Blue Whale - The Largest Animal In The World / Documentary (English/HD) скачать в хорошем качестве

Blue Whale - The Largest Animal In The World / Documentary (English/HD)

The Blue Whale is a colossal creature which grows to such incredible length and weight. Despite its record-breaking size, it is still capable of moving with such relative ease and speed in the water given the water’s buoyancy and the perfectly suitable evolutionary shape which the Blue Whale has developed. Possessive of a long tapered body, triangular wide flukes, and a broad, aerodynamically flat head, the Blue Whale is specifically designed for Earth’s oceans. Just about everything about the Blue Whale tips the scale. Upon birth, a baby blue whale is already the size of adult Orcas measuring 25 feet (almost 8 meters) in length and weighing 6,000 pounds (over 2.5 tons)! The average length of a Blue Whale is between 70 and 90 feet (or 21 to 27 meters). The longest measured length of a Blue Whale clocked in at 109 feet (about 33 meters)! It could weigh as much as 200 tons (that’s over 400,000 pounds)! Prowling our oceans for the past millions of years, the Blue Whale inhabits all the world’s oceans except the frozen regions of the Arctic. Being an oceanic animal, it prefers open waters over coastal regions. Hence, it can be found in places like the Atlantic Ocean, the Pacific Ocean and very rarely, the Antarctic Ocean. Although Blue Whales are not as widely distributed as before, yet, in the Northern Hemisphere of our globe, they can still be found in the North-Eastern part of the Pacific Ocean in places such as Alaska all the way to Costa Rica. They are also found in the northern part of the Atlantic Ocean around regions like Greenland, Nova Scotia and Newfoundland. A pocket sized population can also be found in the Indian Ocean even though before the 1960s, a great multitude of these whales lived there. Having established the fact that these whales live almost worldwide and grow to such enormous sizes, you must be curious as to how old they get and what exactly they eat before becoming so big. A blue whale has an average lifespan of 80 to 90 years with many being known to clock 100 years. In fact, the oldest recorded Blue Whale is believed to have been 110 years old by counting the growth layers in its earplug. Older blue whales primarily feed on krill of which they may consume as much as 40 million – which weigh about 8,000 pounds (approximately 3,600 kg) in a single day! They also eat copepods and plankton. While they have no teeth, they have baleen – about 500 to 800 fringed plates attached to their upper jaw to help separate krill from seawater as they feed. This baleen is made of keratin, the same material from which our hair and nails are made. Despite how much they eat in order to support their humongous size, blue whales can survive for up to four months by living off on the fat stored in their blubber. This often happens when they need to migrate during winter to temperate regions. One of the natural predators of blue whales are Orcas, also known as Killer Whales. A single Orca cannot take down a Blue Whale one on one since a blue whale is much bigger than an Orca. Blue Whale calves are already at par in size with an adult Orca even at birth and grow so fast that they become 50 feet (about 15 meters) long upon their seventh month after being weaned. However, Orcas are successful hunters of blue whales due to the fact that Orcas are smart and deadly. Hunting as a pod or group which may contain between six and forty members, Orcas would often strategically isolate the youngest blue whale from the mother or the rest of the blue whale pod and finish off the calf. Apart from Orcas, there is only one predator that is more fearsome – humans! Between 1800 to 1900s, humans hunted so many blue whales to the extent that in 1966, the International Whaling Commission was formed listing Blue Whales as endangered species that need to be protected. Prior to this time, when whaling (i.e. the hunting of whales for oil and other purposes) was a commercially booming business, hundreds of thousands of whales were hunted. According to Nat Geo Wild, between 1900 and 1960s, about 360,000 blue whales were hunted! Specifically, between just 1930 and 1931 alone, about 30,000 blue whales were executed. Though they are still listed as “endangered” on the International Union for the Conservation of Nature’s list, current population trend however says that they are slowly increasing once again. As stated earlier, blue whales are gentle giants, not predatory in that sense. Despite how wide they can open their mouth and the thousands of kilograms of food they eat each day, blue whales do not attack or eat humans. While there are no known human attacks, there have however been accidental collisions with ships in the sea and this is understandable given their gargantuan size. Narrator: Larry G. Jones