EBN- Blue whales – the largest animals on Earth – are making their home in a part of the Indian Ocean where they were wiped out by whaling decades ago.
Researchers and filmmakers in the Seychelles captured footage of the whales in 2020 and 2021. It features in the Imax film Blue Whales 3D.
But a year of underwater audio recording revealed the animals spend months in the region.
This means they could be breeding there, scientists say.
The researchers involved in the mission described their discovery as a “conservation win” after the Soviet whaling fleet decimated the population in the 1960s.
Blue whales are the largest animals to have ever existed, as long as about three school buses and as heavy as 15 blue whales, even outsizing the dinosaurs.
The whales’ marine habitat contributes to their exceptional size. The ocean provides more room to grow and eliminates one of the factors that usually hinder animal size: gravity. Gravity limits the size of land animals to what their skeletons can support.
The ocean’s buoyancy spares marine mammals of this limitation, thereby allowing them to grow unlike any other animal. Blue whales have one of the loudest calls in the animal kingdom, measuring up to 188 decibels.
Their song can be loud enough to overpower the sounds of jackhammers and jet engines. The whales use their powerful songs to communicate with each other, oftentimes from long distances.
