The largest living mammal
Until a few days ago, I thought that elephants were the largest mammals on earth. When the truth came out, I was proved wrong.
Blue whales, not elephants, are the largest mammals. And blue whales are bigger than all the animals in this world.
They are up to 30 meters long and weigh up to 200 tons. That is, one blue whale is equal to 33 elephants in weight.
And their length is about the length of 3 school buses. A blue whale’s tongue alone weighs as much as that of an elephant.
OMG, what a big beast that is!
The blue whale’s diet is krill, and they eat 4 tons of krill per day. Their stomachs can hold up to one ton of krill at a time.
Blue whales communicate with each other through sound. Their sound goes up to 188 decibels, with which they communicate with other wheels hundreds of kilometers away. Their sound is louder than the sound of a jet engine.
They also travel long distances in the sea, and their travel speed ranges from 5–30 km per hour.
At birth, a baby blue whale weighs 3 tons and is 7 meters long. They drink only mother’s milk and gain 200 pounds per day during the first year of life.
Their average age is 80–90 years. The longest-lived blue whale on record is 110 years old.
Their population was once very large. But at the beginning of the 20th century, they were heavily hunted.
The reason for this was the oil obtained from them.
In the first half of the twentieth century, 350,000–360,000 blue whales were hunted. 30,000 were hunted during 1930–31 alone.
Gradually, when the world realized that they were going towards extinction, talks for the protection of this species started.
As a result, their hunting started getting banned, and finally, in 1966, they got protection all over the world.
But since then, they have not recovered much. Now, their number is between 10,000 and 25,000, and they are among the endangered species.
