Why size matters if you’re a whale
A 10-year study has discovered the reasons for the massive mammals’ proportions by tagging them as they searched for food, writes Nina Massey
AFTER more than a decade of research a team of experts has discovered why whales are so big.
But their study also reveals that the largest creatures to have evolved on the planet won’t get any bigger.
The research, which involved tagging 300 whales, found that their large bodies help them consume their prey at high efficiencies – and this is one factor that means they won’t grow any bigger.
Whales’ gigantism is limited both by this foraging efficiency and the availability of prey, according to a study published in the Science journal.
An international team of scientists, led by Stanford University biologist Jeremy Goldbogen along with Nicholas Pyenson, curator of fossil marine mammals at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, collected data from feeding whales for the research.
Their findings show that body size in all whales is limited by how much prey they can find but researchers also found that only filter-feeding whales have evolved a feeding strategy that drives them to achieve the size they have.
Dr Goldbogen said: “The ratio of energy gain relative to energy use reveals a whale’s foraging efficiency and that provides clues as to why different whales are big and why they aren’t bigger.”
Because the animals spend most of their time under the ocean surface, their behaviour is difficult to monitor.
The team of more than two dozen scientists sought and tagged whales, porpoises and dolphins of various sizes – from 5ft-long harbour porpoises to blue whales which can grow up to 328ft long and weigh more than
100 tons.
They used long poles to attach temporary multi-sensor tags on to the animals backs with suction cups.
Once in place the high-tech devices reported on the animals’ movements as they submerged to feed.
Using sonar equipment in the surrounding waters and past records of prey in whale stomachs, the scientists also estimated the density of prey in each tagged predator’s vicinity.
Researchers analysed data from more than 10,000 feeding events in waters from Greenland to Antarctica.
They then used that data to calculate the energy costs, benefits and total pay-off of foraging for each whale.
The scientists report that the relationship between body size and energy pay-off depended on what feeding strategy a whale had evolved to use.
This meant whether it was a filter feeder that gulps down schools of prey and strains them from ocean water in their mouth, or a toothed hunter that catches prey individually.
Blue whales, humpbacks and other filter-feeding whales use baleen – rows of flexible hair-like plates in their mouths – to strain krill and other small prey from ocean water.
For filter-feeding whales, large size is no impediment to foraging.
Toothed whales use echolocation to forage and are limited to feeding on one prey target at a time, and must dive deeper to find it.
In some cases the largest toothed whales did not eat enough food during a dive to make up for the energy they spent getting there.
“They literally can’t eat enough to achieve a higher energetic pay-off before they have to return to the surface and breathe,” Dr Pyenson said.
Filter-feeding whales feed on small but very abundant krill prey.
As a result the researchers suggest the seasonal availability of their abundant prey is what ultimately limits size in today’s filter-feeding ocean giants like fin whales and blue whales.
Dr Goldbogen said: “The largest baleen whale species must reap the energy gains of krill patches in only a few of the most productive summer months at high latitudes.
“Highly efficient filter-feeding strategies mean that these whales can build up fat stores that can then power their migrations across ocean basins to breeding grounds at lower latitudes that are leaner and provide much less food.”
They can’t eat enough to achieve a higher energetic pay-off