More Insight into Whale Feeding Behavior

Food is the name of the game this week (well, food, and trampling store employees on Black Friday). And friend and fellow Ph.D. student here at UBC, Jeremy Goldbogen (photographed with a minke whale jaw bone), has some new research out this week on the feeding habits of humpback whales and it dons the cover of the current issue of The Journal of Experimental Biology. Jeremy and his colleagues found that lunge-feeding requires a large amount of energy compared to other behaviors--humpback whales breathe three times harder after returning to the surface from a foraging dive than from singing. For more on whale feeding, also visit Carl Zimmer's article about Goldbogen et al.'s research in The New York Times last year.

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