Humpback whale CRUSHES baitball of herring!

A humpback whale, fresh from the long migration from its breeding grounds, seeks food in the cold waters of Alaska. It's been months since the last time it ate, as these animals typically don't feed during the entire trip to the warmer waters of Mexico and Hawaii and back. But now the whale is home in Alaska, where prey is in abundance. Its favorite food is small fish, especially herring, that form large shoals that give the whale opportunities to eat many of them at a time. Herring are usually found deeper in the ocean, but today a school of king salmon have chased a large shoal of herring to the surface. Cornering them on the surface, birds and salmon work together to feed on the smaller fish. The best protection the herring have is to tighten up their school, hoping that dizzying numbers make it more difficult for their predators to pick out any one fish to attack. This is effective against fish and birds, but this could be a fatal mistake against a whale, as it would simply attack the entire school, and the more concentrated they are, the more it would catch. The humpback whale senses the school, and moves closer. How it senses it, either by sound, vibrations in the water, scent, or something else, we still don't know for sure, but in these murky waters there's not much room for mistakes. If the fish detect it coming, they'll scatter, and the opportunity for a solid meal will be gone. Almost perfectly on target, the whale smashes into the school of herring. Its massive mouth takes in up to 5,000 gallons of water and fish, which it then filters out through its baleen. This technique is called lunge feeding. It's hard to say exactly how many fish it caught, but possibly hundreds of pounds. It could take a whale hours to catch this much food the regular way, by diving and chasing the scattered schools around deep underwater, so for a school of herring to be trapped and concentrated on the surface like this was an excellent opportunity. The surviving herring scattered and dove, making them poor targets for the whale, but given some time and with the pursuit of predators, they'll doubtless regroup into their defensive schools again and give the whales more opportunities in the future. Humpback whales like this one need to eat around 800 pounds or 360 kilos of fish a day. This is just the start of a long summer of feeding.