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.