Video: For the first time ever, a drone captured the birth of a humpback whale in the ocean
Off the coast of the Australian state of New South Wales, a drone operator captured the birth of a humpback whale from the air for the first time in the world. These unique images are already being called historic for science and marine mammal research.
The event took place on July 28 during an aerial survey of humpback whale (Megaptera novaeangliae) migration conducted by the Australian Cetacean Rescue and Research Organization (ORRCA).
Drone operator Alexander Forrest spotted a female whale that had fallen behind her pod and was moving much more slowly than the others.
While observing from the air, he realized that the animal was giving birth to a calf right there in the ocean.
“It’s incredibly rare to witness such a moment in the ocean. This is a very rarely documented event. This is the first drone footage showing the birth of a live humpback whale. It captures key moments from the calf’s first minutes of life and reveals the behavior of the mother humpback whale and her newborn calf,” Forrest said.
According to ORRCA, this is only the fourth time a humpback whale birth has been captured on video.
Previously, researchers had also obtained video footage of a gray whale giving birth off the coast of California and a sperm whale in the Caribbean Sea.
The unique video shows the newborn calf surfacing for the first time through blood-stained water to take its first breath, after which the mother returns to it.
The footage was captured approximately 700 meters off the coast of Kingscliff in northeastern New South Wales.
According to Forrest, this discovery will help us better understand exactly where humpback whales give birth, how mothers behave in the first minutes after giving birth, and how the calves’ lives begin.
“This birth symbolizes one of the most powerful conservation efforts in history, which has brought humpback whales back from the brink of extinction to a population of nearly 50,000 off the coast of New South Wales,” he noted.
The researchers plan to analyze the footage in detail and publish the results of their study in a scientific journal.
Biologists paid particular attention to the fact that the female gave birth while lagging behind her pod, as in other whale species, support from other females is often observed during calving.
At birth, a humpback whale calf weighs between 1 and 1.5 metric tons and measures between 3 and 5 meters in length.
For nearly 11 months, the calf feeds on its mother’s nutritious milk and gains about 45 kilograms in weight each day as it prepares for its first major migration.
Humpback whales undertake one of the longest migrations among all mammals, traveling up to 8,000 kilometers one way between the cold polar waters and their warm breeding grounds.
Earlier, Ukrainian scientists from the National Antarctic Scientific Center also released unique footage of a humpback whale’s life, captured using a special camera mounted on the animal’s back. The video captured dives, breaching, and the bubble-trapping hunting technique characteristic of humpback whales.
This is reported in an article by Live Science.
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