The blue whale is the largest living creature on earth, its length and weight are amazing, its combat effectiveness is among the best in the world, its tongue can kill the king of the land forest tiger thousands of times, if it swings slightly, it can make the Titanic overturn and fall to the bottom of the sea.
If the intestines of the blue whale are straightened, they are 200 to 300 meters long, the blood vessels are thick enough to fit a child, and the thickness of the dirty walls can reach more than 60 centimeters. The blue whale is also incredibly powerful, with an estimated power of about 1500 to 1700 horsepower, and the blue whale is a well-deserved giant and Hercules in the animal world.
There are also some descriptions of whales in elementary school textbooks - it is said that the whale's mouth can hold more than 20 adults, so that everyone can put several tables of mahjong in the whale's mouth. Although the author gives such an example, but the blue whale has a gentle temperament, it generally does not take the initiative to attack other marine creatures, let alone rush to attack humans, such a "big man" has its own unique gentleness, which we will talk about later.
We've been taking it for granted since childhood that blue whales are big and heavy, but have you ever wondered why mild-mannered blue whales can grow so large, larger than the size of a dinosaur?
Why are adult blue whales so big? Don't tell you that the newborn baby blue whale is already very large, their size is about 6 to 7 meters, the weight is also counted in tons, the weight of the small blue whale can reach 5 to 7 tons, so the newborn baby blue whale can get a variety of weighing and height competitions.
In fact, all cetaceans evolved from terrestrial creatures, and blue whales are no exception. The whale's ancestor, bucky whale, was small, about 10 meters or so, and this dolphin-like shape of the original bucky whale remained for more than 40 million years, until the advent of the last glacier in geological history, the Quaternary glacier, about three million years ago. During the Quaternary Ice Age, primitive whales faced a lack of food and predators. After enduring nearly a million years, quaternary glaciers melted, the climate became humid, marine life flourished, the population increased to more than 80 species, the oxygen content in the air increased, and the size of whales increased dramatically. Whales at this time evolved quite perfectly, being giant in the ocean, at the top of the food chain, with few natural predators except humans.
In addition to the reasons for biological evolution, the amount of food eaten by blue whales is also amazing, blue whales never take the initiative to kill other organisms, but because small fish and shrimp in the ocean often roam in groups in the ocean, even if the whale does not take the initiative to prey, as long as it wants to be full, slightly open its mouth, you can have several tons of fish and shrimp into the stomach.
Blue whales mainly eat krill, blue whales in the North Atlantic generally eat northern krill, blue whales in Antarctica mainly eat southern krill, and the most shocking thing is that blue whales can eat 2 to 3 tons of krill in one day.
Although a meal eaten by blue whales will kill countless krill, whales also have their own unique tenderness, as the saying goes, "When a whale falls, everything lives." ”
Sensing that life is coming to an end, the blue whale chooses to go to a quiet place and then sinks alone to the bottom of the sea. At this time, even if the water ripples, the blue whale does not move at all. After death, blue whales slowly sink to the bottom of the sea, a process that scientists have named whale fall.
The whale's fall process can generally last from 4 to 24 months, depending on the size of the whale, and in the process, many marine organisms will eat the whale's body and bite ninety-nine percent of its flesh. When the whale reaches the end of the seabed thousands of meters, it can still nourish many soft tissue organisms and microorganisms. When all the nutrients on the whale have been divided, the whale carcass that has become a reef provides a growth environment for the coral, and at this point, the whale completes the whole process of whale fall, truly merges with the sea, and completes its final tenderness.
The carcass of a blue whale can support a circulatory system dominated by decomposers for up to a hundred years, so the whale fall is also known as the ecosystem formed by the whale falling into the deep sea after death, and it is called the "oasis" of deep-sea life along with hot liquid and cold spring. For example, in the deep sea of the North Pacific, whale colonies have maintained the survival of at least 43 species and 12,490 organisms, contributing to the prosperity of life in the deep sea.
Due to the uncertainty of whale death and fall process, humans have only found more than 50 whale drops so far, and Chinese scientists found a whale fall of about 3 meters long for the first time in the South China Sea in 2020, which is a surprising discovery and a revelation of our gentle behavior of whales.
In the future, people will surely see more of the gentleness of whales, because we cannot bury the tenderness of whales.