Whale Saga

Whale Saga 🐋 Every ocean giant carries a story older than civilization itself. We follow them. We witness them. We tell their stories.

From the deepest trenches to the warmest shores — this is the Whale Saga. 🌊

Iceland just committed to something no government has done before: a bill to permanently end commercial whaling, to be s...
10/03/2026

Iceland just committed to something no government has done before: a bill to permanently end commercial whaling, to be submitted to parliament in February. 🐋 It's not law yet — that's the part worth being clear about — but it's a real political commitment from a government that holds a parliamentary majority. If it passes, only Norway and Japan would remain as the world's commercial whaling nations. The push follows Iceland's own veterinary authority confirming that explosive harpoons can take whales up to 20 minutes to die, and a hunting season where even the last buyer, Japan, had already stopped accepting the meat. 🌊 Twenty years of Iceland standing alongside Norway and Japan against the global whaling moratorium may be ending — but only if February's vote goes through.

Off Maui in February, researchers photographed something rare: a newborn false killer whale swimming beside her mother. ...
09/27/2026

Off Maui in February, researchers photographed something rare: a newborn false killer whale swimming beside her mother. 🐬 This population — the only endangered false killer whales anywhere on Earth — numbers about 140 individuals, and only 10 newborn calves have been documented since 1999. In August, both new calves were spotted again, now around eight months old, past the most vulnerable stretch of their lives. One calf's mother, HIPc0363, has been tracked by researchers since 2009 — this is the first calf anyone has ever seen her with. 🌊 The population has been declining roughly 3.5% a year since 2013, and a female won't have more than a handful of calves in her entire life. Two calves, still swimming, are about as close to good news as this population gets right now.

Off the coast of British Columbia, researchers just documented something that had never been recorded before: orcas and ...
09/26/2026

Off the coast of British Columbia, researchers just documented something that had never been recorded before: orcas and dolphins hunting together as a team. 🐋 Pacific white-sided dolphins dive down and act as scouts, tracking Chinook salmon too big for them to catch alone. The orcas follow close behind, sometimes 60 meters down, and make the kill. Then the orcas share the scraps — tolerating the dolphins moving in to feed on what's left, instead of chasing them off. 🐬 Researchers caught it on underwater tags: both species echolocating back and forth the whole time, possibly listening in on each other's clicks to find the fish faster. Two predators, from two completely different families, working the same hunt. Nobody had ever filmed that before. 🌊

A man finishing work near Patricia Bay on Vancouver Island looked up to see up to eight orcas working a floating log bre...
09/15/2026

A man finishing work near Patricia Bay on Vancouver Island looked up to see up to eight orcas working a floating log breakwater like a team. 🐋 Harbour seals were hauled out on the logs. The orcas rammed and rocked them, pushing waves over the top — anything to knock the seals into the water where the odds flip completely. It's textbook Bigg's killer whale behaviour: the Pacific Whale Watch Association says they do the same thing to knock prey off docks, rocks, and ice floes in Antarctica. 🌊 Here's the part that stopped us: this pod is the T109As — relatives of Brave Little Hunter, the orphaned calf who spent a month trapped in a Vancouver Island lagoon in 2024 before making her own escape. She hasn't been confirmed seen in about two years. Her family is still out here, still hunting together.

Iceland's government says it will submit a bill in February to permanently end commercial whaling in the country — but t...
09/11/2026

Iceland's government says it will submit a bill in February to permanently end commercial whaling in the country — but the story behind that announcement is messier than the headline suggests.

This June, Icelandic whaling ships left port to hunt fin whales for the first time in two years. By the time hunting wrapped, around 80 whales had been killed by Hvalur hf., Iceland's last remaining whaling company — even though Japan, the only country still buying the meat, stopped accepting imports back in August. There was no buyer left. The hunt continued anyway, ending with a final total of 23 whales killed in the shortened season, along with one unborn calf and one whale that was struck and lost.

The welfare case against the hunts has been building for a while. An official report from Iceland's own veterinary authority found that the explosive harpoons used can take up to 20 minutes to kill a whale — falling short of the country's own animal welfare standards. A previous suspension of the hunts, prompted by those same welfare concerns, was expected to end things for good. It didn't.

Now Iceland's industries minister has committed to rewriting the whaling law entirely, with a permanent ban built in. But conservation groups are cautious rather than celebratory: existing five-year hunting licenses issued in 2024 may still run their course regardless of what the new law says, meaning boats could still go out next summer even after the bill passes. If the ban does eventually take full effect, only Norway and Japan would remain as the world's commercial whaling nations.

Source: Whale and Dolphin Conservation, "Icelandic government to introduce bill to end whaling," published September 11, 2026 (uk.whales.org)

09/11/2026

Two kilometers down, in water with zero sunlight, a s***m whale is hunting blind — and winning. 🐋 They can hold their breath for over an hour and dive deeper than almost any other mammal on Earth, chasing giant squid through total darkness. Instead of eyes, they use sound: rapid, thunderous clicks — some of the loudest sounds any animal on the planet makes — that bounce off a squid's body and echo back. The faster the echoes return, the closer the prey. Scientists still find deep scars on s***m whales' skin from squid tentacles that fought back on the way down. 🌊 Most of what happens on that hunt has never been filmed. It happens too deep, in the dark, where almost nothing else can follow. 🦑

Scientists have been counting southern right whales off Australia's Great Australian Bight every year since 1976 — one o...
09/07/2026

Scientists have been counting southern right whales off Australia's Great Australian Bight every year since 1976 — one of the longest-running whale surveys in the world. 🐋 This year's count found something worth sitting with: overall sightings are down, and the females' breeding cycle, once reliably every 3 years, is now stretching toward 5, as warmer water means less krill and less body fat to support a calf. But inside the marine park itself, 61 mother-calf pairs showed up — more than 30% of the entire regional total. 🌊 One researcher called it plainly: a conservation success story for the marine park. Fifty years of data, and the one piece of ocean actually protected is the piece still working. ❤️

In June, a cruise ship pulled into port in Seward, Alaska with a dead fin whale draped across its bow. The necropsy was ...
09/07/2026

In June, a cruise ship pulled into port in Seward, Alaska with a dead fin whale draped across its bow. The necropsy was hard to read: blunt trauma to the jaw, spine, ribs — all consistent with a vessel strike. 🐋 Now, for the first time, a marine mammal observer is riding along on an Alaska cruise ship all season, tracking exactly how whales and ships collide so it stops happening. She's watching for humpbacks and fin whales from a rig of binoculars and cameras, training crew on the two things that actually save a whale's life: slow down, or turn. 🌊 Researchers say strikes like Seward's happen to thousands of whales a year — most never even get counted. This season, on this one ship, at least one whale's odds just got a little better. ❤️

Off the coast of Newfoundland this week, a couple filming from shore caught something almost nobody sees anymore: a Nort...
09/05/2026

Off the coast of Newfoundland this week, a couple filming from shore caught something almost nobody sees anymore: a North Atlantic right whale gliding past, alone, right along the coastline. 🐋 There are only about 384 of these whales left on Earth. For years that number was falling — down to 358 in 2020 — and researchers braced for the worst. This year it didn't fall. Fisheries officials just confirmed the decline has actually halted, and there's more: roughly 23 calves were born this season, one of the best calving years on record. 🌊 It's still fragile — losing even one breeding female could undo the progress. But for one afternoon off Newfoundland, a whale scientists worried we might lose just... showed up. ❤️

Something Huge Is About to Happen Beneath This WaterFrom above, the ocean looks almost completely calm.Then a fin whale ...
09/03/2026

Something Huge Is About to Happen Beneath This Water

From above, the ocean looks almost completely calm.
Then a fin whale (Balaenoptera physalus) turns, opens its enormous mouth, and engulfs a dense patch of prey-laden water in one explosive lunge.

Fin whales use this feeding technique to gulp huge volumes of water and prey before filtering the water through hundreds of baleen plates.

Nature doesn't always look powerful until you see it from above. 🐋🌊

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