Maxing out at around 200 tons, the blue whale is not only the largest animal on the planet, it is also the largest animal ever to exist.
Maxing out at around 200 tons, the blue whale is not only the largest animal on the planet, it is also the largest animal ever to exist. These creatures become so massive by eating a diet comprised almost entirely of krill, the translucent, thumb-sized organisms that thrive in the frigid waters of Antarctica.
Blue whales are baleen feeders: In place of teeth they have baleen plates, made from keratin, that serve as a sieve. Swimming toward huge concentrations of krill, they open their triple-hinged jaws to gulp in huge volumes of water and prey, then filter out the water. The only baleen whale that almost exclusively eats krill, blues can consume as much as 16 metric tons of the shrimp-like crustaceans in a day.
But this food supply appears to be faltering. Climate change, which is warming the oceans and melting polar ice, is causing large-scale changes in the Southern Ocean krill population, changing their distribution and behavior and in some places contributing to declines of as much as 80 percent. Parts of Antarctica are warming five times faster than the global average. Last fall the British Antarctic Survey warned that “dramatic and extreme changes in Antarctica are happening faster than expected,” and the continent could be approaching a tipping point.
Read More at: Yale Environment 360
Photo Credit: mcsc1995 via Pixabay
