odds & ends item from AUGUST 2006 ISSUE
God’s Amazing Creation
The Blue Whale
Can you imagine a 20-foot-long baby? Well, a newborn Blue Whale weighs 2.76 tons at birth and drinks 100 gallons of milk a day—gaining 200 pounds each day until it reaches adulthood in 5 to 10 years.
Balaenoptera musculus, or the Great Blue Whale, is the largest animal on earth today. Its scientific name means “whale wing mouse” or “whale wing muscle,” depending on the interpretation. Carl Linnaeus, who originated the scientific naming system used today, loved double meanings and plays on words. It is thought that, for this reason, the name he chose for the largest animal refers back to the common house mouse—one of the smallest, most inconspicuous creatures of the animal kingdom!
This grayish-blue “mouse” is usually close to 100 feet long when fully grown, with the record length for a Blue Whale being 110 feet. That’s about as long as a Boeing 737 airplane! An adult whale’s weight can be as much as 198 tons, or 396,828 pounds!
With enough space for 50 humans to stand on its tongue, what do you think such a large animal would eat? Huge ocean fish? Fishermen? Small sailboats? Guess again. This gentle giant eats a tiny crustacean called krill. Most species of krill are only one or two centimeters long and congregate in huge swarms that the whale will swim through with its mouth open, taking in a large quantity of ocean “soup.”
To get as much krill as necessary, the whale was created with something called baleen plates, instead of teeth. These resemble fine-toothed combs, just like you might comb your hair with—only much, much larger. The whale takes a huge gulp of ocean water into its mouth, and then pushes it out, through the baleen plates, into the ocean. The plates trap the krill inside the whale’s mouth like a filter, while the water flows through the plates back into the ocean. During a typical day of feeding, a Blue Whale can eat up to four tons of krill—that’s roughly the weight of an Asian Elephant!
While they are able to reach speeds of 30 miles per hour, these whales usually cruise along at about half that speed as they migrate through the oceans of the world. Their ability to swim at such a fast speed, coupled with their sheer size, kept them safe from commercial whaling until the invention of speed boats and explosive harpoons. These inventions took their toll on the Blue Whale population in the latter part of the 19th century and up through the 1970s. Population estimates indicate that the species is down to one percent of what it once was, with only about 5,000 to 12,000 Blue Whales remaining.
Listing them as an endangered species, and protecting them from commercial whaling for the past 30-plus years, seems to have stabilized the population somewhat, but not replenished it. Scientists believe that other factors such as environmental pollutants and noise pollution caused by humans and machinery may have a negative effect in the future as well.
An amazing fact about the way these giant ocean mammals communicate has made it difficult for scientists to study their communication and interaction with each other. The sounds that whales make are called “whale song,” and the songs of this entire species are always in perfect pitch.
Professional singers all over the world study and practice in hopes of achieving perfect pitch, yet this is a natural phenomenon in these particular whales. That means no matter how young or old the whale is, no matter how large or small, their song is indistinguishable from every other blue whale’s song, except for the “words” that are used, which vary depending on circumstances. When several Blue Whales are singing to one another, it can often sound like a single whale. This is only one more incredible aspect of these wonderful whales, which may not be ready for the opera, but certainly deserve center stage!
Source: www.acsonline.org; www.nationalgeographic.org