The specific name musculus is Latin and could mean "muscle", but it can also be interpreted as "little mouse". In September 1692, Sibbald found a blue whale that had stranded in the Firth of Forth-a male 78-feet-long-which had "black, horny plates" and "two large apertures approaching a pyramid in shape". The first published description of the blue whale comes from Robert Sibbald's Phalainologia Nova (1694). Researchers working off of Fiji believe they photographed a hybrid humpback/blue whale. Arnason and Gullberg describe the genetic distance between a blue and a fin as about the same as that between a human and a gorilla. There have been at least 11 documented cases of blue/ fin hybrid adults in the wild. If further research confirms these relationships, it will be necessary to reclassify the rorquals. DNA sequencing analysis indicates that the blue whale is phylogenetically closer to the sei whale ( Balaenoptera borealis) and Bryde's whale ( Balaenoptera brydei) than to other Balaenoptera species, and closer to the humpback whale ( Megaptera) and the gray whale ( Eschrichtius) than to the minke whales ( Balaenoptera acutorostrata and Balaenoptera bonaerensis). The blue whale is usually classified as one of eight species in the genus Balaenoptera one authority places it in a separate monotypic genus, Sibbaldus, but this is not accepted elsewhere. However, it is not known when the members of those families diverged from each other. The family Balaenopteridae is believed to have diverged from the other families of the suborder Mysticeti as long ago as the middle Oligocene. There are two more groups in the North Atlantic, and at least two in the Southern Hemisphere.īlue whales are rorquals (family Balaenopteridae), a family that includes the humpback whale, the fin whale, Bryde's whale, the sei whale and the minke whale. There remain only much smaller (around 2,000) concentrations in each of the North-East Pacific, Antarctic, and Indian Ocean groups. Before whaling, the largest population was in the Antarctic, numbering approximately 239,000 (range 202,000 to 311,000). More recent research into the Pygmy subspecies suggests this may be an underestimate. A 2002 report estimated there were 5,000 to 12,000 blue whales worldwide, located in at least five groups. For over a century, they were hunted almost to extinction by whalers until protected by the international community in 1966. īlue whales were abundant in nearly all the oceans on Earth until the beginning of the twentieth century. As with other baleen whales, its diet consists almost exclusively of small crustaceans known as krill.
indica, found in the Indian Ocean, may be another subspecies. brevicauda (also known as the pygmy blue whale) found in the Indian Ocean and South Pacific Ocean. musculus of the North Atlantic and North Pacific, B. There are at least three distinct subspecies: B. Long and slender, the blue whale's body can be various shades of bluish-grey dorsally and somewhat lighter underneath. At 30 metres ( Template:Convert/ft) Template:Convert/test/A in length and Template:Convert/metric ton Template:Convert/test/A or more in weight, it is the largest known animal to have ever existed. The blue whale ( Balaenoptera musculus) is a marine mammal belonging to the suborder of baleen whales (called Mysticeti).
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