Hey there! Squeaks was just showing me his imaginary sea monster that he drew based on some sea monsters of the past!

I think it’s great!

I see that it has sharp teeth, big flippers, and an armored head, like the animals we learned about before.

And I see you drew a picture of you swimming next to your monster!

Your sea monster is HUGE!

But even your imaginary sea monster doesn’t look as big as the biggest biggest animal that’s ever actually lived!

Do you know what that animal is, Squeaks?

It’s a kind of whale called the blue whale, and they’re still around today!

Blue whales can get to be over 30 meters long, about as long as 3 school buses in a row.

And, a blue whale’s tongue can weigh as much as an elephant.

And just its heart can be as heavy as a car!

So, what do you think these great big blue whales eat?

Fish! That’s a great guess!

And some whales, like beluga whales, do eat fish.

They have sharp teeth that they use to catch and eat their prey.

But some whales, like blue whales, don’t have teeth at all!

Weird, right?

These whales have something called baleen instead of teeth.

Baleen is a bristly plate that is stuck to the roof of the whale’s mouth.

It looks like a big, bristly broom inside their mouths!

Oh, that’s a great question!

How dooes it help them eat?

Well, if you’ve ever seen someone cook pasta, they might have dumped it out of the pot and into a strainer when the pasta was done cooking.

Water pours out of the strainer, but the food stays inside.

Baleen works kind of the same way.

When a whale that has baleen takes a gulp of water and food, they use their tongues to push all the water out through the gaps, but keep the tasty food inside.

But if they aren’t eating fish, what are they eating?

Blue whales eat tiny animals called krill!

Krill are so small that we need a microscope to see them clearly.

That’s right, Squeaks!

Something as big as a blue whale does need to eat a lot of krill!

And they do!

Adult blue whales can eat 16 tons of krill each day. That’s as heavy as four elephants!

Isn’t it amazing that such a huge animal eats things that are so small that we can’t even see them?!

Baby whales are called calves, just like baby cows.

And also like cows, whale calves drink the milk that their mothers make inside their bodies until they’re old enough to start eating krill.

That’s because all whales, including blue whales, are mammals.

Mammals are animals like horses, cows, dogs, and humans.

And all mammals feed their newborn babies milk.

That’s one of the special things that makes an animal a mammal!

Yes, they do look more like a fish than like the other mammals.

But fish don’t feed their babies with milk, which helps us know that whales and fish are different.

And there’s another important feature that tells us that whales are mammals and definitely not fish.

Whales don’t have gills to breathe in water, like fish do.

They have lungs, just like us!

So even though some whales can hold their breath for over an hour, they have to come up to the surface of the ocean to breathe every now and then.

When we breathe, air goes through our nose or mouth and into our lungs.

Whales breathe using their lungs too, but they do it in a very special way.

They breathe in and out through a hole on the top of their head called a blowhole.

When a whale is ready to take a breath, it comes up to the top of the water, opens its blowhole, and breathes out. This is called spouting.

That air shoots up into the sky, sometimes about 12 meters high!

That’s about as tall as six grown-ups if they stood on each other’s shoulders.

Then, the whale breathes fresh air in through its blowhole, and goes back underwater.

When a whale is underwater, they can pinch their blowhole closed from the inside, and seal it shut so no water gets in.

But my favorite thing about blue whales are the amazing sounds they make.

Blue whales, as well as lots of other whale species, can talk to each other from really far away!

Sound travels really well in water, so one whale can hear another whale making noises even if they’re thousands of miles apart!

Whales make lots of sounds, including squeaks, whistles, and long low booming sounds that scientists call “songs.”

Here’s what a blue whale’s song sounds like.

I think whale songs sound beautiful, too, Squeaks!

Oh yeah. Squeaks says he still thinks his imaginary sea monster is pretty cool, but it’s even cooler that there are giant blue whales out in the ocean right now, singing to each other, eating microscopic krill, and taking care of their babies!

Thanks for joining me here at The Fort!

I hope you loved learning about our ocean mammal friends too.

What was your favorite thing you got to discover?

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