Meet the Minke Whale
Neptune's Note VII
Name: Pronounced mink-ee, the story goes that a Norwegian whaler named Meincke mistook a minke whale for a blue whale.
While that was probably quite an embarrassing moment at the time (the size difference between the two is significant), Meincke won in the end didn’t he? When I first read this story, I was hoping it would be a potentially sweet story about the one cetacean with a decent name, but Meincke harpooned the whale he had wrongly identified and so he in no way deserves this honour.
Family: Just as sweet is the minke whale's scientific family name Balaenopteridae, which directly translates to ‘winged whale’.
Genus: Balaenoptera. This genus includes eight rorqual species of whale, of which the minke whale is the smallest. Rorquals are the largest (in number) group of baleen whales, distinguished by the ventral grooves that run from their chin down their throat and belly.
Location: While the common minke whale is found throughout the world’s oceans and will migrate seasonally between colder and more tropical waters, the Antarctic minke whale, as their name would suggest, lives in the Antarctic. However, some individuals do occasionally migrate northwards to find warmer seas during winter. There’s also the Dwarf Minke whale - a subspecies of the common minke.
Population: It’s very nice to be able to say that the minke whale is one of the more abundant rorqual species. Their status is considered stable throughout the majority of the population and though guesstimations vary there are approximately 149,000-180,00 in the North Atlantic, around 25,000 in the Northwest Pacific ocean and an unknown number in the Antarctic. Ten year old records suggest 500,000 in the Antarctic, but more recently the total population was estimated to be 209,800. Who knows how accurate these numbers are (counting whales is a difficult job), but the majority are in a healthy range, we know that much!
Status: The diffuse distribution of the common and the Antarctic minke whale makes it difficult to accurately assess their status but the IUCN Red List considers the common minke whale a ‘least concern’ species (which is the best it can get basically), while the Antarctic minke whale is undetermined.
Weight: Average weight for males is around seven tons and females are slightly bigger weighing somewhere over eight tons.
Length: Minke whales are the second smallest baleen whale with only the Pygmy Right whale behind them. Their maximum length is in the range of 31-35 feet, which is obviously still very large (they are whales after all), but they’re just quite little in comparison to others.
Anatomy: In my opinion minkes look like baby blue whales for their streamlined appearance and sharp snout - not that we’re particularly familiar with what these rarely spotted calves look like. Their black, grey —or sometimes referred to as purple— skin covers their backs with a white patch decorating the front. This white patch covers the ventral grooves on their throat and is the classic whale signifier. These pleated grooves will stretch out like an accordion when whales take a huge mouthful of water to filter through their baleen for food. They have rather tall, sickle-shaped dorsal fins further down their spine which make them easy to spot when they surface. Common minke whales are distinguished from their Antarctic cousins by a white band on each of their flippers.
Diet: Minke whales are not fussy eaters. The entire range feeds on everything from herring, anchovies and capelin, to sand eels, krill and amphipods. They feed by side-lunging into swarms of prey, taking large amounts of water into their mouths - as we often see humpbacks do! Though usually solitary feeders, sometimes two or three individuals may be seen together. Closer to the poles they have been spotted in groups of up to 400!
Social habits: When moving fast enough, minkes can create what is known as a ‘roostertail’ in their wake. This is a spray of water thrown up behind them. They do not raise their flukes out of the water when they dive making it difficult to spot them. Instead, they are most easily distinguished by their snout-first surfacing, which makes them frequent ‘spyhoppers’ (spyhopping is when a cetacean will bob their heads vertically out of the water for better visuals - predators often do it to track their oblivious prey sat atop the ice), especially the Antarctic species who use the technique in areas of mobile ice. They’re a curious bunch and will approach vessels out on the water, which might be why we know so much about them. Still, they are more than happy in their own company and though they can breach, they aren’t showoffs like the humpback.
Reproduction: As with most migratory ocean species, the breeding season for minkes peaks during summer in warmer waters, with a gestation period of around ten months. Newborns will nurse for up to six months and stay with their mothers for two years or so before parting ways. They can live to be 60 years old in some cases.
Unique facts:
Minkes can stay underwater for up to 20 minutes. Less than some of our other Neptune’s Notes features, but still impressive!
They can swim at speeds of up to 35 mph (30 kmh)
Evidence suggests that the fat deposits in their jaw may work as sound receptors like melons do in toothed whales.
Threats they face:
Alas, despite a healthy number of minke whales in seas around the world, even a small little rorqual faces multiple threats. A natural threat, but a threat nonetheless, is their only known predator, the killer whale. In a rather unfortunate turn for our sweet minke whales, their tongues and lower jaw are known to be something of a killer whale delicacy. Such is the circle of life. Speed and sheer will are their only defence mechanisms, though they have been recorded swimming into shallow waters to escape the infamous whale killer.
Active and ghost fishing nets are so dense in our waters now that no marine animal is capable of avoiding entanglement, minke whales included. They’re also susceptible to vessel strikes and this is only increasing, as trans-polar shipping routes increase among melting sea ice. This brings with it a rise in underwater noise which can confuse and distress many whale species, like the minke, who rely on low-frequency sounds to communicate and to locate prey. Ocean noise is arguably the reason for the recent mass beach strandings of Pilot whales from Scotland to Australia. :(
Climate change also brings with it severe consequences for our minkes. These include changes in prey distribution, changes in prey abundance and fluctuating ocean temperatures, which could alter their navigation, foraging, calving and breeding patterns.
And yet, none of the aforementioned threats are as significant to minke populations as whaling. Some sources record the hunting of minke whales with harpoons as early as the 11th century, likely the same period when Meincke was out mixing up his whale species. The demand for larger whales became so extreme that for a while the little minkes were left alone. That is until in the 1970s when large whales like the sei, fin or blue whale were over hunted to such an extent that minke whales were up for grabs again.
The minke whale is one of just a few species still hunted by Japan, Greenland, Norway, and Iceland. The latter has slaughtered a sickening 1,800 minke, fin and sei whales since the global ban on commercial whaling in 1986.
This deep dive on these plucky little whales has revealed to me how resilient they must be, to face all of this and still be able to thrive in healthy numbers. Though their healthy population rates are a joy to hear, we should not rest until every individual whale is safe from the harpoons and drive hunts.
Here at Beached we are building a community that can put our brains and resources together to highlight and fund solutions to the problems facing the minke whale and the oceans they live in. I hope you’ll join our humble community and click subscribe for free or support our work by purchasing the paid subscription.
All Beached posts are free to read but if you can we ask you to support our work through a paid subscription. These directly support the work of Beached and allow us to engage in more conversations with experts in the field of marine conservation and spend more time researching a wider breadth of topics for the newsletters. Paid subscriptions allow us to dedicate more time and effort to creating a community and provide the space for stakeholders to come together, stay abreast of each other’s work and foster improved collaboration and coordination.
One day Beached hope to donate a large percentage of the revenue from paid subscriptions to marine conservation organisations and charities to support their work too. Working together, we can reverse the degradation of our oceans.
Amie 🐋
Hoping to dive with them one day
nice