Take a dive alongside a blue whale – the largest animal on the planet!
Explore the whale’s anatomy and amazing adaptations, or view its behaviors as it swims.
Visit bluewhalesfilm.com for lots more on the blue whale and its journey back from the brink of extinction.
- Whales’ throats are elastic, like accordions. They can expand to hold up to 20,000 gallons of water when the whales lunge for food.
- A blue whale’s eye is the size of a grapefruit. But that’s small for such a big body. Colossal squid, one-third the length of blue whales, have eyes the size of soccer balls!
- Blue whales have two blowholes, each over a foot in diameter! When the whale exhales, its blow can reach 370 miles per hour and shoot 30 feet into the air.
- Every blue whale has a unique spot pattern and dorsal fin shape. These markings are like fingerprints. Scientists can use them to identify individual whales.
- Massive back muscles power the blue whale’s enormous tail. The tail can reach 25 feet wide, and generate twice as much force as an F-15 fighter jet.
- A blue whale’s tongue weighs nearly as much as a male African elephant. The tongue helps force water out of the whale’s mouth and filter krill through its baleen plates.
- The blue whale’s brain is highly complex but relatively small. It weighs about 15 pounds - only about 1% of the whale’s total body weight.
- A blue whale can hold a lot of air in its lungs - about as much as 335 party balloons! But when it dives, for up to 90 minutes at a time, it stores most of the oxygen it needs in its blood and muscles.
- A blue whale’s heart is about the size of a golf cart. At the surface, its heart rate is about 33 beats per minute. During a dive, that rate can slow to as low as 2 beats per minute.
- The blue whale’s gut is filled with over 700 feet of intestines. That’s longer than two football fields!
- These small bones in the tail of the whale are evolutionary relics. They’re evidence that whales evolved from four-legged ancestors, which walked on land.
- Blue whales’ ribs are not attached to their backbones. These “floating ribs” help their lungs compress when they dive. This helps whales withstand immense pressures at low depths.
- The blue whale’s lower jaw is made up of two bones called mandibles. They’re the biggest bones on Earth, letting the whales take huge gulps of krill-filled water.
- Instead of teeth, blue whales have plates of baleen. They’re made out of keratin - the same thing that makes fingernails. Baleen acts as a filter by trapping krill when the whale feeds.