Small whales are known to engage in complex play behaviour, which includes such things as producing stable underwater toroidal air-core vortex rings or " bubble rings". A landwhale is a humanoid organism weighing in excess of 300lbs (although smaller specimens have been reported). Regional differences in length at sexual maturity for female blue whales based on recovered Soviet whaling data". Since most of the brain is used for maintaining bodily functions, greater ratios of brain-to-body mass may increase the amount of brain mass available for more complex cognitive tasks.

Stomach content analysis of minke whales Balaenoptera acutorostrata from the Lofoten and Vesterålen areas, Norway". This milk contains high amounts of fat which is meant to hasten the development of blubber; it contains so much fat that it has the consistency of toothpaste. The ribs of the newly described whale have bite marks that "suggest it was once bitten severely by sharks," Gohar said.Blue whales produce some of the loudest and lowest frequency vocalizations in the animal kingdom, [24] and their inner ears appear well adapted for detecting low-frequency sounds. Bears are known to use sit-and-wait tactics as well as active stalking and pursuit of prey on ice or water. WordSense is a free dictionary containing information about the meaning, the spelling, synonyms and more. Unlike human teeth, which are composed mostly of enamel on the portion of the tooth outside of the gum, whale teeth have cementum outside the gum.

They have been recorded to travel as far north as eastern tropical Pacific, the central Indian Ocean, and the waters of southwestern Australia and northern New Zealand. Every year, more people are reading our articles to learn about the challenges facing the natural world. This episode was frequently depicted in medieval art (for example, on a 12th-century column capital at the abbey church of Mozac, France).

There is reference to a humpback-blue whale hybrid in the South Pacific, attributed to marine biologist Michael Poole. They also appear to enjoy biting the vortex-rings, so that they burst into many separate bubbles and then rise quickly to the surface.

Some studies have estimated that certain shastasaurid ichthyosaurs and the ancient whale Perucetus could have rivalled the blue whale in size, with Perucetus also being heavier than the blue whale with a mean weight of 180 tons; however, these estimates are based on fragmentary remains, as well as being subject to change as the latter was a very recently-described species. He had found vertebrae and other fragments while blasting on his property and also sent off a few samples to the Philadelphia society.

By the early 1790s, whalers, namely the Americans and Australians, focused efforts in the South Pacific where they mainly hunted sperm whales and right whales, with catches of up to 39,000 right whales by Americans alone. These pollutants can cause gastrointestinal cancers and greater vulnerability to infectious diseases. In an Icelandic legend, a man threw a stone at a fin whale and hit the blowhole, causing the whale to burst. No matter the size, every gift to the Museum is critical to our 300 scientists' work in understanding and protecting the natural world.

anubis is the earliest (or most "primitive") whale in Africa from a group of semiaquatic whales known as the protocetids. Although whales are widespread, most species prefer the colder waters of the Northern and Southern Hemispheres and migrate to the equator to give birth. However, the Soviet Union continued to illegally hunt blue whales and other species through to the 1970s. The Vikings and various arctic tribes revered the whale as they were important pieces of their lives.

Definitions and other text are available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License; additional terms may apply. A whale features in the award-winning children's book The Snail and the Whale (2003) by Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler.