The smallest of the rorquals, the fastest of the baleen whales, and famously curious about boats. Minke whales travel further and are seen less than almost any whale their size.
Minke whales are rorquals, the same group as the humpback and the blue whale, and they are the smallest of that group. There are two of them: the common minke whale (Balaenoptera acutorostrata), found across both hemispheres, and the Antarctic minke whale (Balaenoptera bonaerensis), which lives in the Southern Ocean. They are separate species, so a single worldwide "minke whale" population figure is always two numbers wearing one label.
They are often called the smallest baleen whale, which is not quite right. That title belongs to the pygmy right whale, an animal of about six metres that lives in southern waters and is so rarely seen that almost nothing is known about it. The minke is the smallest of the rorquals, and the most abundant of them, which is a large part of why it is the one still being hunted.
From the surface a minke is a long, slender, dark grey to black animal, pale underneath, with a narrow and sharply pointed triangular head. On the common minke there is a bright white band across each flipper that is the giveaway when you get a clear look. The Antarctic minke does not have it.
Minke whales are the travellers of the whale world. They are found in every ocean, from the tropics to the ice edge, and they generally favour colder water. Unlike the humpbacks that pass Jervis Bay in a fairly predictable stream, minke movements are far less tidy and much harder to plan a sighting around.
They are also mostly solitary. Where humpbacks form pods and southern rights gather in calving bays, a minke is usually alone or in a group of two to four.
Gestation is about ten months, which is short for a baleen whale, and calves nurse for several months before becoming independent. Females generally calve every couple of years rather than every year. It is the same migratory rhythm that drives the humpback season here, and we have written about why whales migrate at all if you want the longer version.
Minke whales were largely left alone during the industrial whaling era. They were small, and there were far bigger animals to take. Once the great whales had been reduced to the point where hunting them was no longer worthwhile, attention turned to the minke, and it has stayed there ever since.
Commercial whaling has been under an international moratorium since the mid-1980s, and minke whales are still taken. Japan hunted them in the Southern Ocean for decades under scientific permits that it issued to itself. Australia challenged that programme at the International Court of Justice, and in 2014 the court ruled against it. A redesigned programme ran until the 2018 to 2019 season.
Japan then left the International Whaling Commission altogether, in mid-2019, and resumed openly commercial whaling in its own waters. It has not hunted in the Southern Ocean since. Norway and Iceland also still take minke whales, each under a standing objection or reservation to the moratorium.
Australia has consistently opposed all of it, and both minke species are protected in Australian waters. Neither is currently threatened: the common minke is listed as least concern on the IUCN Red List and the Antarctic minke as near threatened.
It is possible. Dwarf minke whales, a smaller form of the common minke, migrate along the east Australian coast between about March and October on their way to and from the Great Barrier Reef, and a reasonable share of all recorded sightings are from the south-eastern coastline rather than the reef.
But they are unpredictable, usually solitary and easy to miss, and they do not travel the coast in the concentrated, countable way the humpbacks do. Nobody can put one on an itinerary.
The whales you can plan a trip around here are humpbacks, on migration from mid-May to mid-November. Our whale watching cruise runs across that season, and if you would like the wider picture first, our round-up of the whales of Jervis Bay and beyond is the place to start.
Humpbacks pass the bay from mid-May to mid-November. Watch them from the water, alongside the sea cliffs and caves.
