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Baleen hair is attached to each baleen plate. Appearance of baleen hair in a whale's open mouth Cross-section of jaw showing bone a, gum b, rigid plate c and frayed baleen hairs d and e. Baleen is a filter-feeding system inside the mouths of baleen whales. To use baleen, the whale first opens its mouth underwater to take in water.
Baleen whales can have streamlined or large bodies, depending on the feeding behavior, and two limbs that are modified into flippers. The fin whale is the fastest baleen whale, recorded swimming at 10 m/s (36 km/h; 22 mph). Baleen whales use their baleen plates to filter out food from the water by either lunge-feeding or skim-feeding
The family Balaenidae, the right whales, contains two genera and four species. All right whales have no ventral grooves; a distinctive head shape with a strongly arched, narrow rostrum, bowed lower jaw; lower lips that enfold the sides and front of the rostrum; and long, narrow, elastic baleen plates (up to nine times longer than wide) with fine baleen fringes.
Rorquals (/ ˈ r ɔːr k w əl z /) are the largest group of baleen whales, comprising the family Balaenopteridae, which contains nine extant species in two genera.They include the largest known animal that has ever lived, the blue whale, which can reach 180 tonnes (200 short tons), and the fin whale, which reaches 120 tonnes (130 short tons); even the smallest of the group, the northern minke ...
Sei whales are rorquals (family Balaenopteridae), baleen whales that include the humpback whale, the blue whale, Bryde's whale, the fin whale, and the minke whale. Rorquals take their name from the Norwegian word røyrkval , meaning "furrow whale", [ 16 ] because family members have a series of longitudinal pleats or grooves on the anterior ...
Articles relating to baleen whales (parvorder Mysticeti, whalebone whales), marine mammals in the infraorder Cetacea (whales, dolphins and porpoises), which use keratinaceous baleen plates (or "whalebone") in their mouths to sieve planktonic creatures from the water.
The larger parvorder, Mysticeti (baleen whales), is characterized by the presence of baleen, a sieve-like structure in the upper jaw made of keratin, which it uses to filter plankton, among others, from the water. Odontocetes (toothed whales) are characterized by bearing sharp teeth for hunting, as opposed to their counterparts' baleen. [10]
The bowhead whale is the only baleen whale to spend its entire life in the Arctic and subarctic waters. [37] The Alaskan population spends the winter months in the southwestern Bering Sea . The group migrates northward in the spring, following openings in the ice, into the Chukchi and Beaufort seas. [ 38 ]