Blue whale
The heaviest animal known to have lived: as long as a tennis court and as heavy as some thirty African elephants.
Adult blue whales are commonly 23 to 27 metres long, about fifteen times your height, and females are larger than males. The longest reliably measured, from the whaling era, approached 30 metres, and the heaviest weighed in the region of 190 tonnes.
This bulk is built on tiny food. Blue whales eat krill, shrimp-like crustaceans a few centimetres long, by lunging into dense swarms with their mouths open, gulping a volume of water about as large as their own body and straining it out through baleen plates. In the feeding season an adult may eat up to about 16 tonnes of krill a day.
Their heart weighs around 180 kilograms, as measured from a whale stranded in Newfoundland in 2014. Their calls, pitched around 10 to 40 hertz, sit mostly below the range of human hearing and can travel hundreds of kilometres through the ocean.
Twentieth-century whaling killed some 360,000 blue whales in the Southern Hemisphere alone, cutting numbers there by more than 99%. Protected since 1966, they are recovering slowly and remain endangered. Water makes their size possible, because buoyancy carries weight that would crush a land animal's skeleton. About thirteen blue whales stood nose to tail would reach the top of the Eiffel Tower.
- Size
- 2.5 × 10¹ m
- Mass
- up to about 190 t
- Diet
- Krill
- Status
- Endangered (IUCN)