"[5] The American marine biologist and painter Richard Ellis, citing the Norwegian scientist Age Jonsgård, stated "that Meincke was a German laborer working for Svend Foyn, inventor of the grenade harpoon.

In 1804, Baron de Lacepede named it Balaenoptera acuto-rostrata, basing his description partly on the stranding of a 4.26 m (14.0 ft) juvenile female near Cherbourg, France in 1791.

The radiation of common minke whales into the Northern Hemisphere occurred rapidly about 1.5 million years ago during a period of cooling in the Pleistocene.

[33][34][35] The dwarf minke whale has similar proportions to the northern form, with an upright, hooked dorsal fin set about two-thirds the way along the back that is up to 32 to 34 cm (13 to 13 in) in height.

[64][65] In the coastal waters of British Columbia, there are estimated to be 475 (95% CI: 221-1,020) whales based on sightings from ship-based line-transect surveys made during the summers of 2004 and 2005.

[2] Minke whales were individually identified using the shape of the dorsal fin and nicks along its edges, variations in lateral body pigmentation, and small oval scars in three separate study sites on the western coast of North America.

During a similar study performed during whale watching cruises in the southern outer Moray Firth, northeast Scotland, between 2001 and 2007 from May to October, 34 individuals were photo-identified.

One whale, first photographed in Skjálfandi Bay in July 2002, moved repeatedly between the two study sites over a period of nearly ten years, sometimes being sighted in both areas in the same season.

Twenty-five showed strong small-scale site fidelity to either the Laurentian Channel Head or the Saguenay Fjord, with over three-quarters of their sightings occurring in one of these two areas.

[70][71] Off Nova Scotia, forty individuals were reliably identified using dorsal fin notches during the summer months (mainly July and August) between 1997 and 2008.

After being tagged in Faxaflói Bay on 27 August 2004 its first signal wasn't received until 17 November, when it was over the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, 900 km (560 mi) west of northern Spain.

[20] Common minke whales have been described as ichthyophagous, but their diet also includes pelagic crustaceans and cephalopods and varies by region, season, and year.

[79][80] In the North Sea, they primarily fed on sandeel (62%) and Atlantic mackerel (nearly 30%), with some feeding on herring (16.2%), small amounts of Mueller's pearlside (10.8%), copepods, haddock, capelin, and whiting.

[79] Off Iceland, they mainly fed on sandeel (nearly 58 per cent of sampled individuals), haddock (22.6%), herring (20%), capelin (19.4%), and Atlantic cod (14.7%), with the rest of the diet consisting of euphausiids, various larger species of gadoids, and Norway pout.

Although haddock was only a minor part of the diet the first couple years of the study (0 and 4% in 2003 and 2004, respectively), it subsequently constituted a major component of it (31-35% in 2005–2007), while sandeel's importance in the south declined considerably (95.2 to 77.7% from 2003 to 2006, but only 18.1% in 2007).

In Sanriku, sardine makes up the bulk of the diet (54%), but euphausiids also play an important part (32%) – only a small percentage (9%) fed on sand lance.

On several occasions scrapes were seen on the whales from lampreys moving about their bodies probably "actively seeking areas of greater access to blood or decreased water flow".

Other internal parasites included the cestodes Diphyllobothrium macroovatum, Diplogonoporus balaenopterae, and Tetrabothius sp., which infected the small intestine and were found in 17 per cent of the sample (all three species combined).

[74] An immature male dwarf minke whale that stranded on the Banks Peninsula, South Island, New Zealand, had a stomach heavily infested with the nematode Anisakis and cysts of the cestode genus Phyllobothrium encased in the boundary between its blubber and muscle, while an immature male caught in a gillnet off southern Brazil had a stomach heavily infested with nematodes of the genera Pseudoterranova (about 97%) and Anisakis (about 3%).

During a horizontal arc a whale turns sharply – on either side – with only a pectoral fin or occasionally a tip of the flukes breaking the surface of the water.

[111] Novel feeding techniques were observed during a study of five individually identified minke whales (named M1 to M5) in the Saguenay Fjord National Park, on the north side of the St. Lawrence estuary, from June to October 2003.

Most boings have been recorded in the tropical and warm temperate North Pacific during the winter and spring, but some have also been detected in the northeastern Chukchi Sea in the summer and fall.

[119][120] The "star wars" vocalization, a complex, stereotyped call consisting of three components ranging from 50 Hz to 9.4 kHz, is produced by the dwarf minke whale.

This bizarre call, described as "almost synthetic, metallic, or mechanical", has been recorded during June and July on the northern Great Barrier Reef (about 14°30'S to 17°S), off Stradbroke Island, Queensland (27°30'S), and off Coffs Harbour, New South Wales (30°S).

[121] The first written records attest to the active hunting of minke whales off Norway by 1100 A.D. By 1240 they began utilizing iron darts fired from crossbows that had been treated with the tissue of dead sheep infected with the bacterium Clostridium.

On the central west coast (Disko Bay and adjacent areas from 66°15'N to 70°45'N), the season begins in late May and peaks in July, August or September.

In the northwest (mainly the Umanak district, 70°45'N to 73-74°N), the season doesn't begin until June because of sea ice, with peak catches occurring from July to September.

Minke whales were caught for their meat, with it mainly being used locally for human consumption and dog food, though in Umanak the Royal Greenland Trading Department purchased some of the products of the hunt beginning in the late 1960s.

In 1968 small motorboats were introduced, which scared the whales into swimming quickly at the surface, making them easier to track and exhausting them in the process – this allowed them to be more easily killed as well.

Entanglements have been reported off Korea,[165] Japan,[166] Canada,[167] the United States,[168] the Azores, Scotland,[169] Portugal, France, Italy,[11] Greece,[170] Tunisia, Israel, the Canary Islands, Senegal,[11] and Brazil.