Video tags reveal surprising details of blue whale feeding behavior

Video tags reveal surprising details of blue whale feeding behavior

By a News Reporter-Staff News Editor at NewsFile -- The lunge feeding of blue whales is an extraordinary biomechanical event in which the largest animal on Earth accelerates and opens its mouth under water, expanding its enormous throat pouch to engulf a huge volume of water, then filtering out its prey (small crustaceans called krill) by forcing the water through sieve-like baleen plates.

“It’s very costly energetically, but it’s also very efficient because they get a lot of prey at once,” said Ari Friedlaender, a researcher at the UC Santa Cruz Institute of Marine Sciences. Blue whales are “the ultimate example of efficient feeding,” he said. Although energetic costs increase with body size, so does the efficiency because a larger mouth can process more water.

Friedlaender is lead author of a new study of blue whale feeding strategies that reveals surprising preferences in the massive whales with respect to how much and which direction they roll during lunge feeding. These preferences show how the need to maximize efficiency shapes the whales’ feeding behavior.

The study, published November 20 in Current Biology, used data from sophisticated tags attached to the animals’ …

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(2017-12-04), Video tags reveal surprising details of blue whale feeding behavior, NewsFile, 190, ISSN: 0000-0000, BUTTER® ID: 014802841