On the Naming of Whales

How many different kinds of whales are there? How many can you name? How did they get their names? My name is David and I want your help with a book I'm putting together, in which I will seek to propose new names for whales in English, based on or inspired by other languages and from a better understanding of these animals. This blog is here to provide information about those whales for anyone who is interested in helping me but may not be familiar with the peculiarities of the different species. I would invite you to do your own research, of course, but I hope this will be a good starting point for you, and if you would like to help, you can contact me through this blogger site or else at davidshewry@hotmail.com

The reason I want to do this is because I feel that some of the English names for whales are either too dull and unimaginative to do justice to the amazing creatures that have been given them, or else the names are in some way rather undignified. It seems to me that our understanding of and attitude towards the natural world has changed considerably and so perhaps it's time for our nomenclature to catch up. Countries are frequently renamed - why not whales?

Image of Herman Melville's Moby Dick

'Monstro' from Disney's Pinocchio

Another thing I want to explore in the book is the way in which whales appear in popular culture. For many of us, our cultural frame of reference for whales includes the biblical story of Jonah, the Greek legend of Ketos, Pinocchio and Moby Dick. These are all wonderful stories but, for the most part, whales are portrayed as monsters. I'm interested in hearing stories about whales that might take a different point of view. I’m inviting people from all over to share information about whales: names, stories, mythology, lore, poetry, drawings, illustrations and art of all kinds, in order to help inform my own understanding of and attitude towards these amazing animals. In doing this I hope also to celebrate the linguistic diversity of the world, and especially smaller, less well-known languages. 

Jonah and the Whale
Tobolsk - Russian 18th Century

There are between 6000 and 7000 languages in the world today, and as English, French, Spanish, Arabic, Urdu, Bahasa, Mandarin and other major languages daily assert themselves more and more as linguae francae, there are many groups who are looking to revitalise or otherwise maintain and perpetuate smaller languages for posterity, which I think is an excellent thing. The world needs a greater understanding and appreciation of its own linguistic and cultural diversity. 

A large amount of the work of marine biology has been conducted and dominated by English-speaking organisations, and English tends to be a dominant language in the global scientific community, so the names for whales in other languages are often literal translations of English (or sometimes French) names, so translating them back into English gets us nowhere. How, then, do we go about this?

Beluga choir

Whale hunting equipment

The common names given to animals are generally of two types – descriptive names such as the beluga whale, which comes from 'белый' (belyy), the Russian word for white, otherwise they are named after individual people, such as is the case for the minke whale, named after a Norwegian whaler who spent his life killing these animals for profit. The former, I find, are often insufficient, unimaginative and short-sighted: The beluga whale is certainly white, and that does distinguish it from other whales, but this animal is also singular in its extraordinary vocal repertoire and has even been known to imitate human speech. As a result it is often known colloquially as the ‘sea canary’ – much better! As for naming animals after people, apart from, it seems to me, being a slightly arrogant thing to do in the first place, they have often been named after men (for it is invariably men) who did the animals considerable harm, such as in the case of the minke whale. So I’d like to invite any interested individuals or groups to come up with new names, whether you’re a linguist, a marine biologist, a language revivalist or, like me, you just have a passion for language and for natural history. For those who are not familiar with the animals I shall try to provide a few details, descriptions, images and links, relating to the species I’m interested in renaming. Whatever names you come up with, it would be interesting to know something about your process.

6th Century Greek vase depicting
Heracles slaying Ketos (κῆτη)

The word ‘whale’, from the Old English 'hvalr' - meaning 'wheel', is not a technical term used to distinguish one group of animals from another. All whales belong to the clade of marine mammals known collectively as cetacea, named after Ketos (Latin Cetus), the sea monster from the Greek legend. Cetaceans are broadly grouped into two categories or parvorders, which are: those with teeth (odontoceti) and those with baleen (mysticeti), both of which derive from a now extinct group of animals known as archaeoceti, and there are currently considered to be 89 living species. These are commonly grouped into whales, dolphins and porpoises. However, as this is a work on nomenclature as much as anything else, we shall limit ourselves to animals which are commonly referred to in English as whales, including ‘killer whales’, which are the largest of the dolphins. Perhaps other dolphins and porpoises will be explored in separate future volumes.

There are broadly considered to be 8 families of whales, which include Kogiidae (the rorquals), Iniidae (right whales), Cetotheriidae (the pygmy right whale), Eschrichtiidae (the gray whale), Monodontidae (belugas and narwhals), Physeteridae (the sperm whale), Kogiidae (the dwarf and pygmy sperm whales), and Ziphiidae (the beaked whales). I shall say a little about each of the species within these families, in turn. Let's start with the baleen whales (also known as Mysticeti - from the Greek meaning 'moustache whale'), and with that group of baleen whales known as the rorquals - humpbacks, fin whales, blue whales, sei whales, bryde's/eden's, omura's and minke whales.

Megaptera novaeangliae - The Humpback Whale

Bubble net fishing

Megaptera novaeangliae – the Humpback Whale, whose stunningly complex songs last 10 to 20 minutes before being repeated continuously for up to 24 hours, is the 6^th largest animal in the world, growing up to 52 feet in length (16 metres) and weighing up to 79 000 lb (36 000 kg), though one whale was recorded at 62 feet. It’s only the males who sing, though no one is really sure why. They have no vocal chords as such, and the way they produce their amazing songs is not well understood, but they don’t exhale when they sing as we do. Other sounds are produced when hunting or for general communication, but the famous whale song that you use in your prenatal yoga session is that of the humpback – listen here.

Another interesting feature is their regular and complex interactions with other species. They are often documented interacting with, and even playing with, a wide range of other species. They are increasingly spotted protecting seals, dolphins and other animals from orca attacks, though there doesn’t appear to be any evolutionary reason why they should do so.

Humpback pod

Their diet consists mostly of krill, plankton and small fish such as herring. There are several ways that they hunt for food, but watching humpbacks eat is fascinating. One way they hunt is by creating ‘bubble nets’ by swimming in circles beneath a shoal of fish, continuously exhaling. The rising net of bubbles confuses and traps the fish and the whales then surge at the shoal – see an example here.  . Each adult whale will eat a ton of food every day through the summer.

Though humpbacks have not found their way into popular culture quite as often as the sperm whale has, one notable instance is the poem 'The Famous Tay Whale' by William Topaz McGonagall, which has the distinction of being broadly considered to be the worst poem written in the English language. Topaz McGonagall was celebrated for his complete disregard for metre or any other of the traditional features of English poetry and this poem may be his worst/best work: Read The Famous Tay Whale,

Humpback breaching

Humpbacks live between 45 – 100 years and can be found all over the world, though they were given their Latin species name because they were so abundant off the coast of New England in North America: nova = new, anglia= England. The genus name comes from the fact that they have very long pectoral fins: Mega = big, ptera = wing. In many languages the common name alludes to their unusually large pectoral fins, for instance in Italian they are called megattera. The common name in English comes from the fact that they arch their backs when preparing to dive. For a fuller, more detailed documentary on humpbacks I recommend this film. There is also a wonderful IMAX 3D film (narrated by Ewan McGregor if you please), so next time you're near an IMAX theatre look out for it.

Balaenoptera brydei, edeni, omurai - Bryde's Whale, Eden's Whale and Omura's Whale

These whales are right at the heart of my book, because their names derive directly from the names of individual people. Because they are neither the biggest, the smallest, the most charismatic, or in any other way superlative animals, they seldom appear in the natural history documentaries or the museum dioramas. As a result, few people outside the world of marine biology have ever even heard of them. This means that renaming them will be a great deal easier than it might be for other animals such as the celebrated humpback whale or the infamous sperm whale.

Whaling station in Durban, South Africa, 1947

Bryde's whale breaching

There is so little known about them that it is difficult to say exactly how many species there are, or whether Bryde's and Eden's are separate species at all. Bryde’s whales were named after Johan Bryde, the Norwegian consul to South Africa in 1908. Bryde was a businessman and ship owner, but also a professional whaler and he set up the first whaling station in South Africa in Durban, and thus contributed to the death of thousands of whales. History must judge such individuals in the context of their times, but the fact remains that this man made a lot of money from the slaughter of these animals and it seems inappropriate that they should still bear his name.

Eden’s whale is named after Sir Ashley Eden, chief commissioner of Burma in the 1870s, by the zoologist John Anderson, the first curator of the Indian Museum in Kolkata. Eden somehow helped to attain the type specimen of this whale for the museum. While Eden clearly had less of a negative impact on these animals than did Bryde, it seems a bit of a stretch to continue to call these animals by his name: only a very few people, historians of the Raj and the like, are likely to have heard of him.

Omura's whale

Rare picture of a breaching omura's whale

Omura’s whales are named after Japanese cetologist  大村秀雄 (Hideo Omura). He was a researcher who published many articles and certainly contributed greatly to our understanding of whales. The problem for me lies in the fact that he was closely associated with Nihon Keiki Keikyushu – The Japan Cetacean Research Institute, which has defied international pleas to end its whaling operation. Japan is among the last nations who refuse to stop whaling. They claim their operations are for research purposes, but there are few outside Japan who accept this. I’ll leave it to the reader to do further research on this matter, but for my part I’d like to find a new name for this species too.

So, to say something about these whales besides their current etymology: They are rorquals. Bryde/Eden are bigger than Omura, the longest measured being a female at 50.9 feet. The longest Omura was just 37.7 feet. Omuras are asymmetrical in colouring, like the fin whale. One interesting peculiarity of omuras is that they seem to prefer shallower, warmer waters. There are several differences in the skeletons of the various species, but this may be a bit technical for our purposes. Bryde/Eden are notable for being especially elongated, their greatest height being only 1/7 of their total length, compared to 1/5.5 for sei whales for example. They occasionally produce strong, low-pitched, human like sounds. The omura whale was only named in 2003 when Japanese scientists performed genetic testing on them. Though they appear very similar to Bryde’s/Eden’s whales, it is thought that they are more closely related to the blue whale. Here is a slightly melodramatic video of some bryde’s whales and another about omura’s whales, which I hope will help to inspire some new names.

Bryde's/Eden's Whale

Balaenoptera borealis - The Sei Whale

 

Pollock

The sei whale gets its common name from the Norwegian for pollock, a large whitefish which arrives in the waters around Norway at around the same time as the whales. Other than that, the sei whale has very little in common with the pollock. For one thing, they’re enormous. They reach lengths of up to 64 feet and weigh 28 tonnes. They are very fast swimmers, reaching speeds of 27 knots or 50 kmph. It is an endangered species with only 80 000 animals alive today and they are still hunted by the Japanese, who call itイワシクジラ(Iwashi Kujira) or ‘Sardine whale’. The American naturalist Roy Chapman Andrews compared it to the cheetah because it can sprint very quickly over short distances but soon gets tired out.

Bryde's Whale and Sei Whale

Their appearance is similar to that of other rorquals and they are often confused with fin whales and bryde’s whales. If you happen to spot any of these animals on your travels, you can identify them best by getting your head right up to their mouths and having a good look at their baleen plates, which are much finer than other whales (only 0.1mm).

Of course, getting close enough to inspect a whale’s baleen may present difficulties to the casual or inexperienced whale watcher, so other distinguishing features include its pigmentation pattern and colouring: sei whales are slightly bluer in colour than their smaller relatives bryde’s whales, which have three ridges on their heads where the sei whale has only one. The sei whale has symmetrical colouring whereas fin whales do not. They prefer to be out in the open ocean rather than off the coast, and they seldom breach. They don’t rise out of the water as they dive, like fin whales do; they just tend to sink down out of sight. So you’re not very likely to see a sei whale, but now you’ll be better equipped to identify one if you do. There's a useful video here on the identification of sei whales.

Cookie cutter shark's teeth

Notice white scars from cookie cutter shark bites

Another identifying feature is that there are often white scars left from attacks by the small but vicious cookie cutter shark, against which the whales have no defense. They just sink in their amazing teeth, rip off a chunk of flesh and leave!

Cookie cutter shark

In terms of  feeding, they eat more like right whales, skimming for food rather than lunging, but they are rorquals so they still stretch out like the others and its quite a thing to see. They like small food, such as krill and copepods, but will also eat sardines, mackerel and other small fish..

Feeding

We don’t know a lot about their voices but their songs tend to be long, very low pitched and very loud. The BBC once interviewed a former whaler called Roddy Morrison, who operated around South Georgia in the Southern Ocean. In the interview he said "When we killed the sei whales, they used to make a noise, like a crying noise. They seemed so friendly, and they'd come round and they'd make a noise, and when you hit them, they cried really. I didn't think it was really nice to do that. Everybody talked about it at the time I suppose, but it was money. At the end of the day that's what counted at the time. That's what we were there for."

Balaenoptera musculus - The Blue Whale

David Attenborough’s description of the blue whale will serve better than anything I can put here. There is a film of David describing the animal here:

David Attenborough and a blue whale

“Dwarfed by the vast expanse of the open ocean, the biggest animal that has ever lived on our planet. A blue whale, 30 metres long and weighing over 200 tonnes. It's far bigger than even the biggest dinosaur. Its tongue weighs as much as an elephant, its heart is the size of a car and some of its blood vessels are so wide you could swim down them. Its tail alone is the width of a small aircraft's wings. Its streamlining, close to perfection, enables it to cruise at 20 knots. It's one of the fastest animals in the sea. The ocean's largest inhabitant feeds almost exclusively on one of the smallest: krill, a crustacean just a few centimetres long. Gathered in a shoal, krill stain the sea red. A single blue whale in a day can consume 40 million of them. Despite the enormous size of blue whales, we know very little about them. Their migration routes are still a mystery and we have no idea where they go to breed. They are a dramatic reminder of how much we still have to learn about the ocean and the creatures that live there. Our planet is a Blue Planet.”

If you don’t know David Attenborough, he is a naturalist and broadcaster who has been making television, more or less, since television began. In the UK he is a national hero and certainly a hero of mine. It is to him that very many scientists, teachers, film makers and hobbyists owe their passions and their careers and his wonderful description of the blue whale above was one of the key moments for me in becoming interested in whales in general. But this is not about David, it is about whales, I shall try to furnish you with a few more important details about these animals.

The species name musculus was given by Carl Linnaeus in 1758. This name could mean either ‘muscular’ or ‘mouse-like’, so the name contains a pleasing pun, which cannot have been an accident on the great taxonomist's part. Perhaps we should call it the mouse whale. The common English name blue whale comes again from Svend Foyn, the Norwegian whaler who invented the harpoon gun and thus sped up the destruction of these animals (blue whales are one of the most endangered species, with only a few thousand left – the Antarctic population was reduced by 99.85%, getting as low as 360 animals). Foyn called it the ‘blåhval’, and it is sort of blueish (the Welsh call it Morfil Glas – greyish-blue whale). In any case the name comes from one of the greatest killers of whales in history so perhaps we could use a new name. 

Flukes

The first published description of the animal came from Robert Sibbald, the 17th century Scottish scientist, in 1694, and for a long time the whale was known as Sibbald’s Rorqual. In Moby Dick Herman Melville called it ‘Sulphur Bottom’ because of a yellowish film of diatoms that sometime accumulates on the whales’ skin. In the same book there is also the first known use of the term ‘blue whale’, though, so who knows - there have been many names in English. Let’s hope to discover some alternatives.

Blue whale baleen

They can reach speeds of up to 50km per hour at a sprint, but typically cruise at around 20km per hour over longer periods when migrating and can travel almost 300 miles in a day. When traveling like this they tend to swim a little way (around 13 metres) below the surface to avoid the drag of waves. With a lung capacity of around 5000 litres, they can dive to great depths (1660 feet is their record) and stay submerged for 40 minutes, or perhaps even an hour, though no one is quite sure.15 minutes is more common for a dive.  

Building a blue whale - 1938

Like so many people in London and the UK, one of my earliest exposures to the idea of whales came through the Natural History Museum, with its huge mammal hall and the collection of cetacean skeletons and models there. The blue whale model was built in the 1930s and is still there today - few people realise she's now older than most blue whales ever get. As well as the amazing model, there is Hope. Hope is the name given to the 25-metre-long skeleton of a female blue whale, which was attacked by whalers in the 19th century. She escaped but died later from her wounds and washed up on a beach in Ireland. The museum purchased the whale for £250 in 1891 and she has been part of the collection since. The Hintze Hall, the huge main entrance hall to the museum, has housed Dippy the Diplodocus since 1905 and many (including me) were sad to see Dippy go this year. But the fact is, dinosaurs are extinct and whales are endangered. The public needs to be made aware of the importance of changing its behaviour to make sure the whales don't go the way of the dinosaurs, and making Hope the centrepiece for the Hintze Hall is one step towards achieving that. Good luck NHM!

Blue whale model at NHM London

Hope in a lunging position in the Hintze Hall, NHM London

Balaenoptera physalus - The Fin Whale

Balaenoptera physalus is commonly known as the fin whale, the finback whale or sometimes the razorback. After the blue whale it is the second biggest animal in the world, reaching a length of up to 85 feet, though there are reports of larger ones, and a weight of up to 82 short tonnes. The naturalist Roy Chapman Andrews called the fin whale "the greyhound of the sea... for its beautiful, slender body is built like a racing yacht and the animal can surpass the speed of the fastest ocean steamship." They get their Latin name from the fact that when they exhale, the spout is huge, bigger than other whales. Physa is the Greek word for ‘blow’. The common name fin or finback comes from the fact that its dorsal fin is more prominent than in other species, helping to identify them. But ultimately most cetaceans have dorsal fins and its name seems to imply that its fin is somehow a unique feature – the fin whale as opposed to the other whales – which simply isn’t true. 

Postage stamp from
the Faeroe Islands

Fin whales are endangered as 20th Century whaling claimed around 725 000 animals, leaving only around 40 000. Since the moratorium numbers have risen back to around 100 000, but their numbers may never fully recover. Several countries still hunt them. 

There are at least 2 subspecies of fin whales, and possibly a third or even a fourth, which haven’t been named yet. They do mix with each other, but only very infrequently. There is also evidence of hybrid crosses with blue whales. The differences and similarities between fin whales and blue whales have been compared to those between humans and gorillas, yet there is a lot of evidence for hybrid individuals existing. 

Asymmetrical colouring on the right mandible

A curious and unexplained feature is the asymmetry of their faces. Fin whales are generally dark brownish-grey on their backs, and white on their bellies, with some variation between Atlantic and Pacific populations, but on the right mandible or lower jaw there is a light, white patch of colour that isn't there on the left side and no one knows why. This asymmetry is often seen in omura’s whales, and also occasionally in minkes, but it is always there in the fins and it remains unexplained.

Fin whales live to be around 100 years old, but specimens have been found much older, up to 140. They like to sing and they have the lowest frequency voices of any animal on Earth. Their songs can be heard from hundreds of miles away. When they were first detected, scientists thought the recording equipment was broken, or else they were coming from some experimental technology used in Soviet submarines. The amount and volume of noise in the oceans now is playing havoc with many whale populations. 

Whale watching tour.

Ship strike

The noise of the big engines of all the worlds shipping – commercial, military, luxury and others, and especially the sonic blasters being used in the search for oil sources below the surface, have turned the marine world into a spectacularly noisy place, and if you use sound as your primary sense and your means for navigating, it can be disastrous. A cetologist once described it to me as being akin to trying to live out your life in a perpetual disco, with strobe lights flashing continuously, all day and all night. Whale populations are responding by moving away from shipping channels, but this also means away from food supplies, so numbers are not recovering as quickly as may be hoped.  Predation by orcas, ship strike and entanglement are major causes of death for these and other whales and is another reason why the population recovery is so slow. But on the positive side, most countries now respect the moratorium and would never consider returning to whaling. The populations are recovering, albeit slowly, and we are learning more about whales all the time. I wonder what names we might come up with for the fin whale.

Balaenoptera acutorostrata - The Minke Whale

There are two known species of minke whale. Balaenoptera acutorostrata (sharp beak), so-called common minkes, live up in the North and are the smallest of the rorquals, and the slightly bigger Balaenoptera bonaerensis (from Buenos Aires) or antarctic minkes. The antarctic minkes venture further south than just about any other whale, not bothered in the least by the cold, though they occasionally wander north and to try their luck with common minke. They are mostly black with white bellies. They grow to around 26 feet and weigh up to 5 tonnes, about the size of an elephant. They have a gestation period of around 10 months - one of the shortest among the whales. Vast as they may seem to you and me, the whalers of yesteryear considered them small-fry and seldom bothered to go after them. One day, however, a gang of Norwegians under the command of Svend Voyn spotted movement. A young whaler got himself all excited and went to catch himself a whale. He thought it was a great blue whale but was sadly mistaken. This young whaler was named Meincke and once he'd captured the tiddler his shipmates all teased him rotten. After this the species became known as 'Meinckehwal', or the minke whale.

Orca attacking a Minke Whale

Minkes live around 40 - 50 years, though there are those who see the other side of 60. They are generally quite solitary, occasionally travelling with a partner and sometimes congregating in pods of up to 60. They sing like other rorquals and they sound like this. When they are hungry, they take a few deep breaths and dive down for 20 minutes to hunt for krill and sardines and the like, swimming at speeds of up to 24 miles per hour or about 21 knots if you're a sailor. Keep in mind that the world-famous tea clipper Cutty Sark, the fastest ship in the world in her day, could manage a top speed of 17 knots, which is very fast indeed, and the modern racing trimaran Sodeb'O shot across the Atlantic in a little over 5 days averaging 25.8 knots. Minkes are not the fastest animals in the sea, but they're certainly not sluggish. This is especially helpful when they are being hunted by pods of orca, though they don't always escape. There's a nice video about minke whales here

Bboonk, the Minke Whale
by Sunny Park

It seems that often when someone decides to write a children's book with whales, they tend to go for the blue whale - there are fairly dozens of them, but Sunny Park decided the minke whale would serve for a protagonist in her book Bboonk, the Minke Whale. Perhaps we will soon have some more stories about minkes. 

Caperea marginata - The Pygmy Right Whale

These whales were believed to be extinct until 2012. They are the smallest of the baleen whales and are more closely related to rorquals than right whales. It was during a voyage commanded by James Clark Ross on HMS Erebus and Terror (the two ships which were famously lost when John Franklin took them into the Arctic in the quest for the Northwest Passage and rediscovered only in 2016) that bones and baleen plates were found and brought back to England, where John Edward Gray eventually established a new genus from the samples. He named the genus 'caperea', meaning wrinkled - referring to the wrinkled appearance of the ear (of all things!). The special name refers to the dark 'margins' or borders around the baleen plates that appears in some individuals. No one is going to be quick to challenge or undermine the great Gray, but really? Neither the binomial nor the common name come close to doing justice to this beautiful cetacean. 

Coming up for air

Recent research by the paleontologist Felix Marx has demonstrated that this whale is a close relative of the cetotheriidae, previously believed to have become extinct some time in the ice age more than 2 million years ago, which makes our whale a living fossil! The longest one ever seen was a female at 6.45 metres, and the longest male was 6.1 metres. There are a number of physiological features that distinguish them from other whales: they have small lungs and hearts, so they are probably not deep diving whales, they have a unique larynx, a reduced tail with what may be a vestigial pelvis and four digits on the flippers.

Very rare picture of a pod
of pygmy right whales

They are thought to be circumpolar and live only in the southern hemisphere. They are very seldom sighted but when they are, they're usually alone. They have on occasion been seen in pods, once in a  group of around 100 individuals near Australia. They are also known to associate with other whale species, including minkes and pilots, as well as dolphins and on one occasion a sei whale with a calf. At sea they have been observed fewer than 25 times. Nevertheless they are unique and wonderful, ancient animals and deserving of our affection and respect. Any thoughts on what we might call them? The picture at the top of this entry is of a whale which, in 2013, got stranded on a beach in Namibia. It was rescued and returned to the sea, and there's a video of the rescue here. A blogger recorded the event on this blog.