Pilot Whale – Scary and Magnificent

The pilot whale is either of two species of cetacean  in the genus  Globicephala. The genus is part of the oceanic dolphin family (Delphinidae) although their behavior is closer to that of the larger whales. The two species are the Long-finned Pilot Whale and the Short-finned Pilot Whale. The two are not readily distinguished at sea. They and other large members of the dolphin family are also known as blackfish.

Pilot Whales are jet black or a very dark grey color. The dorsal fin is set forward on the back and sweeps back. The newborn whale’s dorsal fin is flexible at birth so as to facilitate the birthing process. The body is elongated but stocky and narrows abruptly toward the tail fin.Males are less gracile in form than the females. Differences between long and short-finned pilot whales are quite subtle, and where their distributions overlap it is generally not possible to tell the species apart at sea. On land specimens may be distinguished by the length of flipper, the number of teeth and the shape of the skull: the Short-finned has a more bulbous head particularly in older males; the Long-finned is squarer, and the forehead is more likely to overhang the mouth. G. macrorhynchus was described, from skeletal materials only, by John Edward Gray in 1846. He presumed from the skeleton that the whale had a large beak.

The Long-finned Pilot Whale has traditionally been hunted by whalers by the process of “driving” – where many fishermen and boats gather in a semicircle behind a pod of whales, that has been sighted close to shore, and slowly drive them towards a bay. When close enough stones attached to lines from the boats are thrown into the water behind the whales, driving them towards the beach where they become stranded and are slaughtered. This practice was common in both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Currently only the Faroe Islands operates such a cull. Statistics have been kept for the drives in the Faroe Islands for centuries, and in the 1980s around 1,500 individuals were killed each year in this manner, declining in the 1990s to under a thousand.