Whales Reading Comprehension Lesson

Giants of the Ocean

Whales are the largest animals that have ever lived on Earth. The blue whale, the biggest of all whale species, can reach 100 feet in length and weigh up to 200 tons — heavier than the largest dinosaur that ever lived. Despite their enormous size, whales are not fish. They are mammals: warm-blooded, air-breathing animals that give birth to live young and nurse their calves with milk. Whales breathe through blowholes on the tops of their heads, surfacing regularly to exhale and inhale.

There are two main groups of whales: toothed whales and baleen whales. Toothed whales — which include sperm whales, orcas, dolphins, and porpoises — have teeth and actively hunt fish, squid, and other prey. The sperm whale, which can dive to depths of more than 7,000 feet in search of giant squid, has the largest brain of any animal that has ever lived. Baleen whales — which include blue whales, humpback whales, and gray whales — have no teeth. Instead, they have rows of comb-like plates called baleen that filter enormous quantities of tiny krill and small fish from the water.

Whales are found in every ocean on Earth, from the warm tropics to the icy waters of the Arctic and Antarctic. Many whale species undertake extraordinary seasonal migrations — traveling thousands of miles between feeding grounds in cold, nutrient-rich polar waters and warmer breeding and calving grounds closer to the equator. The gray whale makes one of the longest migrations of any mammal, traveling up to 12,000 miles round-trip each year between its feeding grounds in the Bering Sea and its breeding lagoons in Mexico.

Songs, Intelligence, and Conservation

Humpback whales are famous for their complex songs, which males sing during the breeding season. A humpback song can last for 20 minutes and be heard hundreds of miles away underwater. All the male humpbacks in a given region sing the same song, but the song gradually changes over time as new phrases are introduced and spread from whale to whale — a form of cultural transmission previously thought to exist only in humans and a few other intelligent species.

Whales are highly intelligent and social animals. They form close family bonds, cooperate in feeding and calf-rearing, and have been observed showing what appear to be signs of grief when a calf dies. Sperm whales live in close-knit matriarchal family groups, similar to elephants, in which older females teach younger ones the skills and knowledge needed to survive. Orcas, the largest members of the dolphin family, have distinct cultural traditions: different pods have their own calls, hunting techniques, and social behaviors that are passed from generation to generation.

Commercial whaling devastated whale populations throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. The International Whaling Commission instituted a moratorium on commercial whaling in 1986, and many species have slowly begun to recover. However, whales still face serious threats: entanglement in fishing gear, ship strikes, ocean noise pollution that interferes with their communication, and the effects of climate change on their prey. Several species, including the North Atlantic right whale, remain critically endangered, with fewer than 400 individuals left in the wild.

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