Fin whales off Pico

The animal

The fin whale, Balaenoptera physalus, is the second-largest whale after the blue whale, and its close relative. Both are rorquals, baleen whales with long, streamlined bodies that feed by taking in large mouthfuls of water and straining out small prey. Seen from a boat, a fin whale is long, dark and fast, and quite unlike the blunt-headed sperm whale, the toothed whale that dominates the records for these waters.

What the records show

OBIS holds 1,137 fin whale records inside the box of sea around Pico that this site queries, more than half as many again as for the blue whale. They fall in seven months, March to September. May is the busiest, with 528 records, followed by June and then April. July and August hold a few dozen each, and September only a couple.

So the fin whale follows the same spring pattern as the blue whale, but stretched: it starts at the same time, peaks in the same month, and tails off later into the summer. Neither is logged at all from October to February.

How to read that

These are records, not animals, and not a forecast. A record is one logged observation, so a single whale followed by several boats can produce several. Records also depend on who is out looking, and far more boats go out in the warmer months. Here that makes the late-summer fall more telling, not less: July and August are busy months for common dolphin and sperm whale records, so the boats are out, and they are logging few fin whales.

Conservation status

Wikidata, citing the IUCN Red List, gives the fin whale's status as Vulnerable. The species was described by Linnaeus in 1758.

Related

• All five species, and how the counts are built: whale and dolphin species off Pico.
• The rarest of them in the data: the orca.
• Every species month by month: the season calendar.
• The approach rules and the licensed operators: whale watching on Pico.

Length, weight and population figures are not given here, because none has been checked against a primary source.