![]() The study was published in the journal Marine Mammal Science. ![]() “As it low energy cost for the whale, this feeding activity makes most sense when there is smaller schooling fish left over after a feeding frenzy.”īryde’s whales and humpbacks are both rorquals, a type of baleen whale. “The trap feeding very likely only works in the presence of other predators,” Meynecke said, adding that it had been observed in individual whales and was not a social feeding activity. “It shows that such interesting feeding behaviour has clearly captured humans’ imagination in the past. “The lack of scientific observations prior to the last two decades might be explained by the relative rarity of this feeding strategy, or alternatively because the strategy was not being used.”ĭr Olaf Meynecke, a research fellow at Griffith University’s coastal and marine research centre, who was not involved in the research, said: “It is interesting that this type of feeding was documented thousands of years ago but described as a new technique in recent years.” The researchers noted: “Definitive proof for the origins of myths is exceedingly rare and often impossible, but the parallels here are far more striking and persistent than any previous suggestions. Photograph: Surachai Passada/Department of Marine and Coastal Resources View image in fullscreen A Bryde’s whale feeding in the Gulf of Thailand. At the surface, humpbacks appear dark grey and are easy to spot thanks to their fifteen-foot spout when they exhale. And while they’re still dwarfed by blue and fin whales, an adult humpback whale can be up to fifty feet long and can weigh almost one ton per foot. ![]() But when his mouth is filled with diverse little fish, he suddenly closes his mouth and swallows them.” Humpback whales are some of the largest animals on the planet. In the Naturalist – a 2,000-year-old text that “preserves zoological information brought to Egypt from India and the Middle East by early natural historians like Herodotus, Ctesias, Aristotle and Plutarch” – the ancient Greeks referred to the creature as aspidochelone.Ī surviving version of the text reads: “When it is hungry it opens its mouth and exhales a certain kind of good-smelling odour from its mouth, the smell of which, once the smaller fish have perceived it, they gather themselves in its mouth. ![]() “Now we think we have an explanation for that.” “The hafgufa was frustrating for these scholars because they couldn’t quite figure out any animal that this matched to,” McCarthy said. A 1986 analysis of the King’s Mirror had found correlations between 26 Old Norse descriptions and scientifically recognised marine animals, but had concluded that the hafgufa “must be relegated to the world of the miraculous”. ![]()
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