There are two sub-species of blue whales in the Southern Hemisphere, the Antarctic (or true) blue whale and the slightly smaller (but still very large) pygmy blue whale. Acoustic and field research indicates this population has its own distinctive song, and a foraging ground was identified off the coast of Taranaki (South Taranaki Bight) in 2014. They don't just pass through on annual migrations, but it's unknown for how much of the year they are present. That's far bigger than any dinosaur.Ī blue whale population lives in New Zealand waters for part of the year. A female blue whale weighing 150 tonnes (killed in the Antarctic in 1928) was the largest animal ever known to have lived during the earth's 4600 million-year history. The hardest part of the whole whale was getting the mottled spots right.The blue whale is the largest animal in the world. Some photos had plenty of splotchy white patterns (the Fort Bragg carcasses) but I rarely noticed them overall, and assumed they may have been caused by injury, discolouration, or simply from decay, perhaps. which is not what these depicted whales are doing. Some photos suggested the main "white" parts were inside the corrogated folds on its throat that stretch open to become visible when it opens its mouth to feed. Although plenty of sources stated Blue Whales have white breasts and throats, the photos didn't seem to show this, suggesting it's an optical illusion of the water, or its just too subtle to be worth incorporating. The Fort Bragg ones appeared to be genuinely blue-skinned, while antarctic appeared to be plainer grey, and the pygmy's more charcoal-coloured.Ĭounter-shading I omitted. Taken from photos of whales surfacing and a few washed up carcasses. The Pigmy Whale I did delegate more to references to reshape its body to what should be roughly correct proportions.įor the sake of making it more interesting, I wanted to depict the whales in their most "compacted" stances (not with bloated throats as they caught a massive amount of krill) Once I put enough drone- and sideways-photos together to start getting similar proportions, I started getting a clear idea of the "true" shape of the animal. My trick to getting around this was to get some photographs taken from drones and aircraft as the whales swim (largely flat) against the surface. Of course, whales are never *quite* filmed swimming sideways, always moving a little toward, or a little away from the camera and thanks to its colossal size, some very distorted perspective. I got the general shape from observing "roughly sideways" photographs and some closeups of each part of the whale many brave underwater photographers managed to snap on Google. Which meant a lot of photographic evidence (and eyeballing some existing charts just to be safe with my proportions). My first approach for this chart was to try to identify the proportions myself rather than delegate to an existing chart as a first resort, or else it would be a "size chart of a size chart". THIS time, drawing carefully from scientific sources (for the size) and extensive visual references (for appearance and proportion). This is another piece to replace that shoddy and hastily-assembled Blue Whale from my younger years. Update: Background now includes scale bar.Ī fascinating animal and some fun to research (if at least to check some of the sure-to-be-outlandish-facts-that-turned-out-to-be-true (like the size of a 737, or its tongue).
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