Instead of teeth, they have plastic-like plates called baleen, which are stacked very close together in their mouths and oriented so that water can be squeezed out between them.
Imagine filling your entire kitchen with shrimp and swallowing them all with one gulp!īig blues belong to the group of whales called baleen whales. Tons of small shrimp-like animals called krill get stuck in the plates, and then the whale swallows the krill. It immediately forces most of the water out by shutting its mouth and squeezing the water through plates around its mouth.
#Blue whale weight skin
When big blue opens its jaw to take a huge gulp of ocean water, thick accordion-like folds of skin expand like a massive water balloon, big enough to hold 15,000 gallons (57 kl). My, What a Big Mouth You HaveĪ big body needs a big mouth to feed it. Even the long-necked dinosaurs, although some of them were longer from nose to tail, probably never came close to the weight of big blue. A single blue whale can weigh more than 150 tons (136 m.
The largest blue whale ( Balaenoptera musculus) that scientists have measured was 98 feet (30 m) long, though in 1909 a whaling station reported the capture of a big blue measuring over 110 feet (34 m). But unless you’re shrimp-sized, you aren’t on the menu, because this monster of the deep-the blue whale-has no teeth. Weighing as much as thirty full-grown elephants and with a mouth big enough to swallow a bus, he devours literally tons of food every day. Alone in the ocean depths swims the largest creature that has ever lived on land or sea.
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