What is the largest animal in the world?
When asked what is the largest animal in the world, the answer is: the blue whale , which can weigh up to 150 tons. The blue whale is the largest animal that ever lived. How big is the blue whale?
To give us an idea of how big the blue whale is, think about this comparison. If a bus weighs an average of 15 tons, then a blue whale would weigh the equivalent of 10 buses. Impressive, don’t you think?
The blue whale is the largest animal in the world
How big is the blue whale? The blue whale can measure more than 30 meters long. The largest blue whale on record was a 29.5 meter female weighing 180 tons.
But there are reports of captured 33 meter whales that can weigh up to 200 tons. The heart of a blue whale weighed almost 700 kg.
The blue whale has a big heart, on average it weighs about 180 kg , is 1.5 m long, half a meter high and 1.5 m wide. And it does need a big heart, because it has to pump 220 liters of blood throughout the body of the gigantic animal.
The heart of the blue whale beats about 13 times a minute, unlike the heart of the hummingbird, the smallest bird in the world , which beats 1,200 times a minute. What a great contrast!
The specific name of the blue whale, Balaenoptera musculus , curiously means ” little mouse ” in Latin. And it was chosen by Linnaeus as a joke about the size of this animal, which is in fact the largest mammal that has ever existed.
Blue Whale Facts
What does the blue whale eat? It feeds on krill, a small planktonic organism similar to shrimp, and some small fish. Its belly has a grayish or yellowish color due to the presence of algae that adhere to it.
Its top and sides vary in color from blue to bluish-grey. His head is very long and thin. Having no teeth, it is a mysticete.
It used to be said that the blue whale had a heart as big as a whale , but this is nothing more than a myth . It is actually smaller than a vocho, it can be the size of a small golf cart or the size of a bumper car for two.
Also your arteries are so big that a small child can crawl inside them.
Blue whales live up to 90 years in good conditions. However, due to their hunting, they live less.
According to some studies, the songs of a blue whale could be heard and understood by other individuals at a distance of 4,000 km, however the increase in noise in the sea caused by human activities and their engines reduce this ability.
Their birth rate is very low as it takes them 5-10 years to develop to maturity. They only have one calf in a period of between 2 to 3 years and the pregnancy lasts from 10 to 12 months.
Experts now estimate that there are between 10,000 and 25,000 blue whales in the world’s oceans.
What do you think of the data of the blue whale, the largest animal in the world?
