Nature
PUBLISHED
In the animal world, who takes the champion belt for the biggest chops of them all? If you’re leaning towards one of the whales, congrats – your deductive powers have served you well. Our mouthy winner is the bowhead whale (Balaena mysticetus), and what a gob it’s got.
The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content.When you learn a little more about bowhead whales, it comes as less of a surprise that they have the biggest mouths. Not only are they one of the largest whale species in terms of weight and length, clocking in at up to 90 tonnes and up to 20 meters (66 feet) long, but their heads make up a whopping one-third of that body length. Proportionally, this means that they have the largest head of any cetacean.
And part of that enormous noggin is a suitably enormous mouth, measuring up to 5 meters (16.4 feet) long and 2.5 meters (8.2 feet) wide. If not from size alone, you can spot this gigantic gob when it’s closed by the characteristic bowed line that it forms, after which the species gets its common name.
Then, when it’s time for a tasty dinner of krill, copepods, and small fish, bowhead whales can open their mouths to 4 meters (13.1 feet) high, or two Michael Jordans stacked on top of each other (not that anyone who’s ever ended up in the mouth of a whale has been swallowed by one, so you can rest easy, Mr Jordan).
The actual size of their mouths isn’t the only thing that’s impressive about them; within, they also hold the longest baleen plates of any whale, growing up to 5 to 6 meters (16.4 to 19.7 meters) long. Baleen plates are fringed structures made out of keratin that hang down from the upper jaw inside bowhead (and other baleen) whales’ mouths. They act like a sieve, letting water flow through the mouth, but keeping food trapped inside.
It’s a good thing that those big ol’ mouths allow them to filter through and trap so much food at once; perhaps unsurprisingly for such a large animal, it’s estimated that bowhead whales need to eat roughly 100 tonnes of food every year.
Outside of their mouths, and outside of the cetacean family too, bowhead whales are still record breakers. They’re the longest living mammal on the planet, thought to be capable of living over 200 years. As for how they manage to live so long – well, that’s something that scientists are only just starting to figure out. That, and why they have such tiny balls.
