THE BLUE AHALE.pptVIP

The greatest of creatures ever to live * Even as a baby, a blue whale can make a grown man seem like a minnow. Decades ago, with their number plummeting, this species became a symbol of environmental woes. Now such healthy youngsters offer hope that the giants can be saved from the margin of extinction. Everything about the blue whale is superlative. Though some dinosaurs reached the same length, no animal has ever equaled it in bulk. Powerful flukes can propel a whale for many days without a single stop. Such stamina is extraordinary, yet these giants will need continued human help to survive. The blue whale can grow to 200 tons and 100 feet long. A single whale weighs as much as the entire National Football League. Just as an elephant might pick up a little mouse in its trunk, so the elephant, in its turn, might be taken up by a blue whale and carried along on the colossal tongue. Had a man been injected intravenously, instead of swallowed, he could have swum in the arterial vessels of this whale, boosted along every ten seconds or so by the slow, godlike pulse. The greatest swimming speed of the blue whale, together with the remoteness of its stronghold—where three of Earth’s oceans merge in the ice-cold waters around Antarctica—protected most of the species until early in the 20th century. With the invention of explosive harpoons and fast, steam-powered catcher boats, the stronghold was breached. Through the first six decades of the 20th century 360,000 blue whales were killed. The population around South Georgia Island was extirpated, along with those that once fed in the coastal waters of Japan. Some blue whale populations were reduced by ninety-nine one-hundredths, and the species tipped at the very brink of extinction. While tagging whales from their 85-foot-long vessel in the Santa Barbara Channel in 2007, scientists discovered a body floating belly-up. An autopsy revealed fatal injuries from a collision with a ship—probably one speeding cargo in or ou