Blue whale

Depth: 60 m · Sunlight Zone

The blue whale is the largest animal that has ever lived on Earth, bigger than any dinosaur. Its heart alone is as big as a car. Even so it eats only tiny krill, which it filters from the water by the ton. Its call is louder than a jet engine.

For scientists

The blue whale (Balaenoptera musculus) feeds by lunging: it charges into a cloud of krill with its mouth wide open, its throat pouch expands many times over, and its baleen filters out up to several tons of krill a day. Its deep infrasound calls carry over hundreds of kilometers. Calves drink hundreds of liters of extremely fatty milk a day and grow at an astonishing rate.

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