Blue Whale (Balaenoptera musculus)

Assembled from 39 blocks · 3 evidence · 59 related

1. Story
2. The largest animal known to have lived. The longest individual on record is a female measured at a South Georgia whaling station in the South Atlantic at 33.58 m; the heaviest on record is a separate female taken in the Southern Ocean on 20 March 1947 at 190 tonnes. It is a rorqual: a lunge-feeding baleen whale that engulfs a volume of prey-laden water comparable to its own body mass and then filters it. The species is divided into subspecies whose migrations differ so much that treating "the blue whale migration" as one route is misleading - Antarctic, pygmy and putative northern Indian Ocean populations behave differently. IUCN assesses the species as Endangered, with an estimated 5,000-15,000 mature individuals and an increasing global trend, while individual subspecies range from recovering to critically endangered.
3. Knowledge
4. Blue Whale (Balaenoptera musculus)
5. Rorqual Lunge Feeding
6. Antarctic Krill (Euphausia superba)
7. Connections
8. Antarctic Krill (Euphausia superba)
9. Rorqual Lunge Feeding
10. Antarctic Blue Whale (B. m. intermedia)
11. Pygmy Blue Whale (B. m. brevicauda)
12. Northern Indian Ocean Blue Whale (putative B. m. indica)
13. Fin Whale (Balaenoptera physalus)
14. Whale-Mediated Iron Recycling
15. Vessel Collision with Large Whales
16. The longest blue whale on record is measured at South Georgia
17. The heaviest blue whale on record is weighed
18. The IWC protects blue whales from commercial hunting
19. The commercial whaling moratorium takes effect
20. Blue whale song frequencies are observed falling worldwide
21. The energetics of blue whale lunge feeding are modelled
22. Baleen whale consumption is re-measured, and the krill paradox sharpens
23. Blue Whale (Balaenoptera musculus)
24. Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources
25. Baleen whale consumption is re-measured, and the krill paradox sharpens
26. Antarctic Polar Front (Antarctic Convergence)
27. Sea Ice
28. Southern Ocean
29. Emperor Penguin (Aptenodytes forsteri)
30. CCAMLR is agreed at Canberra
31. A long-term decline in krill density is linked to winter sea ice
32. CCAMLR adopts the Ross Sea marine protected area
33. Blue Whale (Balaenoptera musculus)
34. Seasonal Krill Aggregation
35. The energetics of blue whale lunge feeding are modelled
36. Evidence
37. The blue whale is globally assessed as Endangered, with 5,000-15,000 mature individuals estimated and an increasing population trend; some populations are reported recovering at rates of up to about 7 percent a year. V55 verification basis: retrieved in search summary attributed to the IUCN assessment; the assessment document was not fetched.
38. The longest blue whale on record is a female measured at a South Georgia whaling station at 33.58 m; the heaviest is a separate female taken in the Southern Ocean on 20 March 1947 at 190 tonnes. V55 verification basis: retrieved in search summary attributed to Guinness World Records; the entries were not fetched, and the sources retrieved disagree on whether the length record dates from 1909 or c.1912 - the disagreement is preserved rather than resolved.
39. 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.