Growing to up to 16 metres in length and weighing up to 40 tonne, a single whale can be equivalent to eleven elephants or 600 people.
Whales are very active creatures; regularly perform a variety of behaviours like pectoral slapping, tail flapping and breaching.
Whales can live to at least 48 years, but it is likely to be higher and probably closer to 100 years!
Whale songs are only sung by the males and can last from a few moments to an hour and travel for hundreds of kilometres. These sounds of around 170 decibels!
A whales cruising speed when leisurely moving is 3.5 knots to 5 knots but when chased they can reach speeds of 9 or 10 knots.
Their annual migration from Antarctica to Queensland covers 10,000 km’s (5000km each way) between May – November.
Hervey Bay has now been recognised as the only genuine stop-over on the humpback whales' southern migration along Australia's east coast and is known as the whale watching capital of the world.
