411316-whale.jpg
Bowhead whale. Credit: National Park Service.
Many whales look sleek and powerful — they glide through the oceans quickly and gracefully. But not the bowhead. It has a thick body, there’s no fin on its back, and it has a giant mouth — bigger than any other animal on the planet.
The adult bowhead is up to about 50 feet long, and weighs anywhere from 60 to a hundred tons. Marine biologists say the whale can live for more than a century — and perhaps up to two centuries.
The bowhead lives year-round in Arctic waters. To protect it against the cold, it has a thicker layer of blubber than any other animal, which is one reason it looks so tubby. And its head is enormous — it makes up about a third of the whale’s body length. In part, that’s because the bowhead has a thick skull that allows it to ram through the ice to create a breathing space.
But it also needs a big head to allow it to feed. It consumes about two tons a day — all by filtering tiny organisms from the water. It does so with hundreds of plates, known as baleen. They take up a lot of room, so the bowhead’s mouth is up to 12 feet high, eight feet wide, and 16 feet long. To feed, the whale simply opens that giant mouth, slowly swims along, and filters the goodies from thousands of gallons of water.
The bowhead’s blubber and baleen were so highly prized that the whale was hunted to near extinction. Thanks to strong conservation efforts over the last few decades, though, this tubby whale with the giant mouth is beginning to make a comeback in some regions of the Arctic.
