From our trip to Alaska in 2015, an image of a female humpback whale feeding. She was one of a pod of six or seven other humpback whales that came to Alaska to feed and raise their young. Their young can drink up to 160 gallons of milk and gain up to one hundred pounds a day. The adult humpbacks do something here that they will do at no other place in the world. These usually solitary animals work together to feed by diving deep and circling while releasing air. This forms a net of bubbles that the krill and other small schooling fish cannot readily escape. The whales then head for the surface with their mouths wide open and catch their prey in their mouth like a giant net...a ten thousand gallon net. This female burst though the water's surface near us and rose a good fifteen feet out in the air. She stayed there for a few seconds while the water filtered through her baleen plates (they have no teeth), swallowed a truck full of fish, krill and other food and went down for another go. Each cycle took about fifteen minutes and you could tell when they were ready to surface by all the diving seagulls going after easy prey near the surface. This was a good sized whale at around sixty feet long and probably weighing close to forty tons (80,000 lbs). That is about the same size as a fully loaded semi tractor trailer truck!