page_title: Sei whale
section_title: North Atlantic
hierarchical_section_title: Sei whale / Whaling / North Atlantic
caption_attribution_description: Norsk bokmål: "Hval trukket op paa stranden til flænsning. Finnmarken." English: Title: Sei whale (front) and fin whale (back). From Av hvalfangstens historie (1922). Identifier: avhvalfangstensh00rist (find matches) Year: 1922 (1920s) Authors: Risting, Sigurd, 1870- Subjects: Whaling Publisher: Kristiania&#160;: J. W. Cappelen Contributing Library: Smithsonian Libraries Digitizing Sponsor: Smithsonian Libraries View Book Page: Book Viewer About This Book: Catalog Entry View All Images: All Images From Book Click here to view book online to see this illustration in context in a browseable online version of this book. Text Appearing Before Image: w qq 5' CD 13 Text Appearing After Image: ' Note About Images Please note that these images are extracted from scanned page images that may have been digitally enhanced for readability - coloration and appearance of these illustrations may not perfectly resemble the original work.
context_page_description: The sei whale is a baleen whale, the third-largest rorqual after the blue whale and the fin whale. It inhabits most oceans and adjoining seas, and prefers deep offshore waters. It avoids polar and tropical waters and semienclosed bodies of water. The sei whale migrates annually from cool, subpolar waters in summer to temperate, subtropical waters in winter with a lifespan of 70 years.
  Reaching 19.5 m long and weighing as much as 28 t, the sei whale consumes an average of 900 kg of food every day; its diet consists primarily of copepods, krill, and other zooplankton. It is among the fastest of all cetaceans, and can reach speeds of up to 50 km/h over short distances. The whale's name comes from the Norwegian word for pollock, a fish that appears off the coast of Norway at the same time of the year as the sei whale.
  Following large-scale commercial whaling during the late 19th and 20th centuries, when over 255,000 whales were killed, the sei whale is now internationally protected, although limited hunting occurs under a controversial research program conducted by Japan. As of 2008, its worldwide population was about 80,000, less than a third of its prewhaling population.
context_section_description: In the North Atlantic between 1885 and 1984, 14,295 sei whales were taken. They were hunted in large numbers off the coasts of Norway and Scotland beginning in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and in 1885 alone, more than 700 were caught off Finnmark. Their meat was a popular Norwegian food. The meat's value made the hunting of this difficult-to-catch species profitable in the early twentieth century.
  In Iceland, a total of 2,574 whales were taken from the Hvalfjörður whaling station between 1948 and 1985. Since the late 1960s to early 1970s, the sei whale has been second only to the fin whale as the preferred target of Icelandic whalers, with meat in greater demand than whale oil, the prior target.
  Small numbers were taken off the Iberian Peninsula, beginning in the 1920s by Spanish whalers, off the Nova Scotian shelf in the late 1960s and early 1970s by Canadian whalers, and off the coast of West Greenland from the 1920s to the 1950s by Norwegian and Danish whalers.
caption: A sei whale (foreground) caught off Finnmark.
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