Minke whales can take up to 100 gulps of krill an hour

Tagged minke whale. By Ari Friedlander, via NatGeo.


Tagged minke whale. By Ari Friedlander, via NatGeo.

Ed Yong on whales and "lunge-feeding," which kind of sounds like what I do when presented with pizza.

Snip from his National Geographic article:

The blue whale can swallow half a million calories in a single mouthful. When it spots its prey—shrimp-like creatures called krill—it lunges forward, accelerating rapidly and opening its jaws to an almost right angle. Its mouth expands, its tongue inverts, and it engulfs around 110 tonnes of water—about the same mass as another small blue whale. Over the next minute, it pushes the water through sieve-like plates, filters out the krill, and swallows. Then, having reloaded its face, it's ready for another attack.

The mink whale is the smallest of the great whales, and on one study, two minkes "managed 2,831 lunges over 649 dives. While they were feeding, they lunged around 100 times every hour."