Portal:Cetaceans/Did you know/October, 2006

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

• ...dolphins often leap clear of the water when travelling at speed. This is because the density of water is much greater than that of air and they are able to travel faster by leaping out of the water.

• ...both whales and dolphins carry ‘whale lice’ — small crustaceans that inhabit folds in the skin of whales and dolphins, feeding off the loose skin.

• ...whale and dolphin mothers ‘suckle’ their young underwater! Mothers have muscular mammary glands and ‘squirt’ their milk into the calf’s mouth, to ensure that the calf takes in as much of the energy rich milk as possible.

• ...on average, a whale or dolphin will eat four to five percent of its body weight in food per day. That means that a 100 ton blue whale will eat almost five tons of krill per day, or that a 200kg bottlenose dolphin will eat 10kg of fish per day!

• ...newborn cetacean calves ‘suckle’ three to four times each hour and will suckle from their mothers for six months or more.