This entry was posted on Monday, August 18th, 2008 at 11:31 am and is filed under Watching, Whales. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
The blue whale is one of the most majestic creatures in the ocean. At an average of 110 feet and 200 tons, the blue whale is thought to be the biggest animal to have ever existed. It is a marine animal in the suborder of baleen whales. As with other baleen whales, the diet of the blue whale consists of crustaceans known as krill, small fist and sometimes squid. It is the biggest jokes in nature that the biggest animals in the wild have a diet consisting of one of the smallest.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, blue whales were in abundance in all the oceans, able to travel extraordinary distances to complete their breeding cycles. They truly were the world’s first globetrotter. Then for a period for 40 years, the blue whales were hunted almost to the point of extinction. With better regulations, this trend reversed itself, but the blue whale is only at a few percent population of what they once were. Whale watching in Hawaii is a popular tourist activity. Some folks come from all over the world just to see the birthing and mating grounds for the 5th largest whale in the world.
