My name is Oscar Marroquin. I am in 2nd grade. I have a whale project. I
have some questions on blue whales. Please answer them. Thank you.
What do Blue Whales eat?
Do the Blue Whales live on the bottom or top of the ocean?
Do whales migrate when the seasons change?
What are some interesting facts about the Blue Whale?
Thank you.
Thank you for your friendly questions.
Their food is interesting because even though Blue whales are the largest
animals to live on Earth, they eat very small animals, usually a type of
shrimp called krill. Krill are very numerous in very cold waters during
summer months, so blue whales race through massive swarms of krill and fill
their expandable throats with water filled with krill. Then they push the
water out through their baleen plates and swallow down more than a hundred
pounds of krill with each gulp.
You could say they live on the top of the ocean because they don't dive
very deep, compared to many other whales. In fact, all of the baleen whales
stay within a few hundred feet of the top of the water, whereas most
toothed whales dive many hundreds of feet deep to catch fish and squid one
at a time.
Blue whales migrate to the cold, productive waters during the warmer months
of the year. The problem is that nobody knows where most of the blue whales
go in the colder months. That's amazing when you consider they are the
largest animal on Earth.
Another interesting fact is that the vocalizations of blue whales cannot
heard by humans because their frequency is below our range of hearing. We
would feel them as a vibration in the water. But at that frequency blue
whales can hear each other more than a thousand miles away from each other.
Howard Garrett
Orca Network
Greenbank WA
(360) 678-3451
www.orcanetwork.org
howard@orcanetwork.org
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