Dr. Kelsey Gil is  a postdoctoral researcher at UBC’s department of zoology and the lead author of a paper published in Current Biology that literally peaks down the throat of a lunge whale.

Lunge feeding whales (humpbacks, blue whales and fin whales etc)   open their mouths as they accelerate towards their prey.

Gil explained that if, for example, a human were to do this in a swimming pool, they would have to swallow a volume of water equal to their body size. 

“So you’d have to put yourself in your own mouth and then push out all the parts that you didn’t actually want to swallow and keep the parts in your mouth that you did,” she said.

One of the questions explored in this paper, is why lunge whales don’t drown while they are doing this?

Humpback Whales in our area 

Humpback whales only just returned to our area this past decade, after what appears to be a 140-year-absence. 

They seem to have disappeared around the time the whaling industry collapsed, in 1871. 

Lynne Jordan, former curator of the Cortes Island Museum, told Cortes Currents there was a sighting between Cortes and Quadra Islands around 2011 or 2012. 

The number of humpback whales swimming into our area kept increasing and there were 58 sightings when the Vancouver Island. Aquarium took a census over the long weekend in August 2017.

Helen Hall, Executive Director of Friends of Cortes Island, explained, “Some of those may be the same humpback whales, but the same weekend a year ago, they only had two sightings – so there has been a huge increase in the numbers this summer.” 

Sightings have become more common and on the Friends of Cortes Island website it says, “Unbelievably 86 individual humpback whales were identified in local waters just last year.”  

Finding a whale 

“Unfortunately when whales die along the B.C. coastline, you’re restricted with the time,” explained Gil.  “If tide is coming in, you only have so much time to look at the whale.Sometimes the whales are in really poor condition. They’ve been dead for a few days before you can actually look at them. And then there’s the additional hardship of actually trying to move around a whale, that weighs a few tons, and actually access the inside of that whale.”

So in 2018, her team travelled to a whaling station in Iceland.

“Luckily they are not interested in the respiratory or digestive tracks for food. So we were able to kind of scavenge the pieces that we were interested in and take them off to the side and look at them in our own little lab area,” said Gil.

The team dissected 19 fin whales, a close relative of the humpback. (So we are peaking into the throat of the humpback through what is virtually a facsimile.)

The pandemic put a stop to any possibility of obtaining more tissue.   

Looking down a Lunge Whale’s throat

Scientists already knew a lot about lunge feeding, up until the moment prey enters a whale’s mouth. 

Dr. Gil and her colleagues wanted to find out what happens next. 

They found a kind of oral plug, at the back of the whale’s mouth, that seals off their upper airways during feeding. Otherwise food would be entering their nasal cavities.

As for the lunge whale’s ability to take in its own weight in water: 

“Whales have this huge pouch that extends all the way from their mouth down to their belly button.  That’s where all this water is going. They open their mouths up, their tongue turns outside in and extends all the way down to their belly button,” explained Gil. “The pouch collapses back as they’re closing their mouth. That’s what’s assisting all of the water to be pushed out through those baleen plates.  It seems like a lot of work to get all of this krill, but clearly it’s working very well for these animals considering they have managed to become the largest animals on the planet.”

At a number of points during the interview, Gil referred to the whales food as ‘prey.’ 

In addition to hundreds of thousands of tiny, still living krill, some lunge whales – like the humpback –  can also eat small fish like anchovies or sardines.

The UBC press release talks about the possibility that whales cough, hiccup and burp. 

Gil described these as future areas of research.  

“One more thing about the humpbacks around here. We have seen photos or videos of air bubbles being released from their mouth and we’re not sure where this air is coming from,” she said. “It could be that they are capturing air as they’re engulfing food at the surface, and then just letting those air bubbles out. Or it could be that they’ve managed to find some way to shift that oral plug in the back of the mouth a little bit, and perhaps push the larynx through, to allow air from the lungs to actually exit through the mouth.”

Top credit: A humpback whale from Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary in Massachusetts. Credit: Ari Friedlaender

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