Factbites
 Where results make sense
About us   |   Why use us?   |   Reviews   |   PR   |   Contact us  

Topic: Bowhead Whale


Related Topics

  
  Bowhead Whale | Cetacean Fact Sheet | American Cetacean Society
Bowhead whales have a high bridge (termed the "stack") on which sit the nostrils, and with this are able to smash through ice that is 1-2 feet thick to breathe, presumably as they visually follow long cracks and valleys we now know to mark the bottom of the ice.
Bowhead whales are blue-fl in color, except for a variable amount of white on the lower jaw.
Worldwide, bowhead whales are found in the western Arctic (Bering, Chukchi, and Beaufort Seas), the Canadian Arctic (Baffin Bay, Davis Strait, and Hudson Bay), the Okhotsk Sea (in Russia, between the mainland, the Kamchatka Peninsula, and the Kuril Islands), and Spitsbergen westward to Greenland in the far north Atlantic Ocean.
www.acsonline.org /factpack/bowhead.htm   (1212 words)

  
 Species Status Reports - Bowhead Whale
Bowhead whales of the western Arctic stock overwinter in the Bering Sea and undertake an annual migration to the Beaufort Sea and Amundsen Gulf summering areas.
Bowheads generally communicate at low frequencies, similar to frequencies emitted from industrial sources, and thus are at greater risk for disturbance or masking than other species such as beluga whales which communicate at higher frequencies.
Whenever a bowhead whale is landed, FJMC and DFO undertake measurements and sample tissue of the landed whale.
www.taiga.net /wmac/researchplan/reports/bowhead.html   (1159 words)

  
 Bowhead Whales (Balaena mysticetus)   (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-11)
Bowhead whales were hunted by commercial whalers for over four centuries, beginning in the North Atlantic in the 1500s and ending in the North Pacific by the mid-1900s.
Bowhead whales have the longest baleen of all the mysticete whales with a maximum length of 13.1 feet (4 meters).
Bowhead whales are capable of breaking through sea ice at least 7.9 inches (20 centimeters) thick; some Eskimo hunters have reported whales surfacing through 2 feet (60 centimeters) of thick ice.
nmml.afsc.noaa.gov /education/cetaceans/bowhead1.htm   (274 words)

  
 Beluga Whale   (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-11)
The bowhead whale was once - and if their numbers continue to increase- may again become an important part of the traditional diet and an essential resource for Inuit.
Bowhead whaling was so much a part of Inuit culture and so vital to Inuit survival, that most Inuit would like to see the return of the bowhead whale hunt.
Bowhead whales are so strong that they can break through thick arctic ice to create breathing holes, and it has been discovered that their blubber is so thick and insulated that they could survive submersion in liquid nitrogen.
www.itk.ca /environment/wildlife-bowhead.php   (360 words)

  
 The Bowhead Whale, Balena mysticetus: Its Historic and Current Status   (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-11)
Bowhead whales in the western North Atlantic are currently segregated into two stocks, one occupying Davis Strait, Baffin Bay, and along the Canadian Arctic Archipelago (Davis Strait stock) and the other found in Hudson Strait, Hudson Bay, and Foxe Basin (Hudson Bay stock) (as defined in Moore and Reeves, 1993; Fig.
Bowhead whales observed in Hudson Strait, which connects the Bay to the Labrador Sea, are believed to be migrants leaving the Hudson Bay area in the autumn or returning in the spring (Finley et al., 1982; Reeves and Mitchell, 1990).
Bowhead whales frequently react to being struck with a harpoon by rotating rapidly (Philo et al., 1993).
www.afsc.noaa.gov /NMML/CetaceanAssessment/bowhead/bmsos.htm   (8628 words)

  
 Save the Whales
A 19th century whaling captain, Scoresby, wrote “...when the mouth is open it presents a cavity as large as a room.” From the upper jaw of the massive curved mouth, as many as 300 triangles of narrow baleen may hang.
Bowhead whales use underwater sounds - described as low moans - to communicate while they are socializing, traveling and feeding.
Bowhead color is blue-fl except for a splotch of white on their chin called a vest.
www.savethewhales.org /bowhead.html   (828 words)

  
 Fact Sheets > Bowhead Whale
Stocks of bowhead whales are known to occur: (1) North of Europe, (2) between Canada and Greenland, (3) in Hudson Bay area, (4) the Okhotsk Sea, and (5) the Bering, Chukchi, and Beaufort seas.
Bowhead whales can spend a great deal of time under ice, and it is still unknown how the whales find their next breathing holes.
Bowhead whales were commercially hunted for oil, meat, and apparel materials (corset stays, umbrella ribs, buggy whips, and more) from the 17th through the early 20th century.
www.fact-sheets.com /science-nature/animals/bowhead_whale   (655 words)

  
 Bowhead Whale, species of special concern, Alaska Department of Fish and Game
Bowhead whales are the only baleen whales that spend their entire lives in and around Arctic waters.
The baleen plates of bowhead whales, which are used to strain prey from the water, are the longest of any baleen whale, exceeding 9.5 feet.
Bowhead whales, along with the other large whale species, were declared to be endangered species in 1973, under the federal Endangered Species Act.
www.wildlife.alaska.gov /index.cfm?adfg=concern.bowhead   (402 words)

  
 Bowhead Whale: Wildlife Notebook Series - Alaska Department of Fish and Game
Bowhead whales (Balaena mysticetus) are the only mysticete (baleen) whales that spend their entire lives near sea ice and do not migrate to temperate or tropical waters to calve.
Bowheads are well adapted for living in arctic and subarctic waters—they have very thick blubber, up to 1½ feet (.5 m), which is used for insulation, food storage, and padding, and heavy bone structure in their skulls for breaking ice.
Bowhead calves are gray and adults are fl with varying amounts of white on their chins, bellies, and tail areas.
www.adfg.state.ak.us /pubs/notebook/marine/bowhead.php   (1209 words)

  
 Discovering Whales - The Bowhead Whale
Bowhead whales (like the Right whales) feed primarily by skimming with their mouths open through surface concentrations of plankton.
Distribution of the Bowhead is circumpolar confined to the Arctic, associated with ice.
Bowheads migrate relative to the formation and movement of ice, north in summer, south in winter.
www.omplace.com /omsites/discover/BOWHEAD/bowg.html   (631 words)

  
 Bowhead Whales May Be the World's Oldest Mammals, Alaska Science Forum
Along with new chemical evidence from the whales' eyes, the harpoon tips suggest that the bowhead may be the oldest living mammal on Earth.
Scientists previously thought that bowheads had a lifespan similar to other whales, but the old harpoon points hint that some of the whales alive today were swimming in the cold waters of the circumpolar oceans more than 100 years ago.
The oldest known ages for mammals are 110 years for a blue whale and 114 years for a fin whale, based on a Japanese scientist's counting of waxy laminates on the inner ear plug of the whales, a method that does not work for bowheads.
www.gi.alaska.edu /ScienceForum/ASF15/1529.html   (789 words)

  
 Wise Laboratory of Environmental and Genetic Toxicology - Bowhead Whale Toxicology Studies
The bowhead whale is a large whale found in the Artic, and the largest population, the Bering-Chukchi-Beaufort Seas (BCBS) stock, migrates between the eastern Beaufort Sea-Amudsen Gulf in summer and the Bering Sea in the winter.
The population of this stock is estimated to be 8,200 and is gradually recovering from commercial hunting pressures in the late 1800's and early 1900's at an annual 3.2% rate of population increase (1).
Bowhead whales are considered perhaps the best animal to compare with right whales, a species that is severely endangered (See link to right whale page), because they are the only two members of the family Balaenidae and are more closely related to each other than they are to any other marine mammal (2, 3).
www.usm.maine.edu /toxicology/research/bowhead.php   (931 words)

  
 BOWHEAD WHALE
Bowheads live in pods, are rich in blubber (a subcutaneous layer 20-inch (50 cm) thick in places), and have 2 blowholes.
Bowhead whales (like all baleen whales) are seasonal feeders and carnivores that filter feed plankton and tiny crustaceans like krill, copepods, pteropods, etc., from the water.
Bowhead whales are not extremely social and congregate in small pods of about 3 whales in the spring and pods of about 50 whales in the fall.
www.zoomdinosaurs.com /subjects/whales/species/Bowheadwhale.shtml   (781 words)

  
 Marine Mammals - Bowhead Whale
The bowhead whale, Balaena mysticetus, is an exclusively northern species that inhabits arctic and subarctic waters, never straying far from the edge of the pack ice.
Bowhead whales grow up to 18 m long and weigh 60 to 100 tonnes, and yet they can extract enough resources from a diet of krill to produce a 50 cm thick layer of blubber that weighs 30 tonnes.
Bowhead whales bear a distinct white patch on their chin and tail, while the rest of their body is fl, blue-fl, dark grey, or dark brown.
www.arctic.uoguelph.ca /cpl/organisms/mammals/Marine/bowhead.htm   (383 words)

  
 Bowhead Whale (Balaena mysticetus) Whales, Right Whales, Baleen, Cetaceans.
Bowheads are only found in the northern hemisphere following the seasonal expansion and contraction of sea ice where they feed on various types of zooplankton using a trawling method, cruising along with the mouth open.
Bowhead Whales have no dorsal fin, no throat pleats, no barnacles and no callosities or other obvious markings except for a large white to pale grey bib of pigmentation on the chin, lower jaw and throat.
Bowheads are slow moving animals, as are all Right Whales, raising their broad, fl sculptured flukes prior to diving.
www.marinethemes.com /bowhead.html   (424 words)

  
 The Bowhead Whale, Alaska Science Forum
Fearing total extinction of the bowhead whale, the International Whaling Commission has now limited Alaskan Eskimos to a total of 12 killed or 18 struck whales per year, much to the consternation of the villagers on Alaska's northwest coast.
Whale oil is used as a lubricant, for cold-rolling and quenching of steel and for manufacturing soaps, cosmetics and detergents.
Whale byproducts are used for fertilizer and for cattle and poultry feed.
www.gi.alaska.edu /ScienceForum/ASF2/207.html   (365 words)

  
 Bowhead whale - Balaena mysticetus: More Information - ARKive
The bowhead whale is so-called because of its bow-shaped mouth (5) and is fl in colour with a whitish chin patch (3), broken by a 'necklace' of fl spots (6).
Amazingly, this whale is known to live to over 100 years of age, a fact established by the discovery of stone harpoon heads (out of use since the late 1800s) in the flesh of specimens (5).
The population of bowhead whales appears able to absorb this low-level pressure however, and numbers are increasing in some areas (3).
www.arkive.org /species/GES/mammals/Balaena_mysticetus/more_info.html   (601 words)

  
 OSU MMP Bowhead Whale Research
Satellite-monitored movements of radio-tagged bowhead whales in the Beaufort and Chukchi seas during the late-summer feeding season and fall migration
This is the first documentation of the detailed route and speed for a bowhead whale during its fall migration from Canadian to Russian waters.
Dive and surfacing characteristics of bowhead whales (Balaena mysticetus) in the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas
oregonstate.edu /groups/marinemammal/Bowhead.htm   (608 words)

  
 WWF - Whale watching in the Arctic - The Bowhead Whale (Balaena mysticetus)   (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-11)
Compared to the other great whales, bowheads are relatively compact, rotund fl whales up to 19.8m long, with heads that are about a third of their body length.
Bowhead whales are only found in the Northern Hemisphere, in the arctic waters of northern Europe, Canada, Greenland, the Hudson Bay area, the Okhotsk Sea, and the Bering, Chukchi, and Beaufort seas between Alaska and Russia.
Bowhead whales have the longest baleen of all the mysticete whales, with a maximum length of four metres.
www.ngo.grida.no /wwfap/whalewatching/whales_bowhead.shtml   (487 words)

  
 Bowhead whale - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Bowhead whales are robust-bodied, dark-coloured animals with no dorsal fin and a strongly bowed lower jaw and narrow upper jaw.
The baleen plates, exceeding three meters and the longest of the baleen whales, are used to strain tiny prey from the water.
The bowhead whale was described by Carolus Linnaeus in the 10th edition of his Systema Naturae (1758).
en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Bowhead_Whale   (1029 words)

  
 Becki Trudell's Science Report-Bowhead Whale
The Bowhead whale is a big and beautiful whale that most people have never heard of.
The bowhead whale is confined to the Artic seas.
The Bowhead, along with other whales, are believed to have the best hearing of all living creatures on the earth.
www.webdesigncentral.com /becki   (780 words)

  
 Bowhead Whale - Search Results - MSN Encarta   (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-11)
Bowhead Whale, also known as the Greenland right whale or arctic whale, whale found in the icy waters of the Arctic ocean that has been hunted...
Perhaps the most intriguing indication of whale intelligence came with the discovery in the 1970s of whale singing, most notably in humpbacks....
Early written records suggest that organized, commercial whaling may have begun in the 900s in western Europe.
encarta.msn.com /Bowhead_Whale.html   (114 words)

  
 Bowhead Whales Resources on the Web
The bowhead whale (Balaena mysticetus), also called the Greenland whale, is a large whale of up to 20 metres in length.
The bowhead whale has a very large head, with a great mouth and large lips; it is mainly blue-fl in color, with cream-colored blotches on the lower part of the jaw, and white blotches on the belly; there is a pale grey area on the tail
The status of the bowhead whale stocks in the Okhotsk Sea (North Pacific Ocean), and Spitsbergen-East Greenland, Davis Strait-Baffin Bay, and Hudson Bay-Foxe Basin (North Atlantic Ocean), is unknown.
www.cdli.ca /CITE/whalebowhead.htm   (349 words)

  
 Nunavut Bowhead Whale Hunt a Sad Start to Sovereignty
The killing of this Bowhead whale was conducted in part to herald the return of Nunavut to Innu rule, and the whale will now be butchered and distributed to various Nunavut villages across the Eastern Arctic region.
At a time that whales and their ecosystems come under new global pressures from atmospheric and marine pollution, pirate whaling, diminishing biodiversity and a host of other, undefined threats, all cultures must embrace the social evolutionary principles of global protectionism.
Whaling, not unlike the rapid deforestation of tropical rainforest, or the industrial production of ozone-depleting gases, is another abomination of our collective biodiversity-diminishing history that must, for all time, be put to rest.
home.earthlink.net /~projseawolf/Nunavut.htm   (823 words)

  
 Marine Mammals: Bowhead Whale: Audio Gallery for Discovery of Sound in the Sea
Bowhead whales are easily distinguished by their enormous head, white chin, and lack of
Bowhead whales are found in five separate populations in the Arctic Ocean, migrating north and south with the seasonal movement of the edge of the pack ice.
Clark, C.W. and Johnson, J.H. The sounds of the bowhead whale, Balaena mysticetus, during the spring migrations of 1979 and 1980.
www.dosits.org /gallery/marinemm/15.htm   (396 words)

  
 PEZT - animal information - Bowheadwhale
The bowhead whale is fl in color, with a white chin.
Bowhead whales inhabit the frigid water of the Arctic.
Bowhead whales have not been well observed by scientists, so very little is known about their social behavior.
members.tripod.com /rc-anodizing/PEZT/animalsCC/bowheadwhale.htm   (592 words)

Try your search on: Qwika (all wikis)

Factbites
  About us   |   Why use us?   |   Reviews   |   Press   |   Contact us  
Copyright © 2005-2007 www.factbites.com Usage implies agreement with terms.