Volvox

How Big Are Blue Whale Eyes?

• Pieter Maas
• 16.01.2023
• 0
• 22

How Big is a Blue Whale’s Eye? – The one thing about blue whale’s that’s actually kind of small is their eyes. A blue whale’s eye is about the size of a small grapefruit or a softball. This might seem pretty big compared to our own eyes, which are the size of a cherry. But considering how gigantic a blue whale is, their eyes are kind of puny.

How big are whales eyes?

Page 12 – Eyes An adult’s eyes are about the size of baseballs. The eyes are located about 6 to 7 feet (2 meters) behind the tip of the snout, or roughly one-sixth of the distance from the front to the end of the whale. Image: Keith Jones : Eyes: An adult gray whale’s eyes are about the size of baseballs.

Do blue whales have big eyes?

Eyes – Blue whales have relatively small eyes for their body size – each about the size of a grapefruit – and their eyesight is thought to be weak. They have no tear glands or eyelashes. Their gigantic mouths – big enough to house 100 people – can capture enormous quantities of prey with each gulp of water, filtering the nutritious krill from the expelled water with stiff bristles that grow from the roof of the mouth.

How long is blue whale eye?

Size of a Whale Eye i Hemera Technologies/Photos.com/Getty Images Eleven species of whales live in waters around the globe, and eye size varies according to whale type. Species include sperm whales, humpback whales, minke whales, Bryde’s whales, Sei whales, fin whales, blue whales, beluga whales, false killer whales, pilot whales and orca whales, also known as killer whales.

A whale’s eyes primary sense is her hearing. Dan Bortolotti’s book “Wild Blue: A Natural History of the World’s Largest Animal,” mentions that one of the reasons whales’ eyes are small in proportion to their body is because they have evolved to rely less on vision and more on hearing. An adult gray whale’s eyes are about the size of baseballs, or about 3 inches across.

Her eyes are set about 8 feet away from top of her jawline. A blue whale’s eyes are bigger, at about 6 inches across. This is about the size of a cow’s eyes – seemingly small, considering she’s the largest animal on earth. : Size of a Whale Eye

Which whale has the largest eyes?

The eye of the beast was measured at about 11 in (28 cm), larger than a dinner plate and by far the largest animal eye on Earth. Blue whales, the largest living animals (up to 33 m (110 ft) long and 180 tonnes heavy), have eyes the size of those of a cow.

What animal has the largest eyeball?

The colossal squid has the largest animal eyes ever studied. It possibly has the largest eyes that have ever existed during the history of the animal kingdom. In a living colossal squid they measure about 27 cm across — about the size of a soccer ball. Another incredible feature of the colossal squid is that the eyes are equipped with light organs.

Are whales color blind?

Whales are colour blind – When you observe whales from a Zodiac, they will not notice that you are wearing a fluorescent jumpsuit. Indeed, whales see the world in shades of grey! They can distinguish light from dark, but, like humans who are colour blind, they cannot tell the difference between red and green on a traffic light.

• Indeed, the eyes of cetaceans are monochromatic.
• They contain just one type of cone, which corresponds to a colour between red and green, depending on the species.
• Surprisingly, whales cannot see the colour blue, which is the hue that best penetrates the depths of the marine universe.
• This inactive nature of the cones associated with the colour blue might be explained by the fact that whales’ ancestors inhabited coastal waters, where the ability to perceive blue is less of an advantage.

However, although whales’ eyes contain few cones, they do contain many rods. The function of cones is to capture colour, while rods allow an organism to see better in low light. Whales therefore seem to have prioritized night vision over colour vision!

How big is a blue whale brain?

Blue Whale Brain – Highly complex but only relatively small in comparison to their size, the Blue Whale brain weighs in at approximately 5 kilograms. The largest brain in the would belongs to the Sperm Whale which weighs in at over 6 kilograms and is larger due to the more complex social structures.

Do whales have big balls?

Right whales have the largest testicles in the animal kingdom, reaching a combined mass of 1,000 kg, which corresponds to 2% of their total weight. Despite being generally smaller than their baleen cousins, toothed whales have testicles that are 7 to 25 times larger than those of land mammals of comparable size.

Can a human hear a blue whale?

It’s all about that bass – Baleen whales on the other hand rule supreme over the lower registers – the bass notes of the zoological musical scale. While toothed whales emit high-pitched whistles to communicate with each other, and even higher pitched clicks to pinpoint prey, baleen whales sing to each other with rumbling, low moans and growls that often are too low for humans to hear – blue whales for example can make calls just 14Hz in frequency, invisible to our ears.

Because low frequency sounds travel further with less scattering, distortion and transmission loss, baleen whales can communicate to each other over enormous distances – thousands of kilometres. They accomplish this through an ingenious tactic: making their calls within something called the ‘deep sound channel’, also known as the SOFAR channel (for Sound Fixing and Ranging channel).

Due to the physical properties of the ocean, sound waves diminish in volume rapidly close to the surface, but at varying depths below the surface, depending on latitude, sound waves suffer little transmission loss and increase in the speed at which they travel.

Is Titanic bigger than blue whale?

Yes. A female blue whale is larger than a male. They are commonly between 70 and 80 feet, but can be as long as 110 feet. The Titanic was 882.75 feet long and 92 feet wide, which makes most adult blue whales shorter than the titanic was wide.

How far can you hear a whale cry?

July 13, 2018 For hundreds of miles their multi-tonal moans travel underneath the deep blue ocean waves. Their song is a chain of sharp howls, deep moans and cries, strung together in a complex and beautiful manner that holds the power to leave us stunned.

This is the song of the humpback whale, a magical and haunting sound that never fails to pierce the hearts of listeners as they wonder at the mammals below the water. The humpback whale is one of the largest animals on the planet—it’s about as long as a school bus, for context. Once hunted nearly to extinction, their numbers have somewhat recovered, and their species was recently taken off the list of Endangered Species.

(They’re now considered a Threatened species in Central American and Western North Pacific regions.) Humpback whales continue to be studied by scientists who hope to someday decipher the complex songs that humpback whales sing, to communicate with one another, to attract a mate, or maybe just to express themselves.

1. The Variations of Song & Sound Humpback whale songs are composed of many different sounds, perceived by humans as a series of moans, cries, and howls, but these songs are not the exclusive vocalizations of these whales.
2. They also use a range of social sounds like grunts, groans, snorts, and barks to communicate and hunt.

While male and female humpback whales both vocalize, it is only the males who make the long and loud string of noises that we call the whale song. Despite not having any vocal chords, humpback whales can sing continuously for over 24 hours, generating the noises by forcing air through their nasal cavities.

Songs vary by whale population, so while humpbacks who live in the North Atlantic sing one song, those that populate the North Pacific sing one entirely of their own, almost like a regional dialect. The songs are an evolving tale, lasting 10-20 minutes on average, repeating constantly, and changing slowly over a number of years, seemingly without ever repeating.

Theme changes are made in unison by all members of a given group; how they manage to do so is one of the great mysteries in the animal kingdom. A Traveling Music Of all the creatures on the planet, the humpback whale song is the longest and most varied that scientists have yet discovered.

One of the interesting things about the humpback whale song is how far the song can travel. Researchers estimate that some of the lowest frequency sounds can travel through the ocean as far as 10,000 miles without losing their energy. Most of the frequencies whales use in their songs land between 30 Hertz (Hz) and 8,000 Hz (8 kHz).

Guests on our whale watching tours will have the opportunity to listen to many underwater noises, such as the clicks and whistles of dolphins and the famous humpback whale song using an on-board microphone. Unluckily for us humans, the very lowest of the frequencies used in whale song, those below 100 Hz, are out of human hearing range.

Theories Regarding the Whale Song Scientists and animal researchers have been studying the songs of the humpback whales for many years, but are still not certain of the exact purpose, though there are many likely theories. Some have hypothesized that the song may have an echolocative function; during feeding dolphins are known to use vocalizations to herd fish into their bubble nets, and it’s thought that humpbacks may engage in similar behaviors.

The strongest evidence, however, links the singing to mating purposes. It is during the breeding season that singing becomes the most wide spread, with the songs under constant evolution during this period. Since females vocalize but don’t sing, one theory points to the song as a manner for males to attract a mate.

1. Others, however, postulate that the song is a challenge to other males, as there have been several observed incidences of males approaching singers, often times creating conflict.
2. Whatever the true purpose, the humpback whales song continues to enchant listeners.
3. Come aboard for one of our whale watching excursions and listen to their song for yourself.

It truly has to be heard to be believed.

How big is whale’s tongue?

A Blue Whale’s Tongue Weighs About 4 Tons – Dr. Mirko Junge / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0 Their tongue is about 18 feet long and can weigh up to 8,000 pounds (the weight of an adult female African elephant). A 2010 study estimated that when feeding, a blue whale’s mouth opens so wide, and is so large, that another blue whale could swim into it.

How big is a whale fart?

When a blue whale farts, you could fit a full-grown horse in the gas bubbles, although we couldn’t independently confirm this one.

Which animal has 10,000 eyes?

The quirks of mantis shrimp vision – The is a small marine crustacean known for the aggressive and lightning-fast ways they capture prey. Humans can process three channels of colour (red, green and blue), while mantis shrimps perceive the world through 12 channels of colour, and can detect UV (ultra violet) and polarised light, aspects of light humans can’t access with the naked eye.

The mantis shrimp’s is unique in the animal kingdom. Mantis shrimps, scientifically known as stomatopods, have compound eyes, a bit like a bee or a fly, made up of 10,000 small photoreceptive units. Some of these photoreceptors are arranged in a strip-like arrangement across their eyes so in fact they see their world by scanning this strip across their subject, a bit like a bar-code reader in a shop.

So, rather than relying on heavy brain processing to compare colours and determine what they are (as most vertebrate visual systems do), the photoreceptors interpret information straight away. Studying how animals like mantis shrimps see the world has led to a variety of now being developed in different laboratories around the world for human technologies and medicine. Studying the vision of mantis shrimps taught us how to make better satellite cameras. Image adapted from: Additionally, a large portion of photoreceptors in the mantis shrimp’s eye are used for visualising the UV and polarisation information in objects and scenes underwater.

Which animal has 8 eyes?

Spiders usually have eight eyes but few have good eyesight. Spiders usually have eight eyes (some have six or fewer), but few have good eyesight. They rely instead on touch, vibration and taste stimuli to navigate and find their prey. Most are able to detect little more than light-dark intensity changes which stimulate nocturnal web building, hunting or wandering activities and rapid movement to allow quick reactions against daytime predators (e.g.

What creature has 1000 eyes?

Although chitons look very simple, these mollusks have a very sophisticated shell. Its outer layer contains up to 1000 tiny eyes, each a bit smaller than the period at the end of this sentence.

What has 12000 eyes living?

Final answer: The monarch butterfly is known to possess 12000 eyes.

Is there an animal with 100 eyes?

The multi-eyed chiton could provide a model for robots. – If you spot a West Indian fuzzy chiton, it has most likely spotted you too. Chitons may lack a brain, head and eyes in the classic sense, but nestled in the shell of this primitive marine mollusc are hundreds of tiny ‘eyes’, complete with lenses that focus light to create images.

• The finding was reported in Science in November, by Matthew Connors and his colleagues at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
• Every single one of these funny little lenses works as a reasonably good camera,” says Duke University biologist Sönke Johnsen.
• The chiton’s multiple eyes could inspire more robust robot vision systems, Connors says.

Oval in shape and just under the size of a credit card, chitons spend their days crawling along rocks, camouflaged and shielded by their brownish-grey armour. Their tiny eye-like structures – a unique feature among molluscs – were noticed by 19 th century biologists.

1. They assumed that these eyes, more correctly called aesthetes, would only be capable of telling light from dark.
2. But in 2011, Johnsen and his colleagues discovered chitons could distinguish objects.
3. Chitons quickly clamped down on their rocks when a dark fish-shaped object was placed above them.
4. But when the researchers dimmed the lights by the equivalent amount, the chitons didn’t flinch.

The Connors team decided to take a closer look. The chiton’s eyes consist of a tough crystal lens positioned above a small cluster of photoreceptor cells. The team extracted the lenses, then rigged up a microscope to act like a slide projector, with the chiton’s eye acting as the projector’s lens.

• When they shone images through this lens, the images were a thousand times fuzzier than the image a human eye lens would cast, but still recognisable – and much sharper than Connors was expecting.
• Why a chiton needs so many eyes remains a mystery.
• The chiton ‘brain’ is a rudimentary cluster of nerve cells with insufficient power to integrate the signals from hundreds of eyes.

Chitons “make a goldfish look like Albert Einstein!” says Johnsen. “It’s like having a whole row of television sets on when no one’s watching.” Johnson and Connors suspect the reason chitons have so many eyes comes down to their tough lifestyle on the waterfront.

• Chitons are battered by breaking waves, and their eyes are frequently damaged – but they have plenty of spares, suggests Connors.
• Could the tough, yet perceptive, chiton be inspiration for future robot designs? Johnson thinks so.
• Mars exploration rovers now carry a few cameras on masts.
• Instead, they could carry hundreds of tiny cameras, ready to fill in for each other should a few of them get cracked or covered by dust, he suggests.

“If you can build a robot like that, it’ll be really robust,” Johnson says. Get an update of science stories delivered straight to your inbox.

What color can a human not see?

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(Image credit: hddigital | Shutterstock ) Try to imagine reddish green — not the dull brown you get when you mix the two pigments together, but rather a color that is somewhat like red and somewhat like green. Or, instead, try to picture yellowish blue — not green, but a hue similar to both yellow and blue.

1. Is your mind drawing a blank? That’s because, even though those colors exist, you’ve probably never seen them.
2. Red-green and yellow-blue are the so-called “forbidden colors.” Composed of pairs of hues whose light frequencies automatically cancel each other out in the human eye, they’re supposed to be impossible to see simultaneously.

The limitation results from the way we perceive color in the first place. Cells in the retina called “opponent neurons” fire when stimulated by incoming red light, and this flurry of activity tells the brain we’re looking at something red. Those same opponent neurons are inhibited by green light, and the absence of activity tells the brain we’re seeing green.

• Similarly, yellow light excites another set of opponent neurons, but blue light damps them.
• While most colors induce a mixture of effects in both sets of neurons, which our brains can decode to identify the component parts, red light exactly cancels the effect of green light (and yellow exactly cancels blue), so we can never perceive those colors coming from the same place.

Almost never, that is. Scientists are finding out that these colors can be seen — you just need to know how to look for them. Colors without a name The color revolution started in 1983, when a startling paper by Hewitt Crane, a leading visual scientist, and his colleague Thomas Piantanida appeared in the journal Science.

Titled “On Seeing Reddish Green and Yellowish Blue,” it argued that forbidden colors can be perceived. The researchers had created images in which red and green stripes (and, in separate images, blue and yellow stripes) ran adjacent to each other. They showed the images to dozens of volunteers, using an eye tracker to hold the images fixed relative to the viewers’ eyes.

This ensured that light from each color stripe always entered the same retinal cells; for example, some cells always received yellow light, while other cells simultaneously received only blue light. Images similar to those used in a famous 1983 experiment in which so-called “forbidden colors” were perceived for the first time. (Image credit: Life’s Little Mysteries) The observers of this unusual visual stimulus reported seeing the borders between the stripes gradually disappear, and the colors seem to flood into each other.

Amazingly, the image seemed to override their eyes’ opponency mechanism, and they said they perceived colors they’d never seen before. Wherever in the image of red and green stripes the observers looked, the color they saw was “simultaneously red and green,” Crane and Piantanida wrote in their paper.

Furthermore, “some observers indicated that although they were aware that what they were viewing was a color (that is, the field was not achromatic), they were unable to name or describe the color. One of these observers was an artist with a large color vocabulary.” Similarly, when the experiment was repeated with the image of blue and yellow stripes, “observers reported seeing the field as simultaneously blue and yellow, regardless of where in the field they turned their attention.” It seemed that forbidden colors were realizable — and glorious to behold! Its name is mud Crane’s and Piantanida’s paper raised eyebrows in the visual science world, but few people addressed its findings.

It was treated like the crazy old aunt in the attic of vision, the one no one talks about,” said Vince Billock, a vision scientist. Gradually though, variations of the experiment conducted by Billock and others confirmed the initial findings, suggesting that, if you look for them in just the right way, forbidden colors can be seen.

Then, in 2006, Po-Jang Hsieh, then at Dartmouth College, and his colleagues conducted a variation of the 1983 experiment. This time, though, they provided study participants with a color map on a computer screen, and told them to use it to find a match for the color they saw when shown the image of alternating stripes — the color that, in Crane’s and Piantanida’s study, was indescribable.

• Instead of asking participants to report verbally (and hence subjectively), we asked our participants to report their percepts in a more objective way by adjusting the color of a patch to match their perceived color during color mixing.
• In this way, we discovered that the perceived color during color mixing (e.g., red versus green) is actually a mixture of the two colors, but not a forbidden color,” Hsieh told Life’s Little Mysteries, a sister site to LiveScience.

When shown the alternating stripes of red and green, the border between the stripes faded and the colors flowed into each other — an as-yet-unexplained visual process known as “perceptual filling in,” or “image fading.” But when asked to pick out the filled-in color on a color map, study participants had no trouble zeroing in on muddy brown.

1. The results show that their perceived color during color mixing is just an intermediate color,” Hsieh wrote in an email.
2. So if the color’s name is mud, why couldn’t viewers describe it back in 1983? “There are infinite intermediate colors,
3. It is therefore not surprising that we do not have enough color vocabulary to describe,” he wrote.

“However, just because a color cannot be named, doesn’t mean it is a forbidden color that’s not in the color space.” Color fixation Fortunately for all those rooting for forbidden colors, these scientists’ careers didn’t end in 2006. Billock, now a National Research Council senior associate at the U.S.

Air Force Research Laboratory, has led several experiments over the past decade that he and his colleagues believe prove the existence of forbidden colors. Billock argues that Hsieh’s study failed to generate the colors because it left out a key component of the setup: eye trackers. Hsieh merely had volunteers fix their gaze on striped images; he didn’t use retinal stabilization.

“I don’t think that Hsieh’s colors are the same ones we saw. I’ve tried image fading under steady fixation and I don’t see the same colors that I saw using artificial retinal stabilization,” Billock said. In general, he explained, steady eye fixation never gives as powerful an effect as retinal stabilization, failing to generate other visual effects that have been observed when images are stabilized.

“Hseih et al.’s experiment is valid for their stimuli, but says nothing about colors achieved via more powerful methods.” Recent research by Billock and others has continued to confirm the existence of forbidden colors in situations where striped images are retinally stabilized, and when the stripes of opponent colors are equally bright.

When one is brighter than the other, Billock said, “we got pattern formation and other effects, including muddy and olive-like mixture colors that are probably closer to what Hseih saw.” When the experiment is done correctly, he said, the perceived color was not muddy at all, but surprisingly vivid: “It was like seeing purple for the first time and calling it bluish red.” The scientists are still trying to identify the exact mechanism that allows people to perceive forbidden colors, but Billock thinks the basic idea is that the colors’ canceling effect is being overriden.

• When an image of red and green (or blue and yellow) stripes is stabilized relative to the retina, each opponent neuron only receives one color of light.
• Imagine two such neurons: one flooded with blue light and another, yellow.
• I think what stabilization does (and what enhances) is to abolish the competitive interaction between the two neurons so that both are free to respond at the same time and the result would be experienced as bluish yellow,” he said.

You may never experience such a color in nature, or on the color wheel — a schematic diagram designed to accomodate the colors we normally perceive — but perhaps, someday, someone will invent a handheld forbidden color viewer with a built-in eye tracker.

And when you peek in, it will be like seeing purple for the first time. Follow Natalie Wolchover on Twitter @ nattyover, Follow Life’s Little Mysteries on Twitter @ llmysteries, then join us on Facebook, Natalie Wolchover was a staff writer for Live Science from 2010 to 2012 and is currently a senior physics writer and editor for Quanta Magazine.

She holds a bachelor’s degree in physics from Tufts University and has studied physics at the University of California, Berkeley. Along with the staff of Quanta, Wolchover won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for explanatory writing for her work on the building of the James Webb Space Telescope.

Can whales make you deaf?

Blue Whales – Aside from holding the record for the world’s largest animal, blue whales also have the title of the world’s loudest mammal. Despite being known as gentle giants, blue whales can emit sounds loud enough to cause hearing loss in humans. These massive creatures can make noises as loud as 188 decibels, which is 38 decibels higher than a jet taking off 25 meters away.

How intelligent are whales?

What is intelligence? – Intelligence can be defined as the ability to learn and apply knowledge; to understand new or challenging situations and the ability to think abstractly. Dolphins demonstrate the ability to do all of these things and most scientists agree that dolphins are very intelligent.

They are notoriously talented mimics and quick learners; they demonstrate self-awareness, problem-solving, and empathy, innovation, teaching skills, grief, joy and playfulness. It’s a complicated question because it’s hard to compare a whale or a dolphin’s intelligence with our own, mainly as we can’t use the same methods to measure both.

We can’t ask a dolphin to sit an IQ test or maths exam, or challenge a whale to build an engine or design a building. For a start, they don’t have hands and they communicate very differently from us. In fact, dolphins seem to have an almost unfathomable, alien intelligence, which is so unlike our own that perhaps a better question to ask is ‘ How are whales and dolphins intelligent?’ This short video by renowned scientist Lori Marino, explains how dolphin intelligence evolved.

Whales and dolphins have large brains; brainy dolphins have a brain to body ratio second only to humans. Large-brained creatures generally have a few things in common: they live long lives; they are sociable; their behaviour is complicated; females give birth to only a few offspring throughout their lives and take extraordinary care of each baby while teaching them life skills; the youngsters take their time to grow up, become sexually mature and independent of their mothers.

Perhaps the most obvious difference between our brains and that of dolphins and all toothed whales is that they have an entire area dedicated to echolocation. Dolphins can “see” with sonar and this skill or superpower is called echolocation. Sound travels much better in water than light does and so it makes more sense for dolphins to sense their surroundings with sound.

1. Their echolocation abilities are phenomenal; they can determine extraordinary details about everything around them.
2. They use echolocation to hunt and navigate even in dark or murky water.
3. Dolphins can check out each other’s pregnancies and eavesdrop on the echolocating clicks of other dolphins to figure out what they’re looking at.

Whale and dolphin brains contain specialized brain cells called, These are associated with advanced abilities such as recognising, remembering, reasoning, communicating, perceiving, adapting to change, problem-solving and understanding. So it seems they are deep thinkers! Not only that, but the part of their brain which processes emotions (limbic system) appears to be more complex than our own. Whale and dolphin communication skills are at the very heart of their cooperative lifestyles and social interactions. Scientists agree that they communicate with each other in sophisticated and at times, novel and interactive ways. For some, such as bottlenose dolphins and orcas, the complexity of their communication and social interactions is immense; they are incredibly chatty.if only we were smart enough to solve the mysteries of what they are saying to one another! Here are two great videos of talks by dolphin expert, Dr Denise Herzing on the subject of dolphin communication.

How big is a whales eye compared to a human?

Just as with a big optical telescope, it is the size of the eye’s aperture (i.e., pupil) that determines how many stars are seen — the bigger the pupil, the more light is captured from each star. Even extremely dim stars are visible with a large telescope.

This is equivalent to saying that a larger telescope lens allows one to see stars of higher magnitude. The same is true of eyes. In all eyes, the pupil functions as the aperture through which photons reach the light-sensitive cells of the retina. On a moonless starry night, human pupils reach a maximum width of 8 millimeters.

With such a diameter, we are able to discern stars with a magnitude as faint as 6.5, allowing us to see over 9,000 stars in the entire night sky. What about whales, basking on a starlit ocean surface at night? Remarkably, despite the often gigantic sizes of whales, their eyes are not as large as one might think.

• Even the largest whale eyes studied are only around 70 millimeters across (compared to around 25 millimeters for the human eye), but these eyeballs have thick outer layers of muscles and insulating fat.
• The actual eye itself, embedded within these layers, is typically only around 40 millimeters across.

The pupil is only half as large again as our own pupil — around 12 millimeters wide in the dark (as measured in southern right whales, gray whales, and bowhead whales), so nothing near as large as the objective lenses of typical binoculars! Assuming similar exposure times and that the photoreceptors of whales are as efficient at absorbing photons as our own eyes are (which is amazingly only around 5 to 10 percent), whales would be able to see stars almost one magnitude fainter than we can (around 7.4).

This would allow them to see some 2½ times as many stars, in fact around 22,500! While this number does seem impressive and would give whales a superior view of the night sky compared to our own, imagine the number of stars that would be seen by the giant deep-sea squid Architeuthis dux if it were ever to come to the surface.

With eyes almost 30 centimeters across and with pupils 9 centimeters wide, this squid could potentially see stars as faint as magnitude 12, which is truly staggering! Eric Warrant University of Lund, Sweden

Do whales have small eyes?

Whales Don’t Blubber – Whale eyes are not only relatively small, but they are different from many animals in other ways. Whale eyes lack eyelashes and they do not come equipped with tear ducts. When you live in saltwater, eyelashes and tears – adaptations for keeping out dirt and moistening the eyes – are no longer essential.

How big is a GREY whale eye?

How did gray whales get their name? The gray whale acquired its name from the gray patches and white mottling on its skin. What does the gray whales skin feel like? The skin has scratch marks and patches of white barnacles, and orange whale lice. A whale’s skin feels like a peeled hard-boiled egg.

1. Most of the adult grays have scars and tooth-rake marks from encounters with Orcas.
2. Light gray or white scars show where the whale barnacles have fallen off.
3. Young whales have barnacle patches soon after they are born.
4. How big are gray whales? Adult males can reach a length of 45 feet, adult females are slightly larger, and reach about 50 feet in length.

Both sexes weigh up to 30-40 tons. The gray whale’s flukes or tail can span up to 10 feet. Do gray whales sing? Gray whales make gurgles and warbling sounds, but nobody really understands what these sounds mean. Do gray whales sleep? This is what some scientists say, the whales do not stop swimming during migration, but think they may sleep and continue swimming on “autopilot.” Others say the whales take short naps of 10-20 minutes.

How can I recognize a gray whale? Gray whales have streamlined bodies with narrow, tapered heads with the upper jaw slightly overlapping the lower jaw. The gray whale has no dorsal (top) fin, but, about 2/3 of the way back on the body is a prominent dorsal hump; this is followed by 6-12 knuckles along the dorsal ridge that extend to the fluke (tail).

Its fluke is about 10 feet across, pointed at the tips, and deeply notched in the center; there are also 2-5 grooves on the ventral throat. How big are gray whales eyes? An adult’s eyes are just above their mouth outline and are about the size of baseball, they are located about 8 feet from the tip of the gray whale’s head.

They also have eye lids, I have also talked to some scientist that say you can tell the age of a gray whale by the protein in their eyes (during an autopsy to determine the cause of death). How long can a gray whale stay under water without coming up for air? An adult gray whale can stay submerged up to 20-30 minutes.

Do gray whales have teeth? No, the gray whale is in the sub-order Mysticeti; the Mysticeti whales have a baleen instead of teeth. Are gray whales friendly? Visitors to the calving and breeding lagoons sometimes encounter the “friendliest,” gray whales that come up to the small boats and let people touch them.

How long does a gray whale live? Grays whales live about 40 to 60 years, some can live 70 years. At what age do gray whale’s mate and breed? Gray whales reach sexual maturity somewhere between 5 and 11 years of age, a gray whale that lives to be 40 years old could have as many as 18 calves. How long is a gray whale’s pregnancy? Gestation is 11-12 months; migration and reproduction are connected, since it is best for the mothers to reach warm waters before giving birth.

Gray whales have a special adaptation called delayed implantation; the embryo does not start developing in the mother’s body until a few months after she becomes pregnant. After mating in the lagoons (or during migration), the newly pregnant female returns to the arctic feeding waters on spring’s journey north.

• She feasts for herself and her unborn baby and migrates south in fall or winter to the nursery lagoons to give birth.
• By the time she reaches the warm lagoons, the baby has been developing for 11-12 months and is ready for birth.
• A female usually has one calf every two years.
• What do newborn calves look like? Newborns are dark gray to black, some may have distinctive white markings, and a calf weighs between 1,100-1,500 pounds.

Babies weigh between 1,500-2,000 pounds when they are about 15 feet long. What do baby gray whales eat? Whales are mammals, so calves nurse on their mother’s milk; they nurse between 6 to 8 months. They will drink about 50 gallons of mother’s milk each day, whale milk is extraordinarily rich,, about 53% fat, and (Human milk is about 2% fat.) Where are baby gray whales born? Mating and calving occur mainly in the lagoons of Baja California, Mexico, the shallow, warm lagoons are great nurseries.

Calving and mating are sometimes seen during the migration. What makes the lagoons good nurseries? The lagoons are safe from hungry orca’s whales (killer of whales). The warm water helps the calves stay warm until they gain blubber, also the salty water makes the babies more buoyant, so it is easier for them to nurse.

Why do mothers and calves stay in the lagoons for 2-3 months? It allows the calves to build up a thick layer of blubber, they need blubber for energy to swim during the northward migration, and blubber keeps them warm in the colder waters. Are whale’s good mothers? Yes, mothers are very protective of their calves; they earned the name “Devilfish” because of their violence towards whalers who killed their babies.

1. What happens when a baby whale is born underwater? The mother supports her calf at the surface for its first few breaths of air; she then brings the baby up to the surface with her own back and flukes.
2. When are gray whale calves born? Calves are usually born in late December to early February in the lagoons of Baja California, Mexico, more than half of the births occur in Laguna Ojo de Liebre.

How big are baby gray whales when they are born? Calves can gain 60 to 70 pounds every day on their mother’s milk; they can reach 18 to19 feet in length in their first 3 months of life. Can baby whales swim right away? Within about three hours of birth, a calf can keep itself afloat and swim on a steady course, a calf may rest on its mothers back or fins until it becomes a stronger swimmer.

• What do gray whales eat? Gray whales feed on small crustaceans such as amphipods, and tube worms found in bottom sediments, they can eat a ton a day of shrimp like amphipods.
• Gray whales are like cattle on an open range, they travel wherever they can find food.
• I have seen the resident grays whales off Depoe Bay feed for weeks in one area, then move 1-2 miles and feed for a month.

How do gray whales eat? Since gray whales have no teeth, they capture and strain their baleen, which hangs from the roof of the mouth; grays are the only bottom feeding whales. When they feed, a whale dives to the bottom, rolls on its right side and gulps mouthfuls of mud from the bottom.

As the whale closes its mouth, water and sediments squirt out through the baleen plates. This leaves the amphipods stuck to the baleen inside their mouths. Whales then use their tongues to loosen the amphipods from the baleen, and swallow. What are baleen plates? Baleen whales have a series of 130-180 fringed, overlapping baleen plates hanging like curtains from each side of the upper jaw.

Baleen is made of a fingernail-like material called keratin. The plates are off-white and about 2-10-inch-long. Baleen plates filter water out and trap food in, the baleen is replaced about every 5 years. How fast do gray whales travel during migration? Gray whales cover about 100 miles a day; they can travel from Unimak Pass in Alaska to Baja California in an average of 50-60 days.

Do all gray whales migrate? No, some gray whales are found year-round on the coasts of British Columbia, Washington, Oregon, and California. When do gray whales make their yearly migration? In October, the whales begin to leave their feeding grounds, they swim south during the fall and winter to their mating and calving lagoons in Baja California, Mexico.

The southward journey takes around 2-3 months. The whales return north during the late winter and spring (mid-February to early June). How do the whales know when to migrate? There are several reasons; there are fewer hours of daylight, changes in water temperature, and changes in food supply as the northern pack ice increases.

How fast do gray whales travel? They travel about 3-6 miles per hour. Do all the whales go at the same time? Gray whales travel in groups, first to go south are the pregnant cows, the other adults and juveniles will follow about a month later. When whales head back north the last to leave are the new mothers and calves.

Why do gray whales migrate along the coast? The coastline may help them navigate the long distance, and being benthic (bottom) feeders, they have evolved with an orientation toward the seafloor where their food is located. How far from the coast do they usually travel? Along the coast of Oregon, gray whales will migrate within 2-5 miles of the shore.

Gray whales may pay more attention to water depth than distance from shore. Do whales eat while in their winter breeding grounds? Little, during the months of migrating and socializing in the lagoons of Baja California, gray whales survive almost on their fat reserves built up in the summer feeding grounds.

Some observers believe that gray whales eat nothing from the time they leave the Arctic. Do gray whales lose a lot of weight while in their breeding grounds? A 30-ton whale will expend so much energy on the migration to the Baja lagoons that it may lose 10-13 tons of its blubber; it eats little or nothing in the breeding grounds.

How big is a whale shark’s eye?

Morphology – Morphological observation was conducted on the formalin-preserved eyeball of a whale shark (OCF-F04248) in the collection at the Okinawa Churashima Research Center (Okinawa, Japan). This eyeball was extracted from a dead whale shark specimen during a dissection conducted by the aquarium staff at the Okinawa Churaumi Aquarium in 2017.

• This specimen was originally caught as a bycatch in a net set by local fishermen in Okinawa, Japan, and was donated to the Okinawa Churaumi Aquarium for scientific purposes.
• The anteroposterior diameter of the eyeball was 65.0 mm.
• Computed tomography (CT) data were acquired from this specimen using a micro CT scanner (Zeiss Xradia 510 Versa; Zeiss, Oberkochen, Germany) at an X-ray setting of 50 kV, equipped at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (Okinawa, Japan).

Three-dimensional reconstructions were prepared using IMARIS software (Bitplane, Zürich, Switzerland). The voxel size of the three-dimensional data was 18.2 μm for the observation of the entire eyeball morphology and 5.2 μm for the observation of the more detailed structure (e.g., morphology of each denticle).