Minke Whales are as Small as a Lunge-feeding Baleen Whale can be
Published:19 Mar.2023 Source:University of California - Santa Cruz
A new study of Antarctic minke whales reveals a minimum size limit for whales employing the highly efficient "lunge-feeding" strategy that enabled the blue whale to become the largest animal on Earth.
Lunge feeding whales accelerate toward a patch of prey, engulf a huge volume of water, and then filter out the prey through the baleen plates in their mouths. This strategy is used by the largest group of baleen whales, known as rorquals, which includes blue, fin, humpback, and minke whales. The ability to engulf large amounts of prey-laden water is essential to making this feeding strategy pay off, and the energy efficiency increases with larger body size.
In the new study, published March 13 in Nature Ecology & Evolution, researchers used noninvasive suction tags to observe 23 Antarctic minke whales in the waters off the West Antarctic Peninsula, tracking their daytime and nighttime foraging behavior as they fed on Antarctic krill.
The study also addresses questions about the evolution of baleen whales and the origins of a feeding strategy that depends on large body size.