Sixteen blue whale facts
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| Blue whale |
- Blue whales use blowholes or ‘nostrils’ to breathe. They have two blowholes on top of their heads, to assist in breathing. Their exhaling blow can be 12 m (36 ft) tall and their blow can be heard from as much as 2 km away.
- The Blue whale (Balaenoptera musculus) is a marine mammal belonging to the suborder of baleen whales (called Mysticeti).
- A big blue whale can be as big as Boeing jet. Its heart is usually the size of a car and its tongue is large enough to accommodate at least one elephant.
- At up to 33 metres (108 ft) in length and 180 metric tons (200 short tons) or more in weight, it is the largest animal ever known to have existed.
- Blue whales have eyes as big as the size of small plates. Their brain weighs 5 kg (12.5 pounds) and the head represents 40% of their total length.
- Blue whales were abundant in nearly all the oceans until the beginning of the twentieth century. For over 40 years, they were hunted almost to extinction by whalers until protected by the international community in 1966.
- Like humans, these whales have belly buttons and they give birth and nurse their young ones. Like humans, their bellybutton is also very much the leftover part of their umbilical cords.
- Living blue whales may be encountered on whale-watching cruises in the Gulf of Maine[66] and are the main attractions along the north shore of the Gulf of Saint Lawrence and in the Saint Lawrence estuary.
- A blue whale's milk supposedly tastes like a mixture of fish, liver, milk of magnesia, and castor oil and is very rich and nourishing for its little baby.
- These whales are more of mammals, than fish. They are warm-blooded, have lungs rather than gills and nourish their young ones with milk.
- These whales drink over 50 gallons of their mother's milk in a day. In the first several weeks of their life, they gain 10 pounds an hour or a little over 200 pounds a day!
- Blue whales are known to possess the largest penis in the world, which is around 2.4 m (8 ft) long!
- The whale takes in as much krill as possible in one gulp and then flushes out the extra water through comb-like plates called baleens.
- It's hard to imagine, but the world's biggest animal - blue whale - eats prey that is less than 1/1,000,000th of its size. In order to get enough to eat, a full-grown blue whale might eat 40 million krill in one day!
- Did you know that a blue whale can take in as much as 50 tons of water in one gulp?
- A blue whale's song has 155 and 188 decibels and is thus, the loudest animal sound in the world (by comparison, a pneumatic drill is about 100 dB). However, blue whales sing at frequencies between 10 and 40 Hz and infrasound less than 20 Hz, which cannot be heard by humans.
