In this day and age, it can be pretty hard to get around unnoticed – especially if someone is looking for you.
Luckily for blue whales, though, the oceans are way too vast for even our stunningly improved human technology to observe on a daily basis.
Still, we have been able to spot the adorable offspring of many marine animals through the years, so where are the blue whale calfs?
Marine biologists believe they have the answer.
We have seen a blue whale give birth twice – once in 1911 and once in 1946, but out of all the blue whale sightings around the world, only a little over 3% of them include a mother and her calf.
Since mature female blue whales give birth every two to three years, there have to be more of these pairs out there. So Trevor Branch, an aquatic and fishery sciences professor at the University of Washington, decided to try to figure out why the sightings are so rare.
He used long-term field study and whaling record data to try to determine which of the seven existing theories about the phenomenon seemed most likely. After all of his research was complete, he believed that it is likely down to something as simple – and complex – as timing.
“My conceptual model can explain the mystery of the missing calves: Blue whales produce calves, or give birth, shortly after departing their summer feeding grounds, and wean their calves seven months later, just before they return.”
And it turns out that most field studies on blue whales take place in their summer feeding grounds, when the mothers are still pregnant.
“This new idea provides an alternative explanation for why some blue whale populations appear to produce very few calves: It’s not a failure of calf production, it’s because fieldwork in those populations is understandably concentrated in easily accessible summer feeding areas.”
I would imagine this would inspire some marine biologists to start hunting babies in the winter.
And hopefully produce some adorable images for the rest of us.
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