[imagesource:tiktok/ybsbrodie]

An Australian ‘TikTok celebrity’ has filmed a humpback whale doing a rare ‘headstand’ on the calm horizon.

While paddling along in a transparent kayak, Brodie Moss says the tail of a whale suddenly pierced the ocean surface ahead of him. But what really caught the Aussie off guard was how the whale just froze in place, with its tail sticking out of the water almost completely motionless.

Paddling backward to keep his distance, Moss saw a baby whale swimming around the tail. “I think that’s a whale tail. It’s just come up and stuck its tail up, and it’s not going anywhere. I don’t even know what to say.”

Moss placed his camera underwater to show the calf gently resting its head near the adult whale’s chest, most likely its mother. In the background, the two whales can be heard gently singing to each other.

This odd ‘tail-up’ behavior is not just astounding to Moss and his TikTok fans. Scientists have wondered about it for decades now. Because a whale’s tail resembles a sail when it sticks up out of the ocean, the behavior is sometimes known as ‘tail sailing’.

Its a view only occasionally witnessed by observers of humpbacks, gray whales, bowhead whales, and right whales. A whale-watching business in Western Australia also caught one of these special events on camera in 2019 and in 2020.

Off the coast of Brazil, a long-term study of the species between 1989 and 2000 occasionally noted tail sailing, and each event ranged in time from a few seconds to as long as 12 minutes. In most cases, experts in Brazil found the whales twisted their tails slowly.