Gorged make blue whale food average daily super efficient (sciences)

PharmaLive.com (12 December 2010) – how much peut blue eat whales a single bite and they how much energy burn everything in search of food? These are the questions that Bob the University of British Columbia Colombia Shadwick, Canada and his colleagues have asked. They discovered that the blue whale can swallow almost 2,000 000kJ (almost 480 000kcalories) in a single bite of krill and consume 90 times more energy than they burn for a dive.

Blue whale diving can dive for anything up to 15 minutes. However, the University of British Columbia Colombia, Canada, Bob Shadwick explains blue whale will be able to dive for longer, due to supplies of colossal oxygen that they could carry in their blood and muscles, then why did they?

"The theory was that because of what they are doing underwater should use much energy," said Shadwick. Explaining that whales feed show on several occasions by deep krill, shoals engulfing their own weight in water before filtering nutrients crustaceans Shadwick said: "it was thought that the effect of dragging huge when they feed and then use maximum acceleration this gigantic body should be the cost. However, measuring the energies of blue whales in depth seemed almost impossible until Shadwick and his pupil Jeremy Goldbogen I chat with John Hildebrand, John Calambokidis, Erin Oleson and Greg Schorr, which were skilfully attach hydrophones, pressure sensors and accelerometers two axes elusive animals. Shadwick and Goldbogen realized that they could use Calambokidis measurements to calculate the energy cost of blue whales lying. They publish their discovery that blue swallow almost 2,000 000kJ (almost 480 000kcalories) in one bite of krill and to 90 times more energy than they burn to a unique diving in the journal of Experimental Biology.

Analyze the behavior of each whale Goldbogen saw dives lasted between 3.1 and 15.2 minutes and a whale may slots up to 6 times in the course of a single dive. After previously noted that it might establish a correlation between acoustic noise of water touches past the hydrophone with speed at which a whale moved, Goldbogen calculated velocities of blue as they rushed on several occasions to each dive. Then, the team had calculate the forces exerted on the whales as they accelerate their name bedroom colossal outside the water. Noting that the mouths of the whales inflated almost like a parachute as they engulfed in flames krill, hunted Goldbogen parachute aerodynamic expert Jean Potvin, to help build a mathematical model to calculate the forces acting on the whales as they leaped. With Potvin on the team, they were able to calculate that whales used between 3226 kJ of energy for each slot. But how this compare with the amount of energy that whales could retrieve each huge mouthful of krill?

Goldbogen estimated the volume of the mouth of whales by searching the literature of the whaling for morphological data and teamed with Nick Pyenson paleontologist to measure the size of the blue whale jaw bones in several museums of natural history. He was also awarded krill density in literature – values that are probably on the low side. Then calculated the volume of the water and the amount of krill that whales could engulf and found that whales could eat anything from 34 776kJ until a 1,912 unprecedented 680kJ one plugged krill, by providing as much as 240 times more energy than the animals used in a single slot. And when the team calculates the amount of energy a whale could take aboard for a dive, they found that every power dive could provide 90 times more energy than they used.

Shadwick admits he was initially surprised that whales foraging dives were so effective. "We went on numbers much," he remembers, but then he and Goldbogen realized that huge efficiency of whales is logical. "The key of this size factor is because they can engulf a large volume of food so that she pay really," said Shadwick.

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Source of the story:

The story above is reproduced (with drafting adaptations by PharmaLive.com staff) of materials supplied by the company of biologists. The original article was written by Kathryn Knight.

Reference of the review:

J. a. Goldbogen, j. Calambokidis, e. Oleson, j. Potvin, n. d. Pyenson, g. Schorr, r. e. Shadwick. Mechanics, hydrodynamic and energy power of the blue whale slot: depends on the density of krill. Journal of experimental biology, in 2010. 214 (1): 131 DOI: 10.1242/jeb.048157

Note: If no author is given, the source is cited for this.