Mass of the whale. Which animals have the slowest heartbeat? Species of marine mammals
Blue whales are the largest animals alive today, and they don't have teeth to eat food! Instead, blue whales are filter feeders. There are a total of 15 species of whales that eat this way. These species are known as baleen whales because they have baleen plates instead of dental plates. These plates are made up of stiff hairs that look like ridges and are used to filter food from seawater. Baleen whales filter small fish, crustaceans known as krill, and plankton from seawater.
Baleen whales swallow large amounts of ocean water containing food and then push the water out of their mouths through the estuary. By pushing water out of their mouths, the manor keeps food in their mouths. Feeding occurs for eight months of the year, and then these whales live outside their bubbler reserves for another four months.
Do you know that on our land there lives such a huge animal that in its language your class and the one next door could have a fun time at school? This giant's heart is the size of a small car and weighs about a ton. And his name is blue whale.
Most of the time they dive to depths of 300 feet to capture their prey. Now these numbers don't mean much unless you compare them to numbers and amounts that are easier to imagine! Compared with blue whales The average adult eats about 7 pounds of food in one day.
There are many more numbers that can be applied to blue whales, which are simply amazing - like their hearts weigh about 1 ton and are the size of a Science Bug! Before you become a blue whale expert, try your hand at solving the math problems below to see what else you can “figure out” about this amazing animal!
This is the largest animal that once existed on our planet. How much does a blue whale weigh? Its weight (up to 150 tons) is more than twice the weight of the largest dinosaur. It is thirty times heavier than the African elephant.
Blue whale food
To weigh that much, you need to eat well. Therefore, a whale consumes a million calories a day (for comparison, you consume no more than 1000). Hundreds of horny plates grow on the upper palate of the whale, forming something like a sieve. They are called whalebone. The cells of this sieve are very small, so tiny crustaceans, small fish and squid are retained in them. But this is enough for the whale. Over the summer, he accumulates so much fat that he may not eat anything for several months.
If you round up the amount of food consumed by the average person, how many times more than the Blue Whale? What percentage of body weight do blue whales have in one day? Using the figures above, how much does a male African elephant weigh? Can you count the weight of an African elephant from pounds to tons?
How much does a blue whale weigh?
If a small dog or large cat weighs 15 pounds, how much would you need to equal the weight of a blue whale? If the depth of a whale's dive to obtain its food was comparable to football field, when the 0 yard line was on the surface, which yard line should the whale dive to?
If you've ever drawn a whale, you've probably also drawn a fountain of water that it throws up. How does this work? Whales are very different from all those living in the water. For example, fish have gills, thanks to which they absorb oxygen dissolved in water. But whales are not fish, they breathe through their lungs, therefore, like us, they cannot stay under water for a long time. A whale's nostrils close underwater with two small valves. In order to take a breath, the whale comes to the surface. There he immediately releases the used air from his lungs, creating a loud noise that can be heard at a great distance. This is how the famous fountain is created. It does not consist of water, as we used to think, but of exhaust air and water vapor.
Look for answers in the next blog! Send us your answers before we post our letters and get your name on the post! Blue whales are the largest animals that have ever lived. They are larger than any dinosaur that has ever existed. Big size equivalent to 25 African elephants or the entire National Football League. The skull is large enough to fill a room. The male penis is eight feet long. A blue whale's breach can reach the height of a five-story building, with half its body emerging from the water.
Blue whale and water
The whale dives easily greater depth up to a kilometer and can stay under water without breathing for 40 minutes. In this case, the whale’s blood stops flowing into the vessels of the fins, skin, and tail and feeds only the brain and heart. When a whale is about to dive, it stands vertically upside down in the water and only visible above the surface is caudal fin. It looks like a sail.
Thanks to their speed and distance from their calving and feeding grounds, blue whales survived the whaling era of the 18th and 19th centuries, but the invention of explosive harpoons and boat-powered steam traps helped make up for lost time. They were hunted mainly for the oil in their bushes and bones, and were in high demand due to their large size and the fact that they were easy to hunt because they stayed near the surface.
One field guide describes the blue whale's color as "a light, bluish-gray color, mottled with grayish or grayish-white." As you approach, you see the water moving away from the huge back, first in rivulets and sheets, and then in the film, flowing in beautiful, pulsating patterns down the slope towards the sea.
Whales communicate using the loudest sound they can make. Living being. It's stronger than a roar jet plane. Whales transmit sounds at very low frequencies and they are not absorbed by the ocean. Therefore, two whales can communicate at a distance of up to one and a half thousand kilometers!
The whale is the only animal other than humans that can sing. The blue whale, however, is not very good at this, but some of its relatives are excellent singers. Their songs are repeated sounds and can be transmitted from one whale to another, like a popular tune among people. A typical whale song lasts about fifteen minutes; the longest is about an hour. Often it is repeated note for note, and the whales sing the same melody together! And even female whales sing songs to their babies.
How blue whales live
Underwater they are a beautiful turquoise blue. According to the Guinness Book of World Records, the longest blue whale was a 110-foot female caught off the Falkland Islands. In contrast, the largest dinosaurs weighed about 100 tons. One hundred and ninety tons - almost half a million pounds.
Species of marine mammals
Thus, the elephant, in turn, can be perceived by the colossal tongue of the blue whale. If Jonah had been injected intravenously rather than swallowed, he could have floated in the arterial vessels of that whale, growing even after ten seconds with a slow, divine impulse. Blue whales average about 80 feet, about twice the size of a bus. It is not surprising that such a large creature is in the sea. On land, his skeletal world has a hard time carrying such weight. In the sea the water takes over most weight responsibilities, and bones are not as important as on land.
The baby of such giants is born immediately weighing more than 2000 kilograms and 7 meters long. Every day he gains 100 kilograms in weight, drinking 350 liters of mother's milk. And he feeds on milk almost like a human baby - 7 months.
The blue whale is accustomed to roaming the world's oceans, traveling alone, occasionally in pairs, and can live up to 120 years. Hundreds of thousands used to live on earth blue whales, but people really valued whale oil, meat, and whalebone and mercilessly exterminated these animals. It is believed that today there are just over several thousand of them left...
The brain of a blue whale weighs 15 pounds and is 5 pounds lighter than the brain of a sperm whale. Great whales have the smallest brains of any mammal based on their size. The blue whale's brain makes up only 005 percent of its total body mass. These days blue whales are often seen with south coast Australia, west coast United States and Baja California and the Gulf of St. Eastern Pacific population, considered the largest in the world, feeds in the summer from California and migrates south to Central America, where winters, calves and feed in the dome of Costa Rica, an area of rising cold water, rich in nutrients, 300 to 500 miles from shore.
Even if we take into account the giants that inhabited the Earth millions of years ago - brachiosaurs, blue whales still surpass them in size, weighing more than 2 times the weight of these fossil animals. If we compare the blue whale with the second largest modern animal living on the planet, the African elephant, then the superiority of the whale is undeniable - it is 38 times heavier than the elephant. The average length of a blue whale is 26 meters, and the longest big whale, ever seen by man, reached a length of 33.5 meters. On average, such a whale weighs 150 tons, approximately the same as 2,400 people weigh.
Not all California whales are there. Whale tagging has indicated some winding waters around Oregon, Washington and British Columbia and winter off Mexico. There is also evidence that blue whales travel as far as Antarctica to feed in Costa Rica's Cuba.
Describing what it was like to encounter a blue whale, naturalist David Attenborough wrote: Sapphire blue waters in Pacific Ocean starts to get paler. You realize that something flat, horizontal and vast is slowly rising from the depths to the surface. You look ahead, seventy feet, almost the length of a tennis court, and a gray hump breaks the surface in waves. It is so far away that it is unlikely that it will be associated with the flat, white form still next to our boat. A pair of nostrils open in a distant hump and whoosh, blue from the explosion of steam thirty feet in the sky.
With all this, the heart rate of the blue whale is the slowest of all animals - during a dive it is only 4 to 8 beats per minute. At this time, only the giant’s brain and heart are supplied with blood. By the way, its heart weighs about 650 kg and is comparable in size to a small car like a Mini Cooper. The main aorta is larger in diameter than the world's largest water pipe, located in London, and can withstand greater pressure. And you can hear the heart of a whale working very far away - at a distance of several tens of kilometers these sounds are easily picked up by acoustic instruments located on ships. The heart of the whale is a reliable and wear-resistant pump with high efficiency; no designer has yet succeeded in bringing such technical solutions to life.
“The whale is inactive,” wrote David Attenborough. Even so, it glides through the water so fast that the boat can keep up with it. The whale's head may rise and flap a few more times, but then the tail breaks the surface and rises into the air, dripping water. It is as wide as the wing of a small airplane. The next dive the whale makes will be deep. It may disappear within an hour, and you may have no idea where it will be traveling at that time.
About the blue whale's influence on the surface of the sea, Brower wrote: An oil slick forms above the moment before surfacing, a long, narrow slick that has arched backwards. There are dusty white fountains that the blue whale raises, blows early, still glides below the surface - a succession of premature drains. It expanded towards the surface, glassy and shiny, like a crystal chandelier falling upward. Blue whales are members of the rockal family of baleen whales. They can produce 600 horsepower, travel long distances at 20 knots, and maintain speeds of 12 to 14 mph all day long.
How blue whales live
Once upon a time, all oceans were inhabited by blue whales, but their numbers gradually decreased, in addition, whaling became the reason that today the Arctic population of these animals numbers, different estimates, from several hundred to several thousand. A more precise count is not possible given the deep-sea habitat of blue whales.
Blue whale ducks are so large that they leave a swirl of water behind them that is surprisingly durable. A particularly large float is a sign that the whale is making a deep dive. The blue whale's penis is the largest and longest in the world. The blue whale, as Browser writes, is a pair of nostrils erect on a tapering mound of spray shield created almost to the nose at the back of the head. Other baleen whales also have mud flaps, but not like this. This seemed disproportionately large even for the largest whales.
Its size explained the loud, jarring exhalation—less breathing than detonation—and its size explained the 30-foot spout. It was a lucky strike, quickly followed by a powerful inhalation. When a whale inhales, it sucks in enough air to fill a van in a second and a half. The blue whale's mudflap is large enough to Small child could climb.
To feed itself, this giant needs to eat about 1 ton of krill every day - small crustaceans and shrimp that live in the surface waters of the ocean, which has an energy value of about 1 million calories. Swimming through layers rich in krill, whales swallow hundreds of tons of water and crustaceans, and then push out the water, filtering the krill through a sieve of “baleen” - numerous horny plates hanging from the roof of their mouth.
Sour whales are said to have a foul smell of smoke, but not as bad as gray whales. The "defecation trail" left by the blue whale browser is written "a brick red streak of processed krill, more watery than the particles." Douglas Chadwick, author of several books on whales, said: "The free-flowing explosions of dung" he witnessed were masses of processed krill that turned into acres of sea-colored hot pink.
Baleen whales, such as gray, humpback and calving whales, rarely feed when they mate or give birth. This is unlike blue whales, which appear to feed heavily when they are in their calving areas, perhaps because they are so large and require so much food.
The whale's oral cavity is a spacious room with an area of about 24 square meters. m.
Whales migrate throughout the year - in the summer they “graze” in the subpolar regions of Antarctica, and by winter they move to warm equatorial waters, covering thousands of miles of travel. At the same time, “on the road” they may not eat anything at all, using up the fat reserves that they gained on summer or winter pastures. Whales usually travel alone, sometimes in pairs, and can communicate by emitting intense low-frequency sounds reaching a level of 188 dB, which allows their relatives, who are located at a distance of about 1,500 km, to hear them.
Blue whale with calf diving The gestation period for blue whales is 11 months. It is believed that females select males based on size. They measure 23-26 feet and weigh three tons when they are born. They sometimes reach a length of 60 feet after the first year. The blue whale is said to be twice their birth weight in the first seven days. It takes a human child about 120 days to achieve this.
Young blue whales feed exclusively on their mother's milk, which is 40 percent fat. The calf gains a weight of about four kilograms per hour. During the seven-month lactation period, female blue whales can lose up to 25 percent of their body weight. Weaning occurs after about a year.
In a calm state, the whale swims at a speed of 10-15 km/h, but sometimes reaches speeds of up to 35-40 km/h, which, however, can be maintained for a very short time, only a few minutes.
Female whales carry their babies for 11 months, a 7-meter newborn “baby” weighing 2 tons is able to drink more than 0.5 tons of fatty mother’s milk daily and double its original weight in a week, by which time they can already provide themselves with food on their own . Whales become adults only after 4.5 years, and reach full physical maturity by 14-15 years.
A mother whale often intervenes between her calf and potential danger, but this mother was a calm Montessori parent and she left her baby to explore. Blue whales Songs and communication. Blue Whale Wells The "pulsing noise" that blue whales make is considered the loudest noise made by any animal on Earth. The low-frequency 188-decibel sounds can be picked up, picked up by communications equipment 900 kilometers away, and can be heard by other blue whales on the peninsula.
Most of the sounds they produce are too low for humans to hear, but can be easily matched to underwater microphones used to track submarines. Whales in different areas have different challenges. Little is known about the purpose of the calls. He didn't even know who made them, males or females or both. It is widely believed that most of the songs are made by men who are looking for mates.