How baby whales feed

Above you see the tongue of the baby pygmy right whale. Whales lips aren’t flexible enough to form a suction around the mother’s nipple like human babies do.

To latch on to the mother’s nipple, a baby whale curls its tongue. A good suction is assisted by the flaps on either side of the tongue – you can see one of them above. As the baby whale gets older and is no longer suckling, the flaps will mostly disappear. Cool, huh? :-)

One Comment

  1. Posted 9 March 2009 at 3.42am | Permalink

    Have Australians Stopped Killing Whales? http://is.gd/mgIT What do you think?

    Please complete our poll on Whaling, too.

    Thanks Lesley

    PS Always wondered how they did that – thanks.

2 Trackbacks

  1. [...] Above you see the tongue of the baby pygmy right whale. Whales lips aren’t flexible enough to form a suction around the mother’s nipple like human babies do. To latch on to the mother’s nipple, a baby whale curls its tongue. A good suction is assisted by the flaps on either side of the tongue – you can see one of them above. As the baby whale gets older and is no longer suckling, the flaps will mostly disappear. [...]

  2. [...] by Te Runanga o Makaawhio and measured just over two metres long. Its tongue had flaps like the pygmy right whale I blogged about a while ago.  The flaps mean that it was still feeding from its mother. Another clue to its [...]

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