Blue whale milk contains 18 megajoules (MJ) per kg, which is roughly 4,302 Kilocalorie/kg.
It was hunted almost to the point of extinction by whaling until the International Whaling Commission banned all hunting of blue whales in 1967. There are four subspecies of blue whale,[31][32] recognized by the Society for Marine Mammalogy’s Committee on Taxonomy: Some of these blue whale subspecies have been further divided, resulting in nine recognized management units:[32], There are three populations in the Northern subspecies B. m. musculus.
[30], The five blue whale subspecies recognized by the Society for Marine Mammalogy’s Committee on Taxonomy[31][32] are distributed in all major ocean basins, except the Bering Sea and the Arctic Ocean, although blue whales have been sighted near the ice edge in the North Atlantic. The size of the largest known blue whale is 33 meters (110 feet).
[79] There is no abundance estimate for overall pygmy blue whale abundance, which includes the Madagascar population, Western Australia/Indonesia population, and Eastern Australia/New Zealand population.
[78] Pygmy blue whales typically remain north of 52°S,[74][136] except on rare occasions, e.g. ", "Baleen whales are not important as prey for killer whales (, "Killer Whales Bully Lone Blue Whale in Rare Video", "Killer Whales Attacked a Blue Whale—Here's the Surprising Reason Why", "Orcas hunt blue whale in bloody battle of the sea", "Spatial association between hotspots of baleen whales and demographic patterns of Antarctic krill, "Part 17 – Conservation of Endangered Species and Other Fish or Wildlife (First List of Endangered Foreign Fish and Wildlife as Appendix A)", "The Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972 As Amended", "Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species of Wild Animals", NOAA Fisheries, Office of Protected Resources, Blue whale video clips and news from the BBC – BBC Wildlife Finder, Voices in the Sea – Sounds of the Blue Whale, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Blue_whale&oldid=979881688, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License, contextual information transmission (for example feeding, alarm, courtship), maintenance of social organization (for example contact calls between females and males), This page was last edited on 23 September 2020, at 09:28. Dan Shapiro / NOAA Photo Library / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY 2.0.
[279] Sightings from ship-based surveys in the Central and Northeast Atlantic in 1987, 1989, 1995 and 2001 provided abundances estimates ranging from 222 (CI=115–440) in 1987 to 979 (CI=137-2,542) in 1995.
[42][58][59][60][61][62][63][64][65][66][67][68][127] Antarctic blue whale calls have been acoustically detected in the Eastern Tropical Pacific in May–September. [18] Female blue whales are larger than males.
The reported take of all North Pacific blue whales by commercial whalers totaled 9,773 between 1905 and 1977.[277].
It was the first example of any cetacean hybridization giving rise to a fertile offspring. It was previously thought that blue whales in the North Pacific belonged to at least five separate populations;[211] however, evidence from movement data derived from satellite tags,[40][276] photograph-identification,[7] and acoustic data[44][48][65] supports two populations in the North Pacific—the Eastern and Central and Western North Pacific populations, with divisions according to acoustic calls being estimated by Monnahan et al.[277].
[188], Blue whales maximize the intake of energy by increasing the number of lunges they make during a dive while targeting dense krill patches. Northern subspecies (B. m. musculus) – North Atlantic population: Little is known about the winter distribution and migration patterns of this population in the North Atlantic.
[73][74][75][76][77] Acoustic data indicate that they are distributed in the sub-Antarctic waters of the southern Indian Ocean in summer and fall, including near the Crozet Islands and Amsterdam Island.