The biggest whales can eat the equivalent of 80,000 Big Macs in one day
The biggest animals to have ever lived on Earth gobble up much more food than scientists thought, according to a new study of filter-feeding whales that reveals just how important their eating habits could be for recycling nutrients in the ocean.
Baleen whales such as blue, fin, minke, and humpback whales consume, on average, around three times more each year than previous estimates suggested, researchers report in Nature. A blue whale in the eastern North Pacific, for example, might eat between 10 and 20 tons of food a day.
"That amount of food is somewhere, a researcher at Stanford University and the lead author of the new study. "That is about 70 to 80 thousand Big Macs. Probably decades of our eating is one day for them. So it's pretty remarkable."
