Ok, this is disgusting, but… still incredibly cool.
I mean, it’s just rotting whale going everywhere, but that’s the thing about witnessing nature, it’s always unexpected.
Whales can be the largest creatures in the world. The blue whale takes the crown measuring up to 98 feet long and coming in at 180 tons.
Even small whale species are massive compared to humans.
For an animal that large, you have to wonder what happens when they die?
Well, whales offer more than just being massive and an excellent meal for other ocean creatures.
When whales die their body starts to decompose like everything. Their thick skin and fat layers holds everything on the inside and gas starts to build up so the insides rot away.
The gas gets so back up that it actually bursts out of the body causing what looks to be a whale explosion.
This is known to happen, but incredibly rare to see. I mean, how many whales does a person see in the wild in their lifetime? Let alone seeing one explode…
These folks where out on their boat when they came across a whale carcass off the coast of California.
As they are checking it out, it suddenly explodes. As the gas clears out of the new holes, so do its guts, leaving the ocean water looking like a murder scene out of a horror movie.
Nature is wild.
Two Male Brown Bears Battle Over Whale Carcass
I recently got back from the lovely state of Montana, and while I didn’t run into any bears while I was there (probably a good thing), you get a first hand account of the vast, incredible, and humbling beauty this country has to offer.
And while Montana is amazing, it gets no more vast, incredible and humbling than… Alaska.
In this incredible footage at the Katmai Coast of Southern Alaska, we get to watch as two coastal brown bears engage in a vicious fight over a beached whale carcass.
According to Expeditions Alaska, two big male brown bears were laying claim to this beached whale carcass when some other bears came walking up to chow down.
That’s when all hell broke loose:
“These two large male brown bears had been strutting and posturing and peeing and rubbing, jaw clacking, and carrying on, generally chest-pounding, trying their best to intimidate one another, for near 20 minutes.
During this time, a few other smaller bears had come in and started feeding on the carcass, including this sow and her single yearling cub. One of the males came down and began to feed as well, but didn’t seem unduly concerned about the sow/cub on the other side of the whale carcass.”
But then, the female gets attacked:
“Finally, the second male came down, with that classic side-stepping strutting gait, and headed straight for the female. Her cub bails, and rather than follow suit, she gets defensive.
The power is pretty impressive, watch how far backward she goes each time. And incredibly deft footwork for her… if she didn’t maintain her balance, she’d have been in bigger trouble.”
But then, the other male comes to her rescue and it’s on.
The second male surprises the original attacker, but them seem to be well-matched for each other in size and power. They grapple like it’s a UFC fight, while the sow and her cub manages to get away.
Eventually, they’ve had enough and they separate, both looking pretty gassed from the tussle.
And we have a front row seat.
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Massive Humpback Whale Rise Out Of Water & Demolish Fishing Boat
This is mortifying…
Straight up nightmare fuel.
Last fall, video footage went viral of a massive humpback whale leaping from the water, and hitting the bow of a boat off the coast of Plymouth, Massachusetts.
Luckily, there were no injuries sustained, which is a miracle considering those bad boys weigh between 55,000 to 66,000 pounds. Like, do you hear that? The thing is bigger and heavier than a damn school bus.
The boat however, was… pretty destroyed.
Filmed from a safe distance, it’s no surprise that the wild video went viral, just watching this majestic beast come up from the water out of nowhere, and body slam the boat… it’s insane.
However, this alternate angle will have you breaking out in cold sweats.
One of the passengers on the boat happened to be filming when the humpback leapt from the water.
You can see the passengers are just having a calm, relaxed day on the water, when all of a sudden, you see fish fly from the water, and the massive humpback shadowing straight over the top of the boat, coming down and hitting the bow.
Seriously, this looks like something made from a movie, and definitely not real life.
I just couldn’t imagine being in a situation like this, and you already know everybody on that boat thought for a split second they were about to get crushed by a humpback whale.
Insanity:
Humpback Whale Leaps Out Of Water And Drenches Nearby Boat
Puts Splash Mountain to shame…
I mean, talk about getting your moneys worth out of a whale watching tour. It really doesn’t get much crazier than this.
Humpbacks are absolutely ginormous, weighing up to 66,000 pounds and stretching as far as 55-feet long. We’re talking twice the size of a school bus… that means even a small one is massive by our standards.
Whale watching is a favorite of many tourists around the world. It provides a very safe way of viewing some pretty incredible animals that you just don’t see every day.
Though many people go out to do this, not very many get encounters this close. Hell, some people don’t even see a whale. This group should head to the store and buy a lottery ticket because they had some luck on this day.
A group of whale watchers went out into the deep blue off the coast of Port Macquarie, NSW, Australia, looking for some ocean giants.
The video shows the group eagerly waiting to see the show they came for.
Out of nowhere a humpback comes nearly completely out of the water.
The crowd all gives a good “woah!” as they get absolutely drenched in water, with the whale being mere yards from the boat… and whales have taken down boats before by landing on them.
But thankfully, that wasn’t the case here… talk about a good bang for your buck.
This humpback was no giant in terms of how big they can get, but its still a massive animal.
The young whale was excited to put on a show for the group, and the, it casually raced away with its family back into the abyss.
What a great encounter with some cool animals.
Great White Sharks Chow On Humpback Whale Carcass Off The Coast Of Massachusetts
Sharks and whales, eh?
Nothing gets the weekend started like a good old fashioned feeding frenzy.
And an absolutely spectacular feeding frenzy recently went down off the coast of Massachusetts as the bloated carcass of a dead humpback whale brought in a group of 8 great white sharks looking for a feast.
A team of scientists in the area was notified that a dead whale had floated to the surface not far from where they were conducting research on basking sharks. They rushed to the scene in hopes of being able to observe what types of marine predators would come in to scavenge the carcass, and they wound up capturing some absolutely incredible shark feeding footage.
And local whale watching tours were even able to make it to the scene in time to watch the show.
In the video, the sharks can be seen rising out of the water to rip chunks of blubber off of the dead whale.
The team witnessed 8 different sharks attacking the expired whale. Flocks of birds could also be seen getting in on the action.
The sharks were so distracted by the feast in from of them that the researchers were able to tag 5 of them acoustic tracking devices that will provide important data on shark movements.
“One of the hardest things to communicate to people is how massive white sharks can be. Until you see one in person, it’s hard to appreciate the girth which may be more impressive than length. These photos from yesterday, with the whale for scale, do help put it into perspective.”
According research ecologist Dave Wiley who shared his eye-witness account with LiveScience, 6 of the sharks had previously been observed by scientists in the area, but two female sharks were new to the area, including a gargantuan 18 footer.
“It was nature in action. Everything dies for something else to consume. Nothing goes to waste.
One of the hardest things to communicate to people is how massive white sharks can be. Until you see one in person, it’s hard to appreciate the girth, which may be more impressive than length.”
A research team also was able to examine the dead whale and determine that it was roughly 1-years old and had likely died from a fatal run in with a large boat propeller or commercial fishing net.
Feeding frenzies of this magnitude are a very rarely observed in the wild, mainly because they happen so fast.
Once nearby sharks smell a decaying whale in the water, they tend to congregate in a group around it and whipped up into a frenzy. As the sharks start aggressively tearing away the outer layers of blubber the rest of the carcass begins to sink and the feeding frenzies slip out of site from the top of the water.
But since researchers were able to pinpoint the location of this carcass as it sank, they were able to use underwater camera technology to capture some of the most amazing feeding frenzy footage ever recorded.
