The study has been published in the journal Ecology. “They are a lot less efficient than what we’d expect them to be if they’d evolved just to eat krill,” Meekan said. They are turning by-catch into a part of their diet.”Īnother part of the study involved collecting and testing whale shark poo, with the results showing they were certainly eating krill – but were not metabolising much of it. “Whale sharks have simply got round this in an evolutionary sense by being able to digest the seaweed. “Do you throw it up? Energetically that’s a very costly thing to do because you’ve just spent all this energy collecting it. When you get a gut full of food but there’s also a lot of algae what do you? “But it costs lots of energy to push their mouths – open like a huge net – through the water. “These are very big animals and when you’re a huge animal you need lots of food,” he said. Whales of Iceland is the largest whale exhibition in Europe (and perhaps even the world), where visitors can learn about the giants of the sea in a calm. He believes the size of the whale shark has prompted an evolutionary response that has effectively turned by-catch – such as the brown sargassum seaweed common at Ningaloo – into food. Like the name suggests, blue whales are a dark blue color with a paler underside. Blue whales can grow to be 98 feet (30 meters) in length, but they have been known to weigh upwards of 173 tons. “This study suggests they are feeding on quite a bit of plant material, more so in fact than krill,” Meekan said. Although nowhere near rivaling the largest living species of whale - the blue whale - the largest extinct whale thats been discovered is known as. The blue whale is not just the largest whale species, it is also the largest known animal in the world. Then they looked at what was present in skin samples from whale sharks. Scientists carefully analysed possible food sources, ranging from tiny plankton to large seaweed, for amino and fatty acids.
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