terribly large when you think about how big that whole whale is.
Now the mouth is unique it has what are called ventral pleats
and this is kind of like a fan or an accordion,
where these pleats that go down under the lower jaw here
allow that mouth to open way up,
so this lower part of the mouth
can come way down like this when it feeds.
Again the mouth can open up way like this
using those pleats that part of its body.
Now a humpback whale does not have teeth.
I think you guys all know that,
instead it has what's called baleen this is an example of baleen
that was taken out of a whale that had died up in Alaska.
It's plates that these are kind of like your fingernails
and they are hard plates
and they have these little hairs on the edge of the plates
now a lot of the hair has broken off of this
they would have longer hairs on another whale
on a real whale, a live whale.
But what happens is when the whale takes a big gulp of water,
it traps all the little fish and the little krill,
the little like shrimp like things, on these actual hairs.
It spits the water out of the mouth
and then it takes its giant tongue, which is kind of gross guys,
it's like the size of a small car.
Imagine having a small car in your mouth,
it takes that huge tongue, it swirls it around
and it pulls off all of the little fish and krill off of these hairs
and then it shoves it down the back of the throat.
Now remember how big this whale is - 45 feet.
The back of the throat is only about this big.
It's about the size of a dryer hose, not very big at all.
Couldn't swallow you, couldn't swallow a shark,
couldn't swallow big fish.
It only eats little tiny things.
Here's an example of krill, see if you can actually see these or not,
they're like little tiny shrimp you can see the little eyeballs there,
the little tiny shrimp.
A humpback whale eats about a ton of these a day,
so you can imagine if you've got 20,000 - 30,000 animals up in Alaska
and trying to feed how much food they would need to be able
to producing up there for these guys to eat and to survive.
Okay now we've got the mouth, we've got the baleen in there,
the whale needs to move, it's got two pec fins.
Again, guess how big they are 15 feet,
again one third the size of the body,
they start about one third of the way back on the body,
they come down like this,
there's one in the front there's one on the back side.
They do not have they have coloring on them but for no reason.
They use these like you would use your arms to swim
and to move yourself to steer yourself around
to go from one place to another.
The strength of that whale is back here in a muscle called the peduncle,
right back in here.
It's supposedly the strongest muscle of any mammal in the world.
Think of this humpback whale,
for those of you that are out here in Hawai'i
and have a chance to get out and see the whales,
you've seen a breach that whale is lifting itself
all the way out of the water, doesn't do it with the pec fins
it's doing it with this muscle that is down here.
I want you guys to try this next time you're in a swimming pool.
Can you without kicking off the bottom of the pool,
make your body come up all the way out of the water
and then fall down like on a belly flop?
I don't think so.
Very very powerful, 45 tons.
It's this peduncle muscle back here that does that.
All right now a couple more parts to the body
one is a dorsal fin which is kind of insignificant
doesn't do much for the whale,
but they do have a dorsal fin.
Then we also have blowholes.
How many blowholes does a humpback whale have?
Well a baleen whale, a baleen animal has two,
so you've got two blowholes.
There's one here, there's one on the other side of the whale,
where when you're out on the water, you're sitting on the shore
and you see that whoosh of air come out like this?
That you can be coming out at about 300 miles an hour,
imagine driving 300 miles down the road
as you're going down the road,
well this is how fast this is coming out
it helps you to be able to see that,
they are letting their air out through there,
through those blow holes.
A toothed whale like a dolphin,
only has one blowhole so that's the difference.
Now a humpback whale is a mammal
think for a minute about what does it take to be a mammal.
Number one you breathe air,
we know they come to the surface about every 15 minutes,
an adult whale will come to the surface, take a breath of air.
A baby is longer, a shorter time depending on how big
it is its lungs aren't big enough yet so it breathes air.
It gives live birth the mother produces milk,
she produces about a hundred gallons of milk a day,
if you can imagine to feed that baby.
It also has hair.
Where's the hair in the humpback whale?
It's not on that baleen that's there
but a whale has what are called tubercles,
which are kind of a giant wart kind of things on the front
end of the rostrum here,
so you've got these tubercles
and each one has a little hair coming out of it.
Don't know what that hair does,
they have no idea for sure,
think that maybe it's used for some kind of sensing that is there,
again the humpback whale, think about it,
is really hard for researchers to study
humpback whales are too big they cannot go into captivity,
all the research needs to be done either from shore
or underwater with special permits,
so it's amazing what they have learned about it.
One question here for you is why is a humpback whale
called a humpback whale?
Well, when it dives down it swims along the surface like this,
when it gets ready to dive down underwater,
it humps its back and it goes down underwater.
It's not that it has a humpback,
it's not like a camel doesn't really have a hump there
but it's when it dives down under water and goes underwater to swim off.
So your lesson for today hope you join us again
go back draw another whale and put it on your refrigerator
so you remember about this.
Thank you