Scientists were trying to figure out the mystery behind its massive size when they made this discovery.
The blue whale is the biggest animal in world history — not just currently the biggest animal, but the biggest to have ever lived — and for many years, that has been a mystery to scientists.
Now, scientists think they have an understanding of why that is.
The blue whale can grow to nearly 100 feet long and 200 short tons, which makes it bigger than even the biggest dinosaur that ever lived: Argentinosaurus, which grew to be 130 feet long and 100 tons. But scientists have struggled to understand how the blue whale is able to maintain this incredible size while subsisting entirely on a diet of krill, which are tiny shrimp-like creatures. A new study may have cracked the code however: blue whales are very clever and have very efficient ways of eating, according to a Christian Science Monitor report.
Blue whales will eat four tons of krill every single day, opening up their huge mouths and swallowing large groups of them along with lots of sea water, which is then filtered out of their mouths with baleen that keeps the krill in, allowing them to gulp it down. So it would seem that blue whales are rather boring in that regard: they find krill, gulp it up, and repeat as necessary. Or, at least that’s what scientists thought, until this new study found that they have some very sophisticated methods for eating.
The findings, published in Science Magazine, indicate that scientists have always suspected there was more to the story than that, said Elliott Haze of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in a press release. And as it turns out, that suspicion was right: whales have optimized feeding behavior to avoid wasting effort and energy that is extremely precious for survival.
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