But without his mother, a baby blue whale is a sitting duck. Due to the whales’ size and strength, even several orcas have little chance at feasting on an adult. Orcas are the blue whales’ only natural predator. The energy that the mother whale must expend to protect her baby, especially in the early days of teaching it how to come to the surface and breathe, is inconceivable. Blue whale calves gain 200 pounds a day and drink 100 gallons of milk at their mothers’ breasts per day. And after courting every two to three years, she gives birth to a ‘little’ one weighing 5,000 pounds. The blue whale’s impressive characteristics don’t stop there. Only a few nations today, among them Iceland and Japan, still (legally) have a share in the whaling industry. We are currently lucky to still have the blue whale with us at all they were nearly hunted to extinction until measures were enacted to ensure their security in 1966. While her brain is rather small (fifteen pounds or so), her intelligence and grace cannot be underscored. While feeding, she may slow to about 3 miles per hour in order to have her fill of krill, more than 400 million of which must nourish her on a daily basis. The great blue whale reaches a length of 98 to 100 feet, weighs about 190 tons, and has the muscle power to propel herself against the currents at between twelve and thirty-two miles per hour. These deep monotones are well beyond the 15 to 25 Hz melodies of most blue and fin whales.Īs there are few potential cryptids that can compare to the Loneliest Whale in terms of size, it would first be prudent take a look at the blue whale (she being the largest mammal we’ve catalouged) and appreciate just what kind of resplendent creature she is. The ‘Loneliest Whale’ has been singing at an astonishing 52 hz. And this ‘whale-song’ was no fluke it has since been detected in 1990, 1991, and as recently as 2015. While the enormous creature was not seen or photographed, her yearning serenades were picked up by underwater hydrophones, first installed in the ocean by the Pentagon in the 1950s for the purposes of detecting Soviet submarines. How we are to yet categorize this enigmatic mammal is anyone’s guess. William Watkins of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts was the first to detect it in the late 1980s.
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