50 Fun Facts About Blue Whale

What distinction does the blue whale hold among all animals?

Confirmed lengths reach 29.9-30.5 m and weights up to 190-200 tonnes.

What is the blue whale's scientific name?

B. physalus is the fin whale, Megaptera the humpback and Balaena the bowhead.

The species name 'musculus' may be a Linnaean pun meaning what?

It can mean 'muscle' or be a diminutive of 'mouse'; the genus name Balaenoptera means 'winged whale'.

Whalers nicknamed the blue whale 'sulphur bottom' because of what?

Herman Melville mentions 'sulphur bottom' whales in Moby-Dick.

The name 'blue whale' derives from the Norwegian 'blåhval', coined by which whaling pioneer?

He had just perfected the harpoon gun; the scientist G. O. Sars adopted the name in 1874.

Which Scottish naturalist described a blue whale stranded in the Firth of Forth in 1692?

For a long time the species was known as 'Sibbald's rorqual'.

How many blue whale subspecies are traditionally recognised?

Northern, Antarctic, pygmy and Northern Indian Ocean, with the Chilean population a possible fifth.

Which other rorqual does the blue whale interbreed with?

About 3.5% of the North Atlantic blue whale genome comes from such crosses; the hybrids can even be fertile.

Whole-genome sequencing shows the blue whale is most closely related to which species?

Gray whales come next as a sister group.

How many black baleen plates line a blue whale's upper jaw?

Each is under a metre long; 60-88 throat grooves let the mouth balloon during feeding.

How high can a blue whale's blow reach?

It has two blowholes, like all baleen whales.

What was the length of the longest blue whale ever scientifically measured, captured in the Panama Canal?

Its neck vertebrae confirmed the figure; a 33.6 m record exists but is unverified, and models suggest 33 m is the physical limit.

Which sex of blue whale is larger?

Antarctic females average about 130 tonnes to males' 112.

The record female blue whale, caught in 1947, weighed how much?

She was 27.6 m long; estimates ran as high as 199 tonnes.

How much did the heart of a stranded North Atlantic blue whale weigh, the largest known in any animal?

By contrast its brain weighs only about 3.6 kg.

Roughly how long is the male blue whale's penis, the largest in the animal kingdom?

It is around 30 cm wide.

What do scientists examine to estimate a blue whale's age?

Each year lays down a light and a dark layer of wax; the oldest found this way was 110.

What was the age of the oldest blue whale found using the ear-plug method?

They typically live 80-90 years or more.

How fast do blue whales usually cruise?

They can sprint to 32-48 km/h when disturbed, though the best estimate of a true maximum is around 27 km/h.

How low can a blue whale's heart rate drop during a deep dive?

On surfacing it rises to about 37 bpm, near its peak.

What is the deepest dive reported from a tagged blue whale?

A pygmy blue whale managed 506 m; the longest measured dive lasted 15.2 minutes.

What does the blue whale's diet consist of almost exclusively?

The Northern Indian Ocean subspecies is the exception, feeding mostly on sergestid shrimp.

How much water can a blue whale engulf in a single lunge?

It opens its mouth up to 80 degrees, then squeezes the water out through the baleen with its throat pouch and tongue.

On average, how much krill does a blue whale eat per day?

One mouthful can yield up to 240 times the energy the lunge costs.

What manoeuvre have blue whales been recorded performing during lunge-feeding?

It may help them scan the krill field and find the densest patch.

Which population feeds mainly on sergestid shrimp rather than krill?

To do it they dive deeper and longer than other blue whales, about 10.7 minutes on average.

How long is a blue whale's gestation?

Calves are 6-7 m long and 2-3 tonnes at birth.

Roughly how much weight does a newborn blue whale calf gain each day?

Mothers likely produce around 220 kg of milk a day; calves wean at 6-8 months and 16 m long.

When was the first video of a blue whale calf thought to be nursing filmed?

Mother-calf pairs are rarely seen, perhaps because calves are born and weaned between feeding seasons.

What is the fundamental frequency range of blue whale vocalisations?

That is mostly below human hearing; the calls reach 188 decibels.

What is the maximum loudness of a blue whale call?

They are among the loudest and lowest sounds made by any animal.

By how much did Eastern North Pacific blue whale song frequency fall from the early 1960s to the early 2000s?

One theory is that as populations recover, sexual selection favours deeper voices; another says it is simply cultural.

Which sex produces the repeated A and B call sequences of the Eastern North Pacific population?

That suggests a reproductive function; D calls are made by both sexes while feeding.

What is the only documented natural predator of blue whales?

They usually target calves; the first direct observations of kills came off Western Australia in 2019 and 2021.

What share of pygmy blue whales photographed off Western Australia carried orca 'rake' scars?

Off southeastern Australia the figure for blue whales was just 3.7%.

When did the International Whaling Commission ban all hunting of blue whales?

The Soviet Union kept killing them illegally into the 1970s.

Blue whale whaling peaked in 1930-31 with roughly how many animals killed?

Some 350,000-360,000 were taken from the Antarctic alone in the first half of the 20th century.

Which nation continued illegally hunting blue whales after the ban, into the 1970s?

Iceland had not even recognised North Atlantic protection until 1960.

What was the estimated global blue whale population in the 2018 IUCN assessment?

That compares with at least 140,000 mature whales in 1926.

How many mature blue whales existed in 1926, before industrial whaling took its toll?

The IUCN listed the species as Endangered as of 2018.

How does the IUCN classify the blue whale?

The Antarctic subspecies is considered Critically Endangered.

Bone DNA suggests which people were among the earliest blue whale hunters, from around 900 CE?

More than half of 124 bones from Icelandic archaeological sites were blue whale.

How many blue whales were killed or likely killed by ship strikes off the US West Coast, 1998–2019?

Five deaths off California in 2007 alone were declared an unusual mortality event.

Off which country's coast do blue whales share the sea with a major shipping lane that killed eleven in 2010-12?

Its whales are the shrimp-eating Northern Indian Ocean subspecies.

Where do the largest blue whales, averaging 25.4-26.6 m for mature females, live?

Pygmy blue whales average just 21.3 m.

Where does the Eastern North Pacific population mostly feed in summer and autumn?

In winter they head south to Mexico's Gulf of California and the Costa Rica Dome.

Which seas are blue whales mostly absent from?

Otherwise they are cosmopolitan.

What did analysis of a ship-struck blue whale's ear plug reveal?

The profile suggested many pollutants had been passed from mother to calf.

Where was the earliest anatomically modern blue whale fossil, about 1.5 million years old, found?

The rorqual family split from other whales in the late Miocene.

Which ancient whale was proposed as heavier than the blue whale, a claim disputed in 2024?

Estimates were based on fragmentary remains, as were those for giant sauropods like Bruhathkayosaurus.