Facts About Whales

The blue whale is the largest animal ever known to have lived — bigger than any dinosaur — reaching about 100 feet (30 m) and up to around 200 tons.

A blue whale's heart weighs roughly 400 pounds (180 kg), about as much as a piano, and its aorta is wide enough for a human head.

Whales are mammals: they breathe air, are warm-blooded, give birth to live young, and nurse them with milk.

Whales split into two groups — baleen whales (like blues and humpbacks) that filter tiny prey through comb-like plates, and toothed whales (like sperm whales, orcas, and dolphins).

A feeding blue whale can consume several tons of krill in a single day.

Sperm whales are the loudest animals on Earth; their echolocation clicks can exceed 230 decibels underwater.

Cuvier's beaked whales hold the mammal diving record — nearly 10,000 feet (3,000 m) deep and dives lasting over 3.5 hours.

Humpback whale songs can last 30 minutes, evolve over time, and spread from population to population across oceans like hit tunes.

Bowhead whales may live more than 200 years — a stone harpoon tip from the 1800s was found in one caught in 2007.

Sperm whales sleep in brief bouts while floating vertically, like a pod of drifting logs.

Whales evolved from four-legged land mammals over about 50 million years, and their closest living land relative is the hippopotamus.

Gray whales make one of the longest mammal migrations, round trips of 10,000-12,000 miles between Arctic feeding grounds and Mexican lagoons.

'Whale falls' — carcasses sinking to the deep sea — feed entire ecosystems for decades.

Whale poop fertilizes surface waters with iron and nitrogen, boosting the plankton that produce much of Earth's oxygen and absorb carbon.

Commercial whaling killed nearly 3 million whales in the 20th century before the 1986 moratorium; many populations, including humpbacks, have since rebounded strongly.