37 Fun Facts About Blue Whale

What distinction does the blue whale hold among all animals?

Largest ever known to have existed, the blue whale was long safe from whalers because of its size and speed, until exploding harpoon guns made it catchable.

In 2017, a blue whale skeleton named Hope replaced which dinosaur in the main hall of London's Natural History Museum?

Dippy the Diplodocus was only a plaster replica, and after 112 years at the museum it was taken apart and sent on a tour of museums around Britain.

The blue whale's species name, musculus, may be a pun by Linnaeus meaning what?

Little mouse is one reading of musculus, which also meant 'muscle' in Latin, perhaps because some flexing muscles were thought to look like moving mice.

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

A yellowish tinge of diatoms on the belly is picked up in cold feeding waters, and the whales shed that film on returning to warmer seas.

A blue whale's tongue alone can weigh about as much as what?

An elephant is about the weight of that tongue, which pushes seawater out through the baleen plates so the tiny prey stays trapped inside to be swallowed.

Scientists can tell individual blue whales apart by what feature?

Their skin mottling looks blue-grey when the whale is at the surface, yet seen through the water the same whale appears light blue.

Which other whale species is the blue whale known to interbreed with?

The fin whale fathered a whale killed in the North Atlantic in 2018 that experts had called a blue whale from photos, a national marine institute reported after DNA tests.

How do blue whales usually travel and feed?

Alone or in pairs is the usual pattern, yet loose gatherings of up to 60 blue whales have been reported.

A blue whale's baleen plates are made of what material?

Keratin, the material of human fingernails, makes up the plates, even though baleen was long known as 'whalebone'.

How high can a blue whale's spout shoot into the air?

About 10 m is how high it can shoot, and because spout shapes differ between species, that tall, straight column helps observers pick out a blue whale from far away.

Which sex of blue whale is larger?

The cows are the larger sex, the rarer pattern among mammals, where species with bigger males outnumber those with bigger females nearly three to one.

What lets a blue whale's throat balloon out when it gulps a huge mouthful of seawater?

Rows of pleated grooves run from the chin toward the navel and spread open, and even the nerves in the floor of the mouth are stretchy enough to unfold and snap back.

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

Its earwax builds up in a light and a dark layer each year that scientists count like tree rings, but the plug can only be collected from a whale that has died.

Besides communicating, what do scientists think blue whales may use their calls and excellent hearing to do?

Find their way, perhaps: in the dark depths, their low-frequency pulses may build up a sonic picture of distant undersea features, much like sonar.

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

2 beats per minute is the lowest recorded on a dive, and slowing the heart that far is thought to make the oxygen in its blood last longer at depth.

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

Krill are tiny shrimp-like animals, yet the biggest animal alive can eat well over a tonne of them in a single day.

One blue whale gulp can hold a water volume as big as what?

Its own body can be outsized by that gulp, and hauling in so much water costs so much energy that a lunge only pays off in extremely dense swarms of prey.

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

A 360-degree roll turns the whale upside down to scoop a patch of prey, and rolling while searching may let it scan the water and pick out the densest patch.

In which season are most blue whale calves born?

Winter is when most calves are born, after the adults migrate from their polar feeding grounds to warmer waters nearer the equator.

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

About 90 kg a day is packed on thanks to the mother's fat-rich milk, of which a calf drinks hundreds of litres every day.

To make most blue whale calls audible to people, how do researchers usually play back the recordings?

Sped up, sometimes ten times over, because at natural speed much of a blue whale's call is too deep for human ears to hear.

Blue whales may hear each other from up to how far away?

1,000 miles in the right conditions, yet growing noise from ships and seismic surveys can drown out the sounds they rely on to communicate.

Since blue whale calls were first recorded in the 1960s, what has happened to their pitch worldwide?

Fallen, even though a noisier ocean should push the calls higher if whales were straining to be heard, and scientists still cannot explain the drop.

In the Eastern North Pacific, which blue whales have been recorded singing songs of repeated A and B calls?

Only males have been recorded singing these songs, which suggests they help win mates.

Which of these animals is known to attack and kill blue whales?

The orca is the attacker in documented cases, and since an adult's sheer size leaves it almost no predators, calves are thought the likelier victims.

A blue whale's average lifespan is estimated at about how long?

About 90 years is a typical life, yet a female has just one calf every two to three years, so the species has been slow to recover from decades of hunting.

What did the International Whaling Commission order for blue whales in 1966?

A total ban, but only once whalers had driven the species to the brink of extinction.

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's whalers kept illegally killing blue whales into the 1970s?

The Soviet Union ran its whaling to meet production targets set by central planners, and the full scale of its illegal hunt came out only after the Cold War ended.

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

10,000 to 25,000 is only a small fraction of their numbers before modern whaling, yet the population appears to be increasing.

Industrial whalers of the early 1900s hunted blue whales mainly for what?

Their oil was the prize, and to stop a dead whale sinking before it could be processed, whalers pumped the carcass full of air.

As of its 2018 assessment, how does the IUCN Red List classify the blue whale?

Endangered, and today its biggest dangers are no longer whalers but ship strikes and entanglement in fishing gear.

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

Icelanders struck whales from open boats with spears marked with their own emblems, so whoever found the carcass when it washed ashore knew who had a rightful share.

The poop of blue whales and other baleen whales helps fertilise the growth of what?

Phytoplankton benefit because whales release their fecal plumes near the surface, putting nutrients such as nitrogen and iron where sunlight lets the tiny algae grow.

How did some tagged blue whales react when researchers played simulated military sonar?

They stopped eating, mainly when on deep feeding dives, while whales feeding closer to the surface showed no change in behaviour.

Where do Eastern North Pacific blue whales mostly feed in summer and autumn?

Off California, where they gather close enough to shore that whale watchers regularly spot them in places such as Monterey Bay.

Scientists estimate that a blue whale swallows most of its microplastic by what route?

Eating prey that holds it accounts for most of it, because the krill a blue whale eats have already swallowed the particles.