A Humpback Whale

Learn all about Whales!

• Whales are warm-blooded mammals. Their body temperature is about the same as ours, even though they often live in very cold water.
  
• As mammals, whales also breathe air through blow-holes, give birth to living young and nurse their young. They even have the mammal characteristic of body hair!
• The two largest animals in the world, are the blue whale, which can grow to about 100 feet in length and the fin whale, which can grow to about 88 feet. Both whales feed on small krill and small schools of fish.
  
• There are two types of whales, ‘toothed whales’ (Odontoceti) and ‘baleen whales’ (Mysticeti). Toothed whales are predators that use their teeth to catch squid, fish and marine mammals. They are not teeth like we have – they are cone-shaped or spade-shaped teeth which are used to catch prey, rather than for chewing. Baleen whales have a sieve-like structure called baleen that catches huge amounts of tiny krill for nourishment.
  

Anatomy of a 'toothed' Killer Whale

Anatomy of a 'baleen' Humpback Whale

• There are 10 species of baleen whales. Baleen whales are larger than the toothed whales.
• The biggest whale is the female blue whale, which grows to be about 94 feet (29 metres) long which is the height of a 9-story building. These enormous animals need to eat about 4 tons of tiny krill each day,which they filter through their sieve-like baleen. 
• Adult blue whales have no predators except man.
• One of the smallest whales is the dwarf sperm whale which, when fully grown, is only 8.5 feet (2.6 metres) long.
  
• The whales most important sense is that of hearing! Whales do not have much of a sense of smell and as for the sense of taste, we are unsure if they have one.
• Toothed whales use echolocation to find their food, which involves emitting sounds that bounce off whatever is in front of them and interpreting those sounds to determine the object’s distance, size, shape and texture.
  
• Baleen whales probably don’t use echolocation, but use sound to communicate over long distances and may also use sound to develop a sonic map of the ocean’s features.
• A pod is a social group of whales. Members of a pod may protect one another.
• The bond between mother whale and her calf is very strong.
• The toothed whales travel in large, sometimes stable pods and they frequently hunt their prey in groups, migrate together and share care of their young. Baleen whales usually travel alone or in small pods.
• Because whales cannot breathe underwater and must breathe air like us,they need to be awake just about all the time in order to come up to the surface when they need to breathe. So, whales sleep by resting one half of their brain at a time. While one half of the brain stays awake to make sure the whale breathes and alerts the whale to any danger in its environment, the other half of the brain sleeps. This is called unihemispherical sleeping.
• Whales live a long time! The longest living whale species is thought to be the bowhead whale, which may live to over 200 years old!
  

Watch the video below and learn more about the Blue Whale.

Sizes of Whales

A Killer Whale or Orca

A Beluga Whale

A Blue Whale