Description
Spinner Dolphins ride on the bow wave of a huge Blue Whale, giving great perspective on the immense nature of our planets largest inhabitant.
The blue whale is the largest animal on the planet, weighing up to 200 tons (approximately 33 elephants).The heart of an adult whale is the size of a Volkswagen Beetle.The Blue Whale is the loudest animal on Earth, even louder than a jet engine. Their low frequency whistle can be heard by other whales over 1000km away.
There are currently five “Subspecies” of blue whale, B. m. musculus in the North Atlantic and North Pacific, B. m. intermedia in the Southern Ocean, B. m. brevicauda “Pygmy blue whale” in the Indian Ocean and South Pacific Ocean, B. m. indica in the Northern Indian Ocean, and B. m. unnamed subsp. in the waters off Chile. The blue whale diet consists almost exclusively of Krill.
Once abundant in all the Worlds Oceans, the Blue Whale was hunted to the point of extinction until the International Whaling Commission IWC banned all hunting of blue whales in 1967. The IWC database estimates that 382,595 blue whales were caught between 1868 and 1978. Today< Global estimates the Blue Whale population at between 10,000-25,000, roughly 3-11% of the population size estimated in 1911
