#bubble feeding

Humpback Bubble-Feeding is cool, and important to conservation.

Humpbacks are high on my list of fascinating animals, in part because of this sort of spectacular and complex behavior, filmed by drone in Alaska’s Prince William Sound:

For the uninitiated, I09 describes what is going on:

Typically, humpback whales lunge into a shoal of prey, but as described in Arkive, they also herd their prey using a “bubble net” to trap them in…

The whales were split up into smaller groups of three or so and making bubble nets to heard up their prey. They were moving around so much, it was hard to keep track of them all! We got some amazing looks at the bubble feeding strategy that humpbacks employ as well as some amazing looks at the humpbacks themselves. Bubble feeding is when the whales go below the surface of the water and blow a ring or net of bubbles around schools of fish. The bubbles act to heard the fish together making it easy for the whale to swim up through the center of the bubble net and scoop all the fish up in it's mouth. In the pictures I took, you can see an individual whale coming up in the center of a bubble net and then the same whale with it's mouth wide open, while another individual joins in beside it.