Blue whales swallow 457,000 calories in each mouthful.
A team of researchers led by Jeremy Goldbogen, who is now at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, calculated the efficiency of filter feeding, the strategy of blue whales, the largest animals on Earth.
They determined a single mouthful of food can contain 457,000 calories, or 240 times as much energy as they burn when grabbing that mouthful.
Blue and some other whale species eat by taking enormous mouthfuls of water and filtering out their meals, often tiny crustaceans called krill, using plates of baleen made of keratin, a protein found in hair, fingernails and feathers.
The baleen whales’ efficiency is unprecedented in the animal kingdom. When they take a gulp of water, they fill their mouths with an amount of water equal to their own body mass.
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