Helen Stoddart, age 15, of North Barnaby, Vancouver, for her questions
How does a mother whale give birth?
The baby whale must gulp a breath of air as soon as he is born. For he is an air‑breathing animal and not a fish. This creates quite a problem for Mama Whale, who spends all her life in the ocean. But when time comes for the baby to emerge from his Mama's huge body, she knows just what to do. She is sure to be at the surface of the ocean.
The little fellow is born either on the surface or he is quickly whisked there in Mama's tender flippers. He gulps his first breath of air and he is soon ready for his first meal. Being a mammal, he is fed on mother's milk. This will be his diet for the first six weeks of his life. Feeding during this time is also quite a problem. For it is almost impossible for the baby whale to suck his milk under water. So, at feeding time, Mama comes to the surface where her darling can enjoy his meal in comfort.
A baby whale is called a calf and he is almost always an only child. Rarely does a mother whale give birth to twins. The lone baby may be born at any time of the year. Whales are sociable animals and they travel in herds or schools. Junior can swim from the day of his birth anal he is well able to keep up with his traveling friends and relatives. There are sure to be other young whales of various ages in the herd, but Junior does stay close to Mama for several months. She teaches him to dive and to stay under water for longer and longer periods of time. At the end of six months he has learned all he can and is eating a normal whale diet. He is on his own, though no doubt he still visits his mother once in a while.
Whales come in an assortment of sizes and varieties. The largest is the blue baleen whale, a hundred feet long and weighing more than a hundred tons. Such a big whale needs a ton of food every day. Strange to say, his diet is the fine seafood salad called plankton. He opens his big mouth and.fills it with sea water rich in plankton. Then he uses his huge tongue to force the water out through a curtain of baleen or whalebone which hinges from the roof of his mouth. The baleen acts as a strainer to sift out the plankton from the sea water.
A baby blue whale is about 20 feet long at birth. He is, as you would expect, the biggest baby in the world. If all goes well, he can expect a life span of 25 years. Aside from man‑the‑hunter, the big whales have few enemies. Traveling as they do in herds, few sea creatures are brave enough to attack them.
Smaller whales,, of course, bear smaller babies. The dolphins and the porpoises also belong to the whale family, Cetacea. Some of these small whale cousins are no longer than six feet when fully grown. Their calves are no bigger than lap dogs. But at birth their Mamas act very much like the big whales. A mother dolphin whisks her newborn infant to the surface for his first breath of air. For she too knows he would drown if his lungs filled with water.