Gray whales are mainly distributed in the northern part of the Pacific Ocean, with a body length of 11-15 meters, about the length of a bus, and gray whales are relatively small in cetaceans. Gray whales weigh about 40 tons, and their lifespan is around 50 to 70 years old.
Don't look at its size, but in fact, its food is shrimp soldier crabs, mainly based on planktonic crustaceans, herring eggs, and other swimming fish for food, but also eat sea urchins, starfish, conch, hermit crabs, shrimp, sea cucumbers and seaweed. Because the quality of food is not high, it is necessary to increase the amount of food, they consume about a ton of food a day, eating almost non-stop.
Gray whales have rough skin, so large amounts of barnacles are often parasitic on the skin, and barnacles secrete some gelatinous substances that fix themselves to the gray whales. For gray whales, these barnacles are like the cowhide fresh on humans, they will not only increase the weight of gray whales to make gray whales swim slower, but also make gray whales feel extremely uncomfortable, but gray whales want to catch and can not, sometimes desperately flap the fins in an attempt to shake the barnacles down.
Those white dots are parasitic barnacles
1. Champion of the undersea marathon
Every September, the weather begins to turn colder and the northern ice sheet begins to expand southward, covering the Bering Sea and the feeding grounds of gray whales. So the gray whales bid farewell to the feeding grounds and began their nearly 10,000-kilometer migration, their destination being the lagoon, a warm offshore area in the tropics. Gray whales follow the western coast of North America all the way south, and around December and January, they frequently appear in the coastal waters of Oregon and California, usually very close to the coast, attracting the attention of local residents and tourists.
It usually takes them three months to reach their destination, California, where there is enough food and warm waters, where female gray whales who become pregnant give birth to their babies, compared to 12 months of pregnancy compared to 12 months of pregnancy for humans. After giving birth to the baby, they will stay here happily for a few months, and when early spring comes, they will start to return again, and begin to migrate close to 10,000 kilometers.
With a year of nearly 20,000 kilometers, it is already the longest migration journey for mammals, with an average of nearly 200 kilometers per day, and there is no doubt that gray whales are well-deserved underwater marathon champions.
2. Friendly and smart
Gray whales have very good tempers, they are very friendly to humans, they often take the initiative to swim to the whale watcher's boat, put their chin on the boat, enjoy human caresses, and they encourage their children to do the same.
Good people are always easy to be bullied by evil people, and this is also true in the cetacean world. Killer whales are the natural enemies of gray whales, although they are also cetaceans, they like to kill each other, but fortunately, gray whales are more intelligent, they will float their belly upwards on the water when they encounter vicious killer whales, and use suspended animation to try to avoid disaster.
3, the greatest assist of the male
Female gray whales mate with males during autumn migration or in the winter when they roost in lagoons. Sometimes before mating, there will be two or more male gray whales pursuing a female gray whale. Whenever a female gray whale agrees to a male grey whale's mating request, she will turn herself upside down and face the seabed, and the male who mates with her will also turn her back and line up with her side by side with her back to the seabed.
But because of their huge body and special physiological structure, it is difficult for the two of them to complete mating in water, so it is necessary to call their good brothers to complete the greatest and saddest assist in the animal world: the good brothers need to use their backs to support the backs of female gray whales in order to help the brothers above complete mating, just like the picture below.
It usually takes them a lot of time to set this position, but fortunately, the mating time of gray whales is not long, usually only 30-60 seconds. In this short minute, the assist whale below has endured both internal and physical suffering, which is a long 1 minute for it. However, if you are fortunate that the female gray whale is more sexual today, then it can be its turn, and it will cherish and enjoy this nearly 1 minute of time after suffering physically and mentally, but for it at this moment, 1 minute is so short.
But this is not always the case, and sometimes the female gray whale swims away contentedly after mating for the first time, leaving only one whale in a daze in this endless ocean, which is a sadder story than sadness.
summary:
Gray whales are divided into northwest pacific subgroups independent of the eastern Pacific subgroups, due to human hunting and global warming, in the early 20th century, the number of western Pacific subgroups has only a few hundred, listed by the United Nations as a critically endangered species. Fortunately, with the gradual improvement of the current conservation measures, the number of gray whales has slowly recovered. Hopefully, such a friendly and "great" grey whale can live happily on Earth all the time.
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