Diving blue whales can dive for anything up to 15 minutes. However, Bob Shadwick from the University of British Columbia, Canada, explains that blue whales may be able to dive for longer, because of the colossal oxygen supplies they could carry in their blood and muscles, so why don’t they? ‘The theory was that what they are doing under water must use a lot of energy,’ says Shadwick. Explaining that the whales feed by lunging repeatedly through deep shoals of krill, engulfing their own body weight in water before filtering out the nutritious crustaceans, Shadwick says, ‘It was thought that the huge drag effect when they feed and reaccelerate this gigantic body must be the cost’. However, measuring the energetics of blue whale lunges at depth seemed almost impossible until Shadwick and his student Jeremy Goldbogen got chatting to John Hildebrand, John Calambokidis, Erin Oleson and Greg Schorr who were skilfully attaching hydrophones, pressure sensors and two-axis accelerometers to the elusive animals. Shadwick and Goldbogen realised that they could use Calambokidis’s measurements to calculate the energetic cost of blue whale lunges. They publish their discovery that blue whales swallow almost 2,000,000kJ (almost 480,000kcalories) in a mouthful of krill, and take in 90 times as much energy as they burn during a single dive in The Journal of Experimental Biology at http://jeb.biologists.org.
To read the full, original article click on this link: Blue whale-sized mouthfuls make foraging super efficient | Science Blog
