Don't miss out. Order your tickets today to see the BLUE WHALES.



Visit www.2seewhales.com for more information

Blue Whales are the largest animal to live on earth and they can be seen along the Southern California Pacific Coast making this area ideal for whale watching enthusiasts. The Long Beach area hosts hundreds of blue whales annually who come to the region to feed on krill. These animals are highly mobile and they move regularly through the coast visiting the Los Angeles and Orange County regions and other feeding grounds near Newport Beach and the Channel Islands. Blue Whale watching season begins in May and they can be seen through December.

BLUE WHALE INFORMATION

Blue Whale Physical Description: The blue whale is the largest mammal. Its body is long, somewhat tapered, and streamlined, with the head making up less than one-fourth of its total body length. Its rostrum (upper part of the head) is very broad and flat and almost U-shaped, with a single ridge that extends just forward of the blowholes to the tip of the snout. Its blowholes are contained in a large, raised "splash guard", and the blow is tall and straight and over 20 feet (6 meters) high. Its body is smooth and relatively free of parasites, but a few barnacles attach themselves to the edge of the fluke and occasionally to the tips of the flippers and to the dorsal fin. There are 55-68 ventral grooves or pleats extending from the lower jaw to near the navel.

Blue whale Color: The blue whale is blue-gray in color, but often with lighter gray mottling on a darker background (or with darker spots on a lighter background). The underside of its flippers may be a lighter color or white, while the ventral (underside) of the fluke is dark. The blue whale acquires microorganisms called diatoms in the cold waters of the Antarctic and North Pacific and North Atlantic which give the underside of its body a yellowish green caste. Because of this yellow color, the early whalers gave it the name "sulfur bottom."

Fins and Fluke: Its dorsal fin is small and triangular or falcate (curved) in shape, and is located three-fourths of the way back on the body. The fin measures only one foot (30 cm) at its highest point though its size and shape are highly variable. Its flippers are tapered and relatively short, about 12% of the total body length. The flukes are broad and triangular. The rear edge is smooth with a slight median notch.

Length and Weight: The longest blue whale ever recorded was a 108-foot adult female caught during whaling efforts in Antarctica! In modern times, blue whales in the Southern Hemisphere reach lengths of 90-100 feet , but their Northern Hemisphere counterparts are smaller, on average 75 to 80 feet (23 to 24.5 m). Blue whales can weigh over 100 tons (99,800 kg). Females are larger than males of the same age, the largest perhaps weighing as much as 150 tons (136,000 kg).

Feeding: The blue whale is thought to feed almost exclusively on small, shrimp-like creatures called euphausiids or krill. During the summer feeding season the blue whale gorges itself, consuming an astounding 4 tons (3.6 metric tons) or more each day. This means it may eat up to 40 million krill a day. As a baleen whale, it has a series of 260-400 fringed overlapping plates hanging from each side of the upper jaw, where teeth might otherwise be located. These plates consist of a fingernail-like material called keratin that frays out into fine hairs on the ends inside the mouth near the tongue. The plates are black and measure about 20 inches (51 cm) in length toward the front of the mouth and about 40 inches (102 cm) at the rear. During feeding, large volumes of water and food can be taken into the mouth because the pleated grooves in the throat expand. As the mouth closes water is expelled through the baleen plates, which trap the food on the inside near the tongue to be swallowed.

Information courtesy of American Cetacean Society Fact Sheet

Visit Our other sites for additional information:

www.CaliforniaDolphinCruises.com www.2seewhales.com www.PacificBlueWhales.com www.longbeachweddingcruises.com www.california-dinner-cruises.com www.harbor-cruises.com www.longbeachcruises.com

See us in the news: Orange County Register Daily Breeze CBS NEWS ABC 7 Local news KNBC Local news LA Weekly LA Times

Copyright Harbor Breeze Cruises © 2008 | all rights reserved