6/22/2023 0 Comments Ocean photo splash"But the large shoals of krill are shrinking-and this means that the whales can't fatten up before winter as they used to," explains Fredrik Christiansen. This allows the whales to eat huge amounts of food without using a lot of energy. The baleen inside their mouth is a sort of a giant filter and it filters the small animals from the salt water. Throughout the summer, right whales swim around beneath the sea ice, open their mouths to take in seawater, krill and water fleas. ![]() Several months in which they eat into the fat reserves they have built up through the warm and light summer season. When winter comes, and the cows leave the Antarctic and swim north, they have to cope for several months without food. Fortunately, the right whales in the Southern Ocean are not endangered, but if this continues, they could become so," he says. This is bad for the whale population, because it means that the newborn whale calves have a higher risk of dying. "Right whales are 25 percent thinner than they were in the 1980s. This is explained by Fredrik Christiansen, a senior researcher at the Department of Ecoscience at Aarhus University, who is behind the new results. Since the researchers started to measure right whales in the 1980s, the whales have become increasingly thinner. This is the result of new research from Aarhus University, published in the journal Scientific Reports. The whales arriving at the coasts of South Africa are thinner than they used to be. It is therefore extremely important that the whales eat a lot and fatten up in the cold waters around the Antarctic throughout the summer. However, there is no food for the whales, and all winter long the right whale mothers use up their fat reserves to produce milk for their calves. Here, the warmer South African water is perfect for mating or raising newborn calves.
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