1. Melville’s white whale was based on an albino whale known as Mocha Dick which was seen off the coast of Chile in the early 19th century.
2. The call of a blue whale can be louder than a jet engine and be heard hundreds of miles away.
3. The biggest recorded blue whale was 100ft long with an estimated weight of 190 tons.
4. This is heavier than the largest dinosaur ever discovered but not as long.
5. A blue whale’s tongue can weigh as much as an elephant.
6. The comb-like filter system inside a whale’s mouth called a “baleen” acts as a sieve to separate food such as plankton or krill from seawater.
7. The upper jaw of a whale is know as a rostrum. 8. Although the King James Bible tells us that “God created great whales” on the fifth day, the creature that swallowed Jonah in the Old Testament is only referred to as a “big fish”.
9. In 2013, a team of researchers found a group of sperm whales off the coast of Chile which slept with their bodies vertical.
10. An ecosystem known as a “whale fall” may live for decades in the body of a dead whale on the ocean floor.