a. A very large mushroom.
b. A small family car.
c. A grapefruit.
A grapefruit. |
| photo credit NOAA Photo Library |
Quite interestingly, a blue whale’s throat is almost exactly the same diameter as its belly button (which is about the size of a salad plate), but a little smaller than its eardrum (which is more the size of a dinner plate).
For eight months of the year, blue whales eat virtually nothing, but during the summer they feed almost continuously, scooping up three tons of food a day. As you may remember from biology lessons, their diet consists of tiny, pink, shrimp-like crustaceans called krill, which go down like honey. Krill come conveniently served in huge swarms that can weigh more than 100,000 tons.
Aside from its throat, everything else about the blue whale is big.
At 32m in length, it is the largest creature that has ever lived - three times the size of the biggest dinosaur and equivalent in weight to 2,700 people. Its tongue weighs more than an elephant; its heart is the size of a family car; its stomach can hold more than a ton of food.
It also makes the loudest noise of any individual animal: a low frequency hum that can be detected by other whales more than 16,000 kilometres away.
