{"id":215492,"date":"2025-06-06T05:15:47","date_gmt":"2025-06-06T10:15:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/06\/curious-humpback-whales-approach-humans-and-blow-bubble-smoke-rings"},"modified":"2025-06-06T05:15:47","modified_gmt":"2025-06-06T10:15:47","slug":"curious-humpback-whales-approach-humans-and-blow-bubble-smoke-rings","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/06\/curious-humpback-whales-approach-humans-and-blow-bubble-smoke-rings","title":{"rendered":"Curious humpback whales approach humans and blow bubble \u2018smoke\u2019 rings"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/curious-humpback-whales-approach-humans-and-blow-bubble-smoke-rings2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>A team of scientists from the SETI Institute and the University of California at Davis has documented, for the first time, humpback whales producing large bubble rings, like a human smoker blowing smoke rings, during friendly interactions with humans. This previously little-studied behavior may represent play or communication.<\/p>\n<p>The paper is <a href=\"https:\/\/onlinelibrary.wiley.com\/doi\/10.1111\/mms.70026\" target=\"_blank\">published<\/a> in the journal Marine Mammal Science.<\/p>\n<p>Humpback whales are already known for using <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/tags\/bubbles\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">bubbles<\/a> to corral prey and creating bubble trails and bursts when competing to escort a female whale. These new observations show humpback whales producing bubble rings during friendly encounters with humans. This finding contributes to the WhaleSETI team\u2019s broader goal of studying non-human intelligence to aid in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A team of scientists from the SETI Institute and the University of California at Davis has documented, for the first time, humpback whales producing large bubble rings, like a human smoker blowing smoke rings, during friendly interactions with humans. This previously little-studied behavior may represent play or communication. The paper is published in the journal [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1527],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-215492","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-alien-life"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/215492","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=215492"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/215492\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=215492"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=215492"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=215492"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}