THE ENDANGERED BLUE WHALES

Blue whales are marine mammals belonging to the baleen whales. Blue whales were abundant in nearly all the oceans on earth untill the begining of the twentieth century, they were hunted almost to extinction by whalers until protected by the international community in 1966. These mammals are the largest animals in the world that ever exist. Most of whales live in Atlantic and Pacific ocean. Blue whales actually can be found in every ocean, ranging from the equator to the ice edges in the north and south poles. Blue whales prefer to live in open ocean but they sometimes can be seen offshore of coastal states.

 

Blue whales have 30 metres in length and 170 tons or more in weight. And they also have long tapering bodies appear stretched in comparison with the stockier build of other whales. Their heads are flat, U-shaped and have prominent ridges running from the blowholes to the top of the upper lips. The front part of mouth is thick with one metre of baleen plates. Their dorsal fins are small, ranging in height from 8 up to 70 centimeters and averaging about 28 centimetres. They are visible only during the dive sequence just for a while. Females are bigger than males. The lengthiest blue whales are 110 feet, but they are more commonly between 70 and 80 feet. Adult blue whales weigh up to 150 tons. 

The uniqueness of these mammals is when they are about to come out from the surface to breathe, they raise their shoulders and blow out the water from their blowholes. And this such behaviour makes most of people interested of it. 

Blue whales feed almost exclusively on krill, although they take small numbers of codepods. They always eat the species of zooplankton from ocean to another. Besides, they also feed the shrimps in a huge amount. Adult blue whales can eat up to 40 millions krill in a day. They always feed in the areas with the highest concentration of krill, sometimes they eat up to 3,600 kilograms of krill in a single day.

Blue whales are endangered species because, nowadays, many fishermen catch them illegally in open ocean. This can make all the blue whales  threatened to be extinct. And if this illegal exploitation is still running without any effort from the government to stop it immedietely, it will be possible to make all the blue whales vanished in this planet. There will not be any the largest mammals in the world anymore. So, referring to this matter above, we hope the government to take action to protect these endangered animals from the extinction in order to keep the variety.