Blue whale biology and conservation

Blue Whale

If you have any questions about this paper, please contact our customer service department at THE BLUE WHALE

What's Happening With the Blue Whale

The Blue Whale is the largest mammal to live on earth. If the blue whale lived on the land, the weight of its immense body and bones would crush it. They can weigh up to 200,000 pounds and the biggest ones can be 100 feet long. That's one-third the size of a football field, and longer than three school buses! The blue whale is part of the rorqual whale family that includes the humpback whale, fin whale, Bryde's whale, sei whale, and minke whale. These whales all have large pleats on their throats that let them expand when they swallow water.

The Blue Whale has a long body with a flat, broad head. It has a long, pointy mouth and chin, and small fins attached partway down its body. This whale is bluish gray in color, with white underneath the fins, and a dark color on the underside of the big tail, (called a fluke). Sometimes barnacles attach themselves to the fluke, and make white dots on the whale's skin.

Blue Whales live in every ocean in the world. They like to spend the winters in warm oceans like the tropics. They have their babies here, too. In the summertime, they like to find food in colder waters, so they migrate to the Antarctic, or the Arctic oceans, depending on what part of the world they live in.

It's funny, but the biggest mammals on earth eat some of the tiniest food! Blue Whales don't have teeth, they have "baleen," which is a kind of filter or sieve that filters out tiny pieces of food from the sea water. The whales suck in big gulps of ocean water, and the tiny shrimp and plankton (microscopic sea animals) are filtered out, and the whale swallows them. Blue whales can eat anywhere from 2,000 to 9,000 pounds of food a day! But they don't eat all the time. They only eat in the summertime after they have migrated to the cold waters of the Arctic or Antarctic.

Blue Whales are important and beautiful animals, who are endangered, but we can all help these whales to make sure they don't disappear.

The Blue Whale Needs Your Help!

How Can You Help?

You can help the Blue Whale survive. Because too many of the whales were being killed by whaling ships, in 1966 the International Whaling Commission (IWC) stopped any hunting of blue whales and gave them worldwide protection. Some people think there are only about 5,000 of them living in the oceans today, while others think there may be as many as 14,000.