- 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.