Blue Whales
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| Kingdom:Anamalia |
| Phylum: Chordata |
| CLASS:Mammalia |
| ORDER:Cetacea |
| SUBORDER: Mysticeti |
| FAMILY: Balaenopteridae |
| GENUS: Balaenoptera |
| SPECIES: Musculus |
PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION:
Blue whales are one of the few species of mammals that live under water. It is the larges animal in the world. The longest Blues whale ever recorded was 108ft. The head of the blue whale makes up less than one-fourth of the body length. The upper part of the head is very broad and flat. The body of the whale is mostly smooth and has a few parasites, but sometimes a few barnacles attach themselves to the edge of the fluke (any of various flatfishes) and occasionally to the tips of the flippers and to the dorsal fin. There are 55 to 68 ventral grooves extending from the lower jaw to near the navel of the whale.
COLOR:
Blue whales are often blue-gray in color and often lighter gray. Underneath the flipper the color may be lighter or white. While the under side of the whale is dark. Blue whales get microscopic organisms called diatoms. Diatoms are in the cold waters of the Antarctic, North Pacific, and North Atlantic. It is what gives the underside of its body a yellowish green caste.
FEEDING:
The blue whales are thought to feed almost exclusively on small, shrimp-like creatures called euphausiids or krill.In the summer blue whales consuming an astounding 4 tons (3.6 metric tons) or more each day. This is equal to 40million krill a day. As a baleen whale, it has a series of 260-400 fringed overlapping plates hanging from each side of the upper jaw, where teeth should 
be located. The plates consist of a fingernail-like material called keratin that frays out into fine hairs on the ends inside the mouth near the tongue. The plates are black and measure about 20 inches in length toward the front of the mouth and about 40 inches at the rear of the mouth. When the blue whales eat, large volumes of water and food can be taken into the mouth because the pleated grooves in the throat expand. The mouth closes water is expelled through the baleen plates, which trap the food on the inside near the tongue to be swallowed.
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BREEDING:
Blue whales usually breed in the winter to early spring while near the calf is born tail first near the surface in warm and shallow waters. The newborn instinctively swims to the surface within 10 seconds for its first breath. Its mother, using her flippers, helps it. After 30 minutes of its birth the baby whales can swim. The newborn is 25 feet long and weighs 6-8 tons. Calves drink 50-200 pounds of milk everyday. The mother and calf may stay together until the calf is about 45 feet long. Which is about a year or longer. Blue whales mature in about 10-15 years.
CALLS:
Estimates made by Cumming and Thompson in 1971 suggest that source level of sound made by blue whales are between 155 and 188 decibles. When measured relative to a reference pressure of one micropascal (one hundreth of a pascal) at one metre. All blue whales groups make basic sounds between 10 and 40 Hz, and the lowest sound a human can typically hear is 20 Hz. Blue whale calls last between ten to thirty seconds.
CLICK THIS LINK TO LISTEN TO A BLUE WHALE'S CALL
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Comments (1)
valerieW said
at 10:36 pm on Feb 9, 2010
Good, but add info about where blue whales live. :)
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