Object Details
- Creator
- Scammon, Charles Melville
- Book Title
- The marine mammals of the north-western coast of North America, described and illustrated; together with an account of the American whale-fishery.
- Caption
- The California Gray Whale (Rhachianectes glaucus).
- Educational Notes
- You can probably figure out the color of this Gray Whale by its name, but did you know that a mature Gray Whale can weigh over 30 tons? Thats about the weight of two school buses! In order to grow to be so big, you may think that these whales eat big fish. However, they actually eat small, with shrimp-like animals called amphipods often becoming their meals. They also eat plankton, small microscopic animals floating in the sea. Not just their meals are small, though. The Gray Whales enemies tend to be smaller than them too, including smaller whales like orcas. Though orcas are less than half the size of Gray Whales, orcas are their predators and they prey on Gray Whale babies. It turns out that these whales have much more in common with humans than one would think, too. As a mammal, Gray Whales breathe air, have hair (calves have hair around the front of their heads), are warm-blooded, and give birth to live offspring that drink milk from their mothers. All similarities shared with humans.
- 1874
- Publication Date
- 1874
- Image ID
- SIL-marinemammalsofn00scam_0043_crop
- Catalog ID
- 98048
- Rights
- Not in Copyright
- Type
- Prints
- Publication Place
- New York
- Publisher
- Putnam
- See more items in
- See Wonder
- Taxonomy
- Rhachianectes glaucus
- Smithsonian Libraries
- Topic
- Zoology
- Biology
- Taxonomy
- Mammals
- Oceanography
- Gray Whales
- Language
- English
- Latin
- Record ID
- silgoi_68422
