Rorqual Lunge Feeding

Assembled from 18 blocks · 1 evidence · 41 related

1. Story
2. The engulfment manoeuvre that makes the blue whale's size possible and also constrains where it can live. The whale accelerates into a prey patch, opens its jaws and takes in a volume of water comparable to its own mass, then filters it through baleen. Modelling that combined tag kinematics with unsteady hydrodynamics found the energy returned by a single mouthful of dense krill is very large relative to the cost of the lunge - reported as up to about ninety times the energy expended on a dive - but only if the lunge targets extremely high krill densities. Dives in that work lasted between about 3 and 15 minutes with as many as six lunges each. The efficiency is conditional, which is why a blue whale cannot simply feed wherever it happens to be.
3. Knowledge
4. Seasonal Krill Aggregation
5. Rorqual Lunge Feeding
6. Connections
7. Blue Whale (Balaenoptera musculus)
8. Seasonal Krill Aggregation
9. The energetics of blue whale lunge feeding are modelled
10. Antarctic Summer Feeding Migration
11. Point Conception
12. California Current System
13. Southern Ocean
14. Rorqual Lunge Feeding
15. Whale-Mediated Iron Recycling
16. The energetics of blue whale lunge feeding are modelled
17. Evidence
18. Kinematic tag data combined with unsteady hydrodynamic models gives an energy budget for blue whale lunges and foraging dives: dives lasted between about 3.1 and 15.2 minutes with up to six lunges each, and foraging efficiency exceeds that of other marine mammals by close to an order of magnitude, but only where lunges target extremely high krill densities. V55 verification basis: retrieved in search summary of the paper and of institutional reporting on it; the per-mouthful energy figure and the 90:1 return ratio come from that secondary reporting rather than from the paper.