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Blue whale - BALAENOPTERA MUSCULUS
Endangered
Class: Animals with Milk Glands (Mammalia)
The Name "Rorqual": "Rorqual" is an old Norse word for "red whale." Rorquals are those whales that have plates of baleen to strain their food from the seas. "Whale" comes from an old English word, derived from an even more ancient word, all of them simply referring to the animal.
Location: Worldwide, but especially in the Southern Hemisphere.
Habitat: Aquatic. Oceanic, as far as the coasts of Antarctica.
Description: This is probably the largest animal that EVER lived! It is grayish blue with some paler spots, and the tips and undersides of the fins are often white. The dorsal fin is very small, and the ventral grooves extend to the belly. In the mouth there are 270 to 400 baleen plates on each side. The enormous stomach can contain up to a ton of food. The blue whales grows to an average length of 80 ft, but can reach 100 ft! An average weight is over 140 tons (but then who has the scales to weigh this big guy?).
Behavior: Data relating to the life history of this species are from fragmentary observations gathered in all the world's seas at various times. In addition, the species is now virtually extinct because of overhunting in earlier years, and this hampers further study. These whales used to travel in groups of 30 to 50 animals in a vague formation spread over several miles. It would migrate to the polar regions in the spring, and then moved southward to the open sea in the autumn where it spent the winter. It feeds mainly on kriIl.
Reproduction: Mating takes place in summer and the gestation period lasts 11 months. The single calf is 24 feet long at birth.
Note: There are possibly no more than a few thousand of these whales left, or less than 10% of the population probably present before whaling began on a large scale.
Go to the Cetacea Page to learn more about the other whale-like animals.
Go to the Index to compare the various Whales found in America Zoo.
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