Animalia > Chordata > Mammalia > Cetacea > Balaenopteridae > Balaenoptera > Balaenoptera physalus

Balaenoptera physalus (Fin Whale; finback whale)

Synonyms:
Language: French; Spanish

Wikipedia Abstract

The fin whale (Balaenoptera physalus), also called the finback whale, razorback, or common rorqual, is a marine mammal belonging to the suborder of baleen whales. It is the second-largest animal after the blue whale. The largest reportedly grow to 27.3 m (89.6 ft) long with a maximum confirmed length of 25.9 m (85 ft), a maximum recorded weight of nearly 74 tonnes (73 long tons; 82 short tons), and a maximum estimated weight of around 120 tonnes (132.5 tons). American naturalist Roy Chapman Andrews called the fin whale "the greyhound of the sea... for its beautiful, slender body is built like a racing yacht and the animal can surpass the speed of the fastest ocean steamship."
View Wikipedia Record: Balaenoptera physalus

Infraspecies

Balaenoptera physalus patachonica
Balaenoptera physalus physalus (Northern Fin Whale)
Balaenoptera physalus quoyi (Southern Fin Whale)

Endangered Species

Status: Vulnerable
View IUCN Record: Balaenoptera physalus

EDGE Analysis

Uniqueness Scale: Similiar (0) 
11
 Unique (100)
Uniqueness & Vulnerability Scale: Similiar & Secure (0) 
69
 Unique & Vulnerable (100)
ED Score: 22.63
EDGE Score: 5.24
View EDGE Record: Balaenoptera physalus

Attributes

Gestation [2]  11 months 12 days
Litter Size [2]  1
Litters / Year [2]  0.4
Maximum Longevity [2]  114 years
Migration [1]  Interoceanic
Snout to Vent Length [4]  59 feet (1792 cm)
Speed [5]  12.751 MPH (5.7 m/s)
Water Biome [1]  Coastal
Weaning [2]  6 months 3 days
Adult Weight [2]  77.162 tons (70,000.00 kg)
Birth Weight [2]  1.984 tons (1,800.00 kg)
Diet [3]  Carnivore (Invertebrates), Piscivore
Diet - Fish [3]  30 %
Diet - Invertibrates [3]  70 %
Forages - Marine [3]  100 %
Female Maturity [2]  7 years 4 months
Male Maturity [2]  7 years 10 months

Protected Areas

Prey / Diet

Prey / Diet Overlap

Predators

Carcharodon carcharias (Maneater shark)[6]

Consumers

Range Map

External References

NatureServe Explorer

Citations

Attributes / relations provided by
♦ 1Myers, P., R. Espinosa, C. S. Parr, T. Jones, G. S. Hammond, and T. A. Dewey. 2006. The Animal Diversity Web (online). Accessed February 01, 2010 at animaldiversity.org
♦ 2de Magalhaes, J. P., and Costa, J. (2009) A database of vertebrate longevity records and their relation to other life-history traits. Journal of Evolutionary Biology 22(8):1770-1774
♦ 3Hamish Wilman, Jonathan Belmaker, Jennifer Simpson, Carolina de la Rosa, Marcelo M. Rivadeneira, and Walter Jetz. 2014. EltonTraits 1.0: Species-level foraging attributes of the world's birds and mammals. Ecology 95:2027
♦ 4Nathan P. Myhrvold, Elita Baldridge, Benjamin Chan, Dhileep Sivam, Daniel L. Freeman, and S. K. Morgan Ernest. 2015. An amniote life-history database to perform comparative analyses with birds, mammals, and reptiles. Ecology 96:3109
♦ 5Kinematics of foraging dives and lunge-feeding in fin whales, Jeremy A. Goldbogen, John Calambokidis, Robert E. Shadwick, Erin M. Oleson, Mark A. McDonald and John A. Hildebrand, The Journal of Experimental Biology 209, 1231-1244 (2006)
♦ 6Jorrit H. Poelen, James D. Simons and Chris J. Mungall. (2014). Global Biotic Interactions: An open infrastructure to share and analyze species-interaction datasets. Ecological Informatics.
♦ 7Food Web Relationships of Northern Puget Sound and the Strait of Juan de Fuca : a Synthesis of the Available Knowledge, Charles A. Simenstad, Bruce S. Miller, Carl F. Nyblade, Kathleen Thornburgh, and Lewis J. Bledsoe, EPA-600 7-29-259 September 1979
♦ 8DIET AND FEEDING BEHAVIOR OF FIN AND BRYDE'S WHALES IN THE CENTRAL GULF OF CALIFORNIA, MEXICO, Bernie R. Tershy, Alejandro Acevedo-G., Dawn Breese and Craig S. Strong, Rev. Inv. Cient. Vol. 1, UABCS, 1993
♦ 9Szoboszlai AI, Thayer JA, Wood SA, Sydeman WJ, Koehn LE (2015) Forage species in predator diets: synthesis of data from the California Current. Ecological Informatics 29(1): 45-56. Szoboszlai AI, Thayer JA, Wood SA, Sydeman WJ, Koehn LE (2015) Data from: Forage species in predator diets: synthesis of data from the California Current. Dryad Digital Repository.
♦ 10Gibson, D. I., Bray, R. A., & Harris, E. A. (Compilers) (2005). Host-Parasite Database of the Natural History Museum, London
Abstract provided by DBpedia licensed under a Creative Commons License
Species taxanomy provided by GBIF Secretariat (2022). GBIF Backbone Taxonomy. Checklist dataset https://doi.org/10.15468/39omei accessed via GBIF.org on 2023-06-13; License: CC BY 4.0