Fun Facts

have a whale of a day

My Report about Whales: 

by Pike Street Fish Fry

1.	How do whales hold their breath?
	The sperm whale can hold its breath for 20 minutes to even an hour or more. Many other whales can hold their breath for 10 minutes to a half hour. All marine mammals have special physiological adaptations during a dive. These adaptations enable a whale to conserve oxygen while underwater.
	• Whales, like other mammals, have a slower heart rate while diving. • When diving, blood is shunted (moved) away from tissues tolerant of low oxygen levels toward the heart, lungs, and brain, where oxygen is needed most. • Certain protein molecules - hemoglobin and myoglobin - store oxygen in body tissues. Hemoglobin occurs in red blood cells. Myoglobin occurs in muscle tissue. Marine mammals have a higher blood volume (and more hemoglobin) than similarly-sized land mammals. In addition, the muscle of whales has at least twice the myoglobin concentration of the muscle of land mammals.
2.	How do whales sleep?
	Whales sleep in the water, usually at the surface. Studies suggest that, unlike in land mammals, deep sleep in whales probably happens in only one hemisphere of the brain at a time.
	Killer whales have been observed resting both day and night for short periods of time or as long as eight hours straight. While resting, killer whales may swim slowly or make a series of 3 to 7 short dives of less than a minute before making a long dive for up to three minutes.
3.	How much krill does a whale eat each day?
	Most whales do not eat krill, but the baleen whales that do can eat more than a thousand pounds of krill each day. An adult blue whale, the largest animal in the world, can eat four tons (8,000 pounds) of krill a day.
4.	Can whales swim far?
	Yes, some whales like the gray whales swim as much as 12,000 miles each year on their migration from feeding grounds in the Arctic all the way down to breeding and calving grounds in Baja California, Mexico.
5.	Do whales ever fight with each other?
	Dolphins, including killer whales have many social behaviors and some of these such as raking (scratching the skin of another dolphin with its teeth) and head-butting are used to establish and maintain dominance in dolphin groups. Some killer whales hunt and feed on other marine mammals, including other whales such as Dahl's porpoises and even gray whales and blue whales.
6.	Are whales related to dolphins?
	Yes, dolphins are a kind of whale, so all dolphins are whales, but not all whales are dolphins. Other kinds of whales (that are not dolphins) include baleen whales (like gray whales and humpbacks), sperm whales, porpoises, river dolphins, beluga whales and narwhals, and beaked whales. For more information on whales, view the Baleen Whales, Beluga Whale,Bottlenose Dolphin, Killer Whale, and Toothed Whales infobooks.
7.	How many teeth do whales have?
	It depends on the kind of whale. Killer whales have 40 to 56 teeth. Most beaked whale males only have a single pair of teeth and most female beaked whales have no teeth. A sperm whale only has teeth in its lower jaw, which fit into grooves in its upper jaw. Baleen whales, like gray, humpback or blue whales have no teeth - instead they have rows of long plates of baleen in their mouths that they use to strain food out of the water.
8.	How many different kinds of whales are there?
	Scientists are still discovering new species of whales. There are at least 85 species of whales including at least 73 species of toothed whales and 12 to 14 species of baleen whales.
9.	How long is a blue whale?
	The blue whale is the largest animal on earth (growing larger than even the biggest of dinosaurs were). A 100 foot blue whale is as long as three school buses. Blue whales grow to about 70 to 80 feet in the northern hemisphere (north of the equator) and 90 to 100 feet in the southern hemisphere (south of the equator). Female blue whales grow larger than males. The longest blue whale ever recorded was 110 feet.