Blue whale, the gentle giant

While not nearly as old as the Earth’s oldest trees, blue whales are among the planet’s longest-lived animals. Similar with counting the tree rings, scientists count layers of wax in the blue whale’s ears and can determine an estimated age. The oldest blue whale scientist have discovered this way was calculated to be around 100 years old, though the average life is thought to last around 80 to 90 years.

Visualize in your mind a 10-story-tall creature walking down the street and you most likely begin channeling images of Godzilla or King Kong. But if you picture it as an oceanic mammal and place it on its side, swimming; now you have a blue whale. Earth is covered with amazing, fascinating living things, but the blue whale is in a league of its own. Balaenoptera musculus, the blue whale, is the largest animal ever known to have lived on the planet, including all dinosaurs. Even at birth, it is larger than adults from most other animal species. The longest blue whale ever recorded was a magnificent 108 feet (33 meters) long. That is about as long as three school buses lined up end to end. But generally, they range in length from 80 to 100 feet (24 to 30 meters). Their average weight is 200,000 to 300,000 pounds (90,000 to 136,000 kilograms), or about 100 to 150 tons. Some can weigh as much as 441,000 pounds (200,000 kg), or 220 tons. For comparison, an adult African bush elephant weighs up to 6 tons, so it may take 30 or more elephants to equal the weight of one blue whale. Apart from being the largest animal ever to have lived on Earth, Blue whales, in fact, are the loudest animals on the planet; a jet engine registers at 140 decibels; the call of a blue whale reaches 188. Their language of pulses, groans, and moans can be heard by others up to 1,000 miles (1,600 kilometers) away.

Blue whales get their name from their gray to blue coloration which comes partially from the sea. Although blue whales are thought to have a deep blue color, when they are at the surface of the water they actually appear grey. When blue whales dive down again, the color of the water and the light from the sun make them look deeper blue than they really are. Blue whales are really a lightly mottled blue-grey, with light grey or yellow-white undersides. The yellow ventral coloring is due to the accumulation of diatoms (microscopic unicellular marine algae) in cold water.

While not nearly as old as the Earth’s oldest trees, blue whales are among the planet’s longest-lived animals. Similar with counting the tree rings, scientists count layers of wax in the blue whale’s ears and can determine an estimated age. The oldest blue whale scientist have discovered this way was calculated to be around 100 years old, though the average life is thought to last around 80 to 90 years.

Interestingly, though they are enormous, blue whales are not predatory. This massive animal feeds almost exclusively on tiny shrimp-like creatures called krill. They feed by opening their huge mouths, swimming forward, and then filtering out the water through a structure called “baleen.” Baleen are plates made of keratin – the same material that your hair and fingernails are made of. The sheets of baleen are similar to very stiff hair, and when the whale pushes the water out of its mouth through the baleen, the shrimp are left behind. They can eat up to four tons of krill per day. Though they may be found singly or in small groups, it is more common to see blue whales in pairs. They are sometimes seen in larger groups and loosely defined concentrations of 50-60 have been observed. They are fast, strong swimmers, capable of reaching 30 mph (48.3 km/hr) when alarmed, but they usually cruise along at about 12 mph (19.3 km/hr). Blue whales spend their summers in the cooler waters of the Arctic or Antarctic oceans, and their winters in the tropical waters near the equator. The older whales, and pregnant whales, begin their migration first. Groups generally migrate according to age, and sex, with the youngest animals migrating last. During the migration, they eat virtually nothing, and survive on their fat stores.

Due to their enormous size and mass, blue whales have no natural predators on earth but they have been globally listed as endangered. Blue whales are in danger of extinction through man-made causes in the form of entanglement, vessel strikes, and other threats. This species was once abundant in nearly all the oceans on Earth until the beginning of the twentieth century. During the 1,700′s whale blubber and oil became a profitable business largely due to the growing industrial age and increasing dependency on oil combined with advances in technology and boating, which made it easier for whalers to hunt, kill and capture them, which quickly lead to a highly competitive (international) whaling market, and thus the whaling industry was born. As technology, boats, and hunting equipment continued to evolve throughout the centuries, the rate at which blue whales were being killed greatly increased and continued to shrink the existing their populations. Due to their massive size, whalers got paid top dollar for this mammal, so competitors continually hunted them until near extinction. As blue whale populations declined significantly, organizations such as The International Convention for the Regulation of Whaling begin stepping in to limit the killing of the endangered species and hopefully allow those species time to recover and repopulate. In addition to the assistance, these organizations provided towards the monitoring and regulation of blue whale hunting, increases in technology and cheap alternative resources provided companies & suppliers with alternative methods of producing & selling their products without the need to use whale oil as a source of fuel or as an ingredient in their materials. Unfortunately, even though agreements exist between various countries, those that did not opt into the agreement are only bound by their country’s own regulations on whaling (if the country has imposed regulations), which means that there are still countries these days that consider whaling a source of industry.

Today, however, countries and companies that still hunt whales primarily hunt them as a source of food (in some areas, whale meat is considered a delicacy) because other practical uses such as lamp oil, cosmetics, and candles no longer require the parts/oil of blue whales to be produced. Recovery has been extremely slow but thanks to those protections, the population has grown, and only in the last few years have there been signs that their numbers may be increasing. Pre-whaling population estimates were over 350,000 blue whales, but up to 99% of blue whales were killed during whaling efforts. Presently, there are estimated between 5,000 to 10,000 blue whales in the Southern Hemisphere and about 3,000 to 4,000 blue whales in the Northern Hemisphere. However, blue whales continue to face threats in their ocean home, such as ship strikes and impacts from ocean trash and fishing gear.