A Blue Whale's Tongue Weighs More Than An ELEPHANT! | Wild Bites | BBC Earth Kids

do you know what the biggest animal that's ever lived is [Music] no it's not a dinosaur it's alive today and its tongue alone is heavier than an elephant in this video we are going to find out all about some of the biggest animals ever whales weighing in 130 tons and measuring 30 meters the blue whale is bigger than even the most ginormous of the dinosaurs they can grow longer than two buses and weigh the same as three lorries a blue whale's heart is so big that it's the size of a small car it only beats

once every 10 seconds and a fully grown person could swim down his arteries but what is a whale and why are they so huge [Music] wild bites whales with fins and flippers you might think a whale is a really really big fish but you'd be wrong they don't look much like it but whales are actually mammals just like us that means they are warm blooded they breathe air and baby whales need their mother's milk to survive so they're more closely related to humans than fish so why do they live in the sea well around 50

million years ago the ancestors of wales used to live on the land we can tell this by looking at their skeletons believe it or not even though they don't have any legs they still have tiny hip bones left over from their prehistoric relatives [Music] over millions of years the water which gives their vast bodies more support than air has allowed them to grow into over 80 different species of all shapes and sizes there are two major types of whale and their difference can be found if you look inside their mouths some whales have teeth but

others have weird hairy structures called baleen these giant combs act like a big sieve filtering food out of the water but even though these baleen whales are absolutely enormous one of their favorite meals is one of the smallest animals in the ocean a little shrimp called krill most krill only grow to be about one or two centimeters long so whales have to eat a lot of them in fact they eat around 40 million krill a day that's equivalent in weight to about five cows the other family of whales are called toothed whales and if you

look in their mouths you'll find you guessed it teeth this family includes the massive sperm whale the all-white beluga whale the bizarre looking narwhal with its huge unicorn-like tusk and even dolphins and porpoises toothed whales mainly eat fish and squid but some like the killer whale hunt other mammals like seals some killer whales like these have learnt to launch themselves onto beaches to catch the seals in the shallows they may be one of the biggest predators in the ocean but despite their ominous name killer whales are actually the largest species of dolphin in the world

and have never killed a human in the wild there's a lot more to whales than just their size they smash all sorts of other records too the kuvia's beaked whale can hold its breath for over two hours which is the longest of any mammal this rarely seen bowhead whale in northern canada is the oldest living mammal clocking up an average of 268 years a whale of that age today would have been born before the invention of the steam train the english dictionary and the founding of the united states whale calls are the loudest of any

creature on the planet and can be heard underwater for hundreds of kilometers and the sperm whale has the largest brain in the animal kingdom it's around six times the size of humans and so whales are thought to be one of the most intelligent animals on earth despite all these amazing abilities for many years whales were heavily hunted by people and some species remain close to extinction even today but thanks to a global hunting ban in the 1960s in the last few years the number of blue and humpback whales are finally starting to increase given his

hope that these majestic creatures will be seen in the wild for many more years to come [Music] you