Whales are incredible creatures. Intelligent, enormous, and beautiful, they cruise through the ocean doing all sorts of things that we simply don’t understand. One of the more curious things is something called “tail sailing,” which has rarely been recorded.
In short, tailing sailing is basically what it sounds like. A whale will stick its tail out of the water and just kind of… float there. Heads down and tails up, the whale will bob around like a giant, blubbery cork for as long as ten hours. Of course, since it’s such a rarely observed phenomenon, they could potentially do it for much longer away from our prying eyes, but we’d never know about it. Recently, however, a guy named Brodie Moss from the YBSYoungbloods YouTube channel was kayaking when his prying eyes were lucky enough to watch a whale sailing its tail for just about as long a time as anyone’s seen.
According to reports, Moss ran into the tail sailing whale off the coast of Maui, and the footage he captured might be another piece of a puzzle that’s been stumping researchers for years. It’s theorized that tail sailing is part of how a mother whale feeds its calf, a way to get some much needed rest, or a method of cooling themselves down.
“We know logically that nursing is a part of this [behavior],” Ed Lyman, resource protection specialist for the Hawaiian Islands Humpback Whale National Marine Sanctuary, told the Huffington Post. He went on to explain that while the whale rests in this position its mammary glands are in the perfect orientation for the whale to squirt milk into the calf’s mouth.
Whatever the reason for the tail sailing is, what is for certain is that nature and its creatures sure can put on a hell of a show.
