Page 16 - OCEAN ARTISTS SOCIETY - WInter 2017

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big blue
It’s difficult to truly comprehend the size of a blue whale. However, if you saw one in a land-based environment, you might be looking at a creature spanning more than the length of three school buses. Individuals over 100 feet long have been recorded, with weights up to 150 tons, a heart as big as an automobile, and a tongue weighing as much as an elephant. The main reason why an animal like the blue whale can exist at all owes to the buoyancy of water. Free from the restrictions of gravity, these animals can achieve a size and scale of enormous proportions. In fact, the blue whale is widely considered to be the largest animal to have ever lived on Earth.
Like other big oceanic animals, blue whales survive on a diet composed nearly exclusively of tiny shrimplike animals called krill. During certain times of the year, a single adult blue whale consumes about 4 tons (3.6 metric tons) of krill a day. Fringed plates of fingernail-like material on their upper jaw, called baleen, attached to their upper jaws, strain krill by the ton for the protein rich nourishment the animal needs. The giant animals feed by first
Original photo by Wyland
Did you know?
When a blue whale exhales, the spray from its blowhole can reach nearly 30 ft (9m) into the air.