The blue whale is the largest animal that has ever lived. And yet they feed almost exclusively on tiny crustaceans known as krill. The secret is in the baleen, a complex filter-feeding system that allows the enormous whales ...
Plants & Animals
Jun 29, 2017
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135
In a recent paper published in PLOS One, Saint Louis University professor of physics Jean Potvin, Ph.D., and biologist Alexander Werth, Ph.D. at Hampden-Sydney College, detail for the first time how baleen whales use crossflow ...
Plants & Animals
Jun 6, 2017
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9
The blue whale, which uses baleen to filter its prey from ocean water and can reach lengths of over 100 feet, is the largest vertebrate animal that has ever lived. On the list of the planet's most massive living creatures, ...
Evolution
May 23, 2017
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271
Modern whales' ancestors probably hunted and chased down prey, but somehow, those fish-eating hunters evolved into filter-feeding leviathans. An analysis of a 36.4-million-year-old whale fossil suggests that before baleen ...
Archaeology
May 11, 2017
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111
Until now, it has been a bit of a mystery about the evolution of hearing capabilities in those graceful ocean behemoths, the baleen whales.
Plants & Animals
Feb 24, 2017
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12
When rorqual whales eat, they open their mouths and lunge. Their tongues invert as their mouths take in a huge volume of water and prey. In the process, nerves running through the ventral groove blubber along the floor of ...
Plants & Animals
Feb 16, 2017
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21
A sophisticated new type of "tag" on whales that can record data every second for hours, days and weeks at a time provides a view of whale behavior, biology and travels never before possible, scientists from Oregon State ...
Ecology
Dec 23, 2016
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681
A sound in the Mariana Trench notable for its complexity and wide frequency range likely represents the discovery of a new baleen whale call, according to the Oregon State University researchers who recorded and analyzed ...
Plants & Animals
Dec 14, 2016
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79
Baleen whales, such as the gigantic 30m-long blue whale, are the largest animals that have ever lived on this planet. They even beat the largest of the dinosaurs. But, ironically, the secret to their success lies in their ...
Plants & Animals
Nov 30, 2016
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28
Thirty years into a moratorium on commercial whaling, hundreds of the marine mammals, some endangered, are killed every year—some in open defiance of the ban, others in the name of scientific research.
Ecology
Oct 28, 2016
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27
