(Wikipedia/Wikimedia Commons)
A-ha! They don’t do that at the bottom of the sea! When it’s time to feed their young, the whales start to swim more slowly and approach the surface, a strategy that still intrigues experts today. To taste its mother’s milk, the baby whale does like most newborn mammals: it sucks the meal directly from one of the female’s two apparent nipples, located between the center of the belly and the tail.
As it takes a lot of milk to satisfy the hunger of the calf, the whale has several mammary glands distributed from the head to the anus. The pups nurse all day long, but they are quick meals, lasting about a minute each, which are repeated every half hour. In species such as the Northern Right Whale, calves ingest up to 200 liters of milk a day!
As if that were not enough, cetacean milk has a fat concentration that varies between 25 and 50% – that is, it is 40 times more fatty than human milk. This helps in the incredible development of the puppies.
A baby blue whale, for example, is born weighing around 2.5 tons and, after just seven or eight months suckling, it already reaches a weight of 23 tons.