Animalia > Chordata > Mammalia > Cetacea > Balaenopteridae > Balaenoptera > Balaenoptera musculus

Balaenoptera musculus (Blue Whale)

Synonyms:
Language: French; Spanish

Wikipedia Abstract

The blue whale (Balaenoptera musculus) is a marine mammal belonging to the baleen whales (Mysticeti). At up to 30 metres (98 ft) in length and with a maximum recorded weight of 173 tonnes (191 short tons) and probably reaching over 181 tonnes (200 short tons), it is the largest animal ever known to have existed.
View Wikipedia Record: Balaenoptera musculus

Infraspecies

Balaenoptera musculus brevicauda (Pygmy Blue Whale)
Balaenoptera musculus indica (Great Indian Rorqual)
Balaenoptera musculus intermedia (Southern Blue Whale)
Balaenoptera musculus musculus (Northern Blue Whale)

Endangered Species

Status: Endangered
View IUCN Record: Balaenoptera musculus

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 musculus

Attributes

Emoji [4]  whale
Gestation [2]  11 months 20 days
Litter Size [2]  1
Litters / Year [2]  0.4
Maximum Longevity [2]  110 years
Migration [1]  Interoceanic
Snout to Vent Length [5]  100 feet (3049 cm)
Speed [6]  29.818 MPH (13.33 m/s)
Water Biome [1]  Pelagic
Weaning [2]  6 months 2 days
Adult Weight [2]  149.915 tons (136,000.00 kg)
Birth Weight [2]  2.205 tons (2,000.00 kg)
Diet [3]  Carnivore (Invertebrates)
Diet - Invertibrates [3]  100 %
Forages - Marine [3]  100 %
Female Maturity [2]  5 years
Male Maturity [2]  5 years

Protected Areas

Emblem of

Antigua And Barbuda

Prey / Diet

Prey / Diet Overlap

Providers

Parasite of 
Trichinella spiralis (pork worm)[7]

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
♦ 4Emoji by Twitter is licensed under CC BY 4.0
♦ 5Nathan 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
♦ 6Wikipedia licensed under a Creative Commons License
♦ 7Jorrit 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.
♦ 8Food 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
♦ 9Blue whale habitat and prey in the California Channel Islands, Paul C. Fiedler, Stephen B. Reilly, Roger P. Hewitt, David Demer, Valerie A. Philbrick, Susan Smith, Wesley Armstrong, Donald A. Croll, Bernie R. Tershy, Bruce R. Mate, Deep-Sea Research II 45 (1998) 1781-1801
♦ 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