[Animals] The blue whale: the largest animal on the planet

[FNX Magokiler]

The blue whale is the largest known animal that lives on Earth. These majestic marine mammals dominate the oceans with their 30 meters in length and up to 180 tons in weight. Your tongue alone can weigh as much as an elephant, and your heart as heavy as a car. It is also called the blue whale, sharing a family with other whales such as the fin whale or the northern whale.

Blue whales reach these exorbitant dimensions with a diet composed of plankton and krill, an animal similar to a tiny shrimp. At certain times of the year, an adult blue whale consumes about 3.5 tons of krill per day. It is precisely the increase in krill that experts point to as the reason why these seriously endangered cetaceans are once again being seen in Spanish waters.

Until an archaeological investigation in Peru in mid-2023 described the bones of the whale Perucetus colossus, scientists agreed that the blue whale was the largest animal that has ever inhabited our planet. According to experts, the new species discovered could weigh between 93 and 370 tons, but the remains found to date are very few so it is still very daring to dethrone the blue whale as the largest animal in history.

Both in our waters and at a general level, blue whales and fin whales, both common and northern, are seriously threatened by the effect of climate change, by the lack of food and by heavy fishing exploitation. The subspecies that can be found in the waters of the Canary Islands and the peninsula is the Balaenoptera musculus musculus, similar to the fin whale.

 

 

Threats to the blue whale
"Various conservation problems affect marine life in Galician waters, many of which are related to human activity, such as interaction with fishing (a major cause of mortality), overfishing, aquaculture activities, oil spills , pollution, the effects of noise from maritime transport, military activity and tourism," stated the Spanish Cetacean Society at the last annual congress.

To support their conservation, a report published in 2018 studied how, through whale earwax hormones, it can be investigated how human activities, such as whaling or war, have stressed whales for more than a century. century and a half.

Furthermore, despite being the largest animal on our planet, humans are not the only ones capable of hunting these aquatic colossi. According to a study published in the journal Marine Mammal Science in January 2022, scientists described three killings of blue whales carried out by orcas; in March and April 2019 and in March 2021.

"This is the largest predation event on this planet: the largest possible predator taking out the largest prey," says study co-author Robert Pitman, a marine ecologist at Oregon State University's Marine Mammal Institute. "We don't have dinosaurs anymore, so for me, as a whale biologist and zoologist, it's amazing."

 

https://www.nationalgeographic.es/animales/ballena-azul