Why do whales break?

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ever seen whale jumping out of the water? If so, you’ve seen a whale break. Yet another question on your mind might be, “Why do whales break?” After all, while violating power look nice, there is no food to be had. Let’s take a look at why whales break and the reasons scientists identified when studying breakout behavior!

The background on infringements

Humpback that breaks through — A humpback that breaks through

It’s a brilliant representation of, well, many things.

Whale researcher Hal Whitehead defines a breach as any jump in which at least 40% of the animal’s body clears the water, and a lunge as a jump with less than 40% slack.

—Wikipedia

A lot of whale species break, but it’s the right whale, hunchback whale, and sperm whales that seem to do this most often. Their activity on the surface of the water breaks and hits the water with their tails and “fins”.

The Society for Marine Mammalogy a finding published in their Science journal for marine mammals that describes their exhaustive study of why whales break. They tracked, monitored and registered 94 groups of whales/pods to investigate their behaviour.

<a href= — Sperm whale break through off the coast of Pico Island, Azores, Portugal.

The specific behavior they targeted was whale breaching — also known as cresting — and to answer the question,

“Why do whales break?”

In the study, each behavior was perceived as a form of communication. They found that the whales in their pods communicated not only with each other, but also with whales thousands of miles away. And the methods were vastly different.

Studies have shown that cetaceans/whales have their…

pectoral fins (flippers)
Bones (tails)
And peduncles (the area between the dorsal fin and the caudal fins)

…to communicate within the group or with relatives. In-group communication seemed to be common when pods broke up or merged.

However, when the pods were more than 4,000 miles away, breaching was prominent and repetitive. The bigger the splash, the farther the sound travels. And it helps that sound travels faster in water than in air.

Whales hear ultrasonic and infrasonic, depending on their species. In addition, sound and communication are critical to the species for navigation, feeding, breeding and social purposes.

So simply put, much of whales’ offending behavior is as a form of communication. However, researchers have found that infringement can also have other benefits.

So whales are breaking through. But the answers to why the phenomenon occurs continue.

Additional Reasons Why Whales Can Violate

Loudest Animals: Blue Whales — The largest animal in the world, a blue whale, breaks through and shows its back from dorsal fin to caudal fins.

As mentioned above, there seems to be more to it than just communication. The courtship behavior, signaling a warning, or even establishing dominance are all reasons given by scientists for whales breaking.

Asking the question can be similar to asking people the question “Why are you running?” The reasons can be:

> For exercise
> Out of fear
> To travel
> For the love of it

Only each of us, individually, would know the reason for it.

As we learn even more about the species and their behavior, we will hopefully learn more of their secrets. We’ve discovered a number of reasons why they jump out of the water, but…

Only the whales know when they break through:

To communicate
To complete an ascent from the deep
To warn others in their pod
To flirt
During a feed frenzy
To stun or scare off prey
To remove parasites from the skin
As a form of play
For pure pleasure…

These are all additional reasons why whales can break through. We’re just lucky that they showed this primal behavior to us.

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