What do whales eat? Inside the diet of blue, humpback, sperm and killer whales.
Whales may be known as gentle giants, but they still have a looming presence as the world’s loudest and largest animals.
The Antarctic blue whale can weigh up to 400,000 pounds and stretches to 98 feet in length. The underwater call of the sperm whale, the earth’s loudest, registers at 230 decibels. For context, 140 decibels is the threshold for humans to feel pain and ear injury.
These massive creatures also play an important role in our ecosystem. Fourteen species of baleen whales are instrumental in moving carbon, nitrogen and iron through the ocean, a 2021 study in Nature found.
What do whales eat?
Whales are carnivores who feast on other animals like plankton, crustaceans, fish, squid, sea birds and even fellow whale species.
A whale's diet varies by species. Odontocetes, or whales with teeth, use echolocation to hunt their food with sound rather than sight. They eat squid, octopus, fish, prawns, crustaceans and other marine mammals, sucking in their prey and swallowing it whole.
Whales with baleen, a filter-feeding system, eat smaller prey like krill, zooplankton and small fish by swallowing large gulps of water and straining it through the baleen plates.
Baleen whales eat between 10 and 20 tons a day, a 2021 Nature report found. That’s the caloric equivalent of eating 70-80 thousand Big Macs per day, the researchers told NPR.
What do blue whales eat?
Blue whales are baleen whales. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, they almost exclusively eat krill, which they strain out of huge water gulps through baleen plates.
What do humpback whales eat?
Humpback whales are filter feeders and eat small fish and crustaceans, mostly krill. They herd and disorient their prey using several methods. In one, called “bubble-net feeding,” one whale corrals fish and pushes them toward the surface by blowing bubbles. The others surround the fish and swim in a spiral to keep them trapped, keeping their mouths open to gulp up the fish.
What do killer whales eat?
Killer whales, also called orcas, are social predators who hunt as a team in “pods.” Their diet depends on where they live, but they hunt for fish, squid, walruses, seals, sea lions, penguins, sea turtles, sharks and other whales. Scientists recently confirmed the first observation of a group of orcas hunting a great white shark.
Orcas eat around 500 pounds of food per day.
What do sperm whales eat?
Sperm whales search for their food in deep waters – their hunts regularly reach 2,000 feet below the ocean surface and last for 45 minutes. Their diet consists of squids, sharks, skates and fish, NOAA reports.
How long do orcas live? Life expectancy for the rulers of the sea
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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: What do whales eat? Explore the diets of blue, killer and sperm whales
