What is 'furrow whale'

DID YOU KNOW? 

• The narwhal's tusk is in fact a canine tooth that can grow up to 3m in length. It is thought to be a symbol of sexual power within males, rather like a lion's mane, helping to establish rank within hierarchies.
• Sperm whales can reach depths of around 3km beneath the ocean's surface, staying submerged for up to two hours. What are they doing down there? One of their favourite foods is giant squid, which lives in the depths of the ocean. Occasionally sperm whales are seen with scars obtained from their deep sea battles.
• There's a species of toothed whale called the Perrin's beaked whale, and rather remarkably, no-one has ever knowingly seen a live one. In the 1970s, a few dead individuals were discovered on the Californian coastline, and were identified as other species. Later DNA testing of them revealed that they were in fact a completely new species to science, and they were given the name Perrin's beaked whale. No-one has positively identified one since.
• All toothed whales, including dolphins and porpoises, have a melon. This sounds rather an odd statement, until you realise that 'melon' is the term given to a fatty organ in their forehead which is thought to be used to aid echolocation. In some species, such as the beluga, the melon can cause a pronounced cranial bulge.
• Belugas, the all-white toothed whales of the Arctic, are often known as sea canaries because of their high-pitched twitter.
• The large whales known as rorquals all have pronounced grooves that run from their mouths and along the underside of their bodies. These grooves, which are actually folds of skin, enable the mouth to widen in huge gapes when feeding. The word 'rorqual' itself actually comes from the Norwegian for 'furrow whale'

from : http://uk.whales.org/

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Watch BLUE live.....

Facts about blue whales

• The Blue Whale is the largest creature ever to have lived on earth.
• Their tongues alone can weigh as much as an elephant. Their hearts, as much as a car.
• Amazingly, however, this giant of the ocean feeds on some of the smallest marine life – tiny shrimplike animals called krill. A single adult blue whale can consume 3,6000kg of krill a day.
• They mainly catch their food by diving, and descend to depths of approximately 500m.
• The whale’s mouth has a fascinating row of plates fringed with bristles to help it filter its’ main source of food – Plankton from the water.  There is what looks like a moustache of long bristles on the end of each plate to help it hold the minute prey.  With each mouthful, the whale can hold up to 5,000kg of water and plankton.  Having forced the water out of its mouth, the whale licks these bristles with its fleshy tongue.
• Although the blue whale is a deep-water hunter, as a mammal, it must come to the surface of the sea to breathe.  When it surfaces, it exhales air out of a blowhole in a cloud of pressurized vapour that rises vertically above the water for up to 9m.
• Blue whales occasionally swim in small groups but usually alone or in pairs. They are thought to form close attachments.
• In spite of their bulk, these graceful swimmers cruise the ocean at over 8km/h, and can reach speeds of over 30km/h.
• Though we can’t hear them, blue whales are one of the loudest animals on the planet, communicating with each other using a series of low frequency pulses, groans, and moans. It is thought that in good conditions blue whales can hear each over distances of up to 1,600km.
• Scientists think they use these vocalizations not only to communicate, but, along with their excellent hearing, to sonar-navigate the dark deep oceans.
• Females breed only once every three years and gestation is between 11-12months.  Females usually only have one young.
• A baby blue whale (calf) emerges weighing up to 2,7000kg and up to 8m long. New born whales are helped to the surface of the water by their mothers and are often encouraged (nudged) by other females so that they can take their first breath of air. 
• The calf is suckled in the water, drinking more than 600 litres of milk each day and gaining about 90kg every day for its first year.
• Blue whales have few predators but are known to fall victim to attacks by sharks and killer whales, and many are injured or die each year from impacts with large ships.
• It is thought that whales feel emotions.
• Intensive hunting in the 1900s by whalers seeking whale oil drove them to the brink of extinction. Hundreds of thousands of whales were killed. The 1966 International Whaling Commission finally gave them protection, although they have only recovered slightly since then. Blue whales are currently classified as endangered on the World Conservation Union (IUCN) Red List. It is estimated that only10,000-25,000 blue whales now swim the world's oceans.

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Biography Of A Blue Whale

A few years ago, Stephen Trumble contacted the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History and asked if they had some earwax from a blue whale.

They did.

In 2007, a large ship travelling off the coast of California collided with a male blue whale, ending its life at the tender age of 12. It was one of three similar strikes that year. The animal’s 21 metre carcass washed up on the beach, and scientists from the local museum examined and dissected it with machetes and excavators. They collected several tissues and organs, including a 25-centimetre tube of earwax.

Blue whale earplug, extracted from a dead individual. Credit: Michelle Berman- Kowalewskic, Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History, Santa Barbara

Earplugs are common to blues and other large whales like fins and humpbacks. They are similar to the ones in your ears, although obviouslymuch bigger. Each is an oily build-up of wax and fats that accumulates through the whale’s life. “It looks like a long candlestick that’s been beat up a bit,” says Sascha Usenko, Trumble’s colleague at Baylor University. “It’s not appealing-looking.”

A whale produces a lighter-coloured wax during the time of year when it’s feeding, and a dark-coloured version when it migrates. If you cut through the earplug, you can see these varieties as alternating light and dark bands. They’re like tree rings. And just like tree rings, you can use them to estimate a whale’s age. That’s why scientists often collect and store the wax from dead whales.

But Trumble and Usenko have shown that the wax can reveal much more. It also preserves a chemical biography of a whale’s life, from its birth to its untimely ship-inflicted death. It records some of the hormones that surged through its body and the pollutants that it absorbed.

Blue whale earplug, whole (top) and in cross-section (bottom). Credit: Trumble et al, 2013. PNAS.

The duo previously measured environmental contaminants in whale blubber, but they realised that the same chemicals also ought to build up in earwax, which is made of similar fatty substances. “It was really an ‘A-ha!’ moment,” says Usenko. To find fresh whale wax, they contacted Michelle Berman-Kowalewskic from the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History, who handed over the earplug from the dead blue whale they had dissected in 2007.

The plug showed that the whale’s testosterone levels rose during its first three years of life, fell until it was nine, and then shot up by around 200 times. That’s almost certainly the point when it became sexually mature. When other scientists have tried to work out this age using body length, ovaries or blubber, they’ve come up with estimates ranging from 5 to 15 years. “We didn’t really know,” says Udenko. “Now, we’ve nailed that down with tight resolution for one animal, and it’ll be really exciting to do a bunch more.”

Meanwhile, the whale’s levels of cortisol—a stress-related hormone— rose steadily over the course of its life and peaked a year after its testosterone spike. This might reflect the need to compete for mates, or to interact with other mature whales. “I think about what I was like at that age,” says Udenko. “A raging bull, trying to figure out my place in the social order… I was pretty stressed out.”

In the earplug, the team also found traces of several contaminants. There were 16 pesticides, flame retardants and other pollutants that tend to persist in the environment for a long time, such as the long-banned insecticide DDT. These were most concentrated during the first six months of the whale’s life, suggesting that they were inherited from its mother, either through the womb or from her milk.

There was also a fair amount of mercury, which gradually accumulated over the whale’s life and peaked twice, once when it was five years old and again when it was ten. Human industries like gold-mining can release large amounts of mercury into the oceans. Perhaps this whale was caught in a few such surges during its travels past California.

Blue whales off the coast of Sri Lanka. Credit: Ed Yong

The chemical contents of the whale’s blubber matched those within its wax, which assured Trumble and Usenko that their readings were accurate. But blubber has no rings, so it can only give you an overall picture of the whales’ life. Earwax can tell you what happened every six months. Blubber gives the sum of the whale’s chemical bill; the earplug shows the individual lines.

“I was surprised at how well [the technique] worked, not only for persistent chemicals but for hormones that typically rapidly degrade,” says Usenko. “It allows us to ask more complex questions that are difficult to get at, like: What are the impacts of contaminants or stress on these animals?”

To get the same sorts of readings, Usenko says that he would need to follow a blue whale around for years, and take tissue sample from it every six months. “You couldn’t do it,” he says. “People have tried, but it’s difficult and you have to be committed for 30 years. Here, we can go to a lab and reconstruct the same effort in a month.”

But the earplugs have several limitations, says John Wise, a toxicologist at the University of Southern Maine who specialised on marine mammals. They only capture certain pollutants that accumulate in fat, they don’t tell us how those pollutants affect the animal’s health, and they can only be extracted from a dead whale. “Nevertheless, it’s a new and useful part of our whale conservation toolbox as we seek to better understand ocean pollution,” he says.

And, of course, the team have only looked at one earplug from one whale. Usenko acknowledges this, and says the study is meant to be a proof-of-principle. “We want to encourage museums to keep and collect these samples,” he says.

Existing earplugs should already provide a trove of data. The Smithsonian Institute alone has hundreds of plugs in its collection, many of which have been traced back to specific whales. They’re not in pristine condition, but they could be useful. Charles Potter, who manages the institute’s marine mammal collection and is a co-author on the paper, is now thinking about how to preserve these waxy treasures.

Reference: Trumble, Robinson, Berman-Kowalewski, Potterd & Usenko. 2013. Blue whale earplug reveals lifetime contaminant exposure and hormone profiles. PNAS http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1311418110

PS: In case anyone was wondering, it doesn’t seem that the earplugs prevent the whales from hearing. In fact, some scientists have suggested that the plugs might actually help to channel sound towards the eardrum.

And finally, this is a good chance to reprise my blue whale facts:

• Blue whales are so big that each one can grow as large as a fully grown blue whale. That’s huge!
• If you take all the blue whales in the world and put them on a giant weighing scale, you are on drugs.
• A blue whale’s main artery is so big that a human could swim through it, but it’s generally not advised.
• A blue whale’s heart is the size of a Volkswagen beetle, but its steering is rubbish.
• If you take a blue whale’s intestines and lay them in a line, the whale will die. Also, what’s wrong with you, you sick bastard?

by Ed Yong

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The largest animal lived on Earth-Blue Whale

Blue whales are the largest animals ever known to have lived on Earth. These magnificent marine mammals rule the oceans at up to 100 feet (30 meters) long and upwards of 200 tons (181 metric tons). Their tongues alone can weigh as much as an elephant. Their hearts, as much as an automobile.

Blue whales reach these mind-boggling dimensions on a diet composed nearly exclusively of tiny shrimplike animals called krill. During certain times of the year, a single adult blue whale consumes about 4 tons (3.6 metric tons) of krill a day.

Blue whales are baleen whales, which means they have fringed plates of fingernail-like material, called baleen, attached to their upper jaws. The giant animals feed by first gulping an enormous mouthful of water, expanding the pleated skin on their throat and belly to take it in. Then the whale's massive tongue forces the water out through the thin, overlapping baleen plates. Thousands of krill are left behind—and then swallowed.

Blue whales look true blue underwater, but on the surface their coloring is more a mottled blue-gray. Their underbellies take on a yellowish hue from the millions of microorganisms that take up residence in their skin. The blue whale has a broad, flat head and a long, tapered body that ends in wide, triangular flukes.

Blue whales live in all the world's oceans occasionally swimming in small groups but usually alone or in pairs. They often spend summers feeding in polar waters and undertake lengthy migrations towards the Equator as winter arrives.

These graceful swimmers cruise the ocean at more than five miles an hour (eight kilometers an hour), but accelerate to more than 20 miles an hour (32 kilometers an hour) when they are agitated. Blue whales are among the loudest animals on the planet. They emit a series of pulses, groans, and moans, and it’s thought that, in good conditions, blue whales can hear each other up to 1,000 miles (1,600 kilometers) away. Scientists think they use these vocalizations not only to communicate, but, along with their excellent hearing, to sonar-navigate the lightless ocean depths.

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Explore Mirissa-Sri Lanka

Sleepy Mirissa, 4km southeast of Weligama on the Matara road, has a headland
dividing its small fishing harbour from a beautiful curve of sandy beach with calm,clear waters. It’s a low-key, peaceful spot
that was once the preserve of backpackers
but is now becoming more popular as travellers seek out quieter alternatives
to Unawatuna and Hikkaduwa. The tsunami caused much damage along the coast
here.
Most of the places to stay are on the beach. You’ll need to go to Matara for most
services, although there are Internet and phone places, and small markets near the
149km marker.
Sights & Activities The water at Mirissa is clear and excellent
for snorkelling. The best stretch is at the west end of the bay, along the jagged
coastline, where there are many fish. The south side of the bay yields flat-bottom
coral and, sometimes, sea turtles. Surfing is also good at the west end of the bay. Ask
your guesthouse or hotel if it has gear that
you can rent.
The rocky outcrop to the east of the bay, Parrot Rock, is the perfect place to watch the
sunset, and it’s also a popular fishing spot.There are pleasant walks around Mirissa.
One heads up a steep series of steps from the main road to the small Kandavahari temple,
while the headland is a good spot to view
Weligama Bay. 
About 6km inland there’s a snake farm with an Ayurvedic practitioner.
Ask your guesthouse how to get there.Some guesthouses organise boat trips on
a lake that’s about 2km inland.

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Blue Whale - Mirissa Sea

Scientific Name: Balaenoptera musculus

The blue whale is the largest animal on earth. Not even the long-dead dinosaurs can match the size of the blue whale. Its slim, mottled, blue- gray body can be as long as 30 metres. It has a small curved dorsal fin placed far along its back. The whale is so big that its head disappears long before the dorsal fin and the huge flukes are seen.

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