Head to head
Humpback Whale vs Blue Whale
Both are baleen whales in the rorqual family, both feed by engulfing huge mouthfuls of water and straining out the food, and both were hunted heavily in the twentieth century. But they are very different animals to meet. The humpback is a chunky, active, noisy whale that puts on a show. The blue whale is the biggest creature in the history of the planet and does much less at the surface.
| Humpback Whale | Blue Whale | |
|---|---|---|
| Length | 13 to 16 m | 24 to 30 m |
| Weight | 30 to 40 tonnes | Up to 150 tonnes or more; the largest animal ever |
| Body and flippers | Stocky; flippers up to a third of body length | Slender and streamlined; relatively small flippers |
| Head | Covered in fleshy knobs (tubercles) | Broad, smooth, U-shaped |
| Behaviour at the surface | Highly acrobatic; breaches and slaps often | Rarely breaches; usually just surfaces to breathe |
| Feeding | Fish and krill; cooperative bubble-net feeding | Almost entirely krill; solo lunge feeding |
| Sound | Long, complex, culturally evolving songs (males) | Simple, very loud, very low-frequency moans |
| Conservation status | Least Concern (most populations recovered) | Endangered (recovering slowly) |
Humpback Whale vs Blue Whale: common questions
How much bigger is a blue whale than a humpback?
Roughly twice as long and three to five times as heavy. A large humpback is about 16 metres and perhaps 40 tonnes; a large blue whale is around 27 to 30 metres and can weigh 150 tonnes or more, with the biggest reliably measured individuals heavier still. The blue whale is the largest animal known to have ever lived, exceeding even the biggest dinosaurs, its heart alone is the size of a small car, and its tongue can weigh as much as an elephant. A humpback is a big whale by any normal standard, but it is comfortably in the blue whale's shadow.
Which one is the whale that sings?
The humpback is famous for song. Male humpbacks produce long, structured sequences of moans, cries, and chirps that can last many minutes and are repeated for hours, and all the males in a population sing broadly the same song, which then changes gradually over months and years and can spread from one ocean region to another. Blue whales also vocalise, and their calls carry for enormous distances underwater, but they are simple, repetitive, extremely low-pitched sounds rather than the varied, musical phrases of a humpback. When people play recordings of whale song, it is almost always a humpback.
Why has the humpback recovered but the blue whale has not?
Both were driven down by industrial whaling, but they started and ended in different places. Humpbacks were numerous, breed relatively quickly, use coastal waters where they are easier to protect, and many populations were given protection earlier; since commercial hunting of them stopped, most stocks have rebounded strongly, some to near their original numbers. Blue whales were fewer to begin with, were hunted intensively into the 1960s, especially in the Southern Ocean where the largest population was reduced to perhaps a percent or two of its former size, breed slowly, and range across vast areas of open ocean. Recovery from that low a point, for an animal that produces one calf every two to three years, takes many decades, and blue whales remain Endangered.