Watch a Blue Whale With a Sense of Humor Perfectly Time an Exhale From Its Blowhole

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Whoever said that the flare for the dramatic was only for humans never met the blue whale in this video! The footage shows a blue whale sighting happening right in the middle of filming a nature documentary. The blue whale couldn’t have had better timing!

This clip posted to the BBC YouTube channel features Mark Cardwardine, a British zoologist. According to Mark’s website, he is “a zoologist, an environmental activist, an award-winning writer, a TV and radio presenter, a widely published wildlife photographer, a best-selling author, a wildlife tour operator, and a magazine columnist.” 

Mark and his team are out on the water, and they are searching for one thing: blue whales. They state that they are in a populous area. However, seeing blue whales isn’t as easy as it sounds. Mark said that we know blue whales are “underwater and out of sight. So you could be going right by them and have no idea they are there.” 

He adds, “You know they are here, but you just can’t jolly well find them.” It’s at this exact moment that, off in the distance, we hear and see a burst of water coming from a distance. And we immediately know and recognize this to be an enormous blue whale exhaling from his blowhole. Talk about a flair for the dramatic with his perfect timing!

Then, finally, if we pause the video at 52 seconds, we see amazing footage that this team has recovered. This enormous blue whale has shown his face, or rather his entire body! There is nothing quite so powerful as being next to a sea animal that is larger than your boat! If we pause the video again at 56 seconds, we see this massive blue whale alongside the boat, and it is quite obvious how much larger this blue whale is.

Does the UK Have Blue Whales?

There are fewer than 20,000 blue whales left in the world and they can be found in all oceans around the globe except for Antarctica. 

The Sea Watch Foundation had this to say about blue whales in the UK: “Their presence around the British Isles is evident primarily from whale fisheries of the early 20th century indicating that small numbers regularly passed west of Britain and Ireland during summer in deep waters off the edge of the continental shelf.”