Blue whales off Pico

The animal

The blue whale, Balaenoptera musculus, is the largest animal alive. It is a baleen whale: rather than hunting single prey with teeth like the sperm whale, it takes in huge mouthfuls of water and strains out small crustaceans through plates of baleen. Its closest relative in these records is the fin whale, the other large rorqual logged off Pico.

What the records show

OBIS holds 678 blue whale records inside the box of sea around Pico that this site queries. Every one of them carries a month, and every one falls between March and July. May is the busiest month, with 331 records. April comes next, then June, then March. July holds only a handful, and from August to February there are none.

That shape is the most distinctive of the five species on these pages. The sperm whale is logged in every month, the common dolphin from March to October. The blue whale's records sit almost entirely inside one season, which fits an animal that passes through these waters rather than one that stays in them. The data shows the timing; it does not by itself show where the animals come from or go next.

How to read that

These are records, not animals, and not a forecast. A record is one logged observation, so a single whale followed by several boats can produce several. Records also depend on who is out looking, and far more boats go out in the warmer months. That cuts both ways here. August and September still produce thousands of sperm whale and dolphin records, so boats are plainly out looking, and the absence of blue whale records in those months says more than an absence in January would.

Conservation status

Wikidata, citing the IUCN Red List, gives the blue whale's status as Endangered. The species was described by Linnaeus in 1758.

Related

• All five species, and how the counts are built: whale and dolphin species off Pico.
• The rarest of them in the data: the orca.
• Every species month by month: the season calendar.
• The approach rules and the licensed operators: whale watching on Pico.

Length, weight and population figures are not given here, because none has been checked against a primary source.