Journal
JOURNAL OF EXPERIMENTAL BIOLOGY
Volume 223, Issue 20, Pages -Publisher
COMPANY BIOLOGISTS LTD
DOI: 10.1242/jeb.224196
Keywords
Filtration; Scaling; Baleen whale; Constraints
Categories
Funding
- National Science Foundation [IOS-1656691, IOS-1656676, IOS-1656656, OPP-1644209]
- Office of Naval Research [N000141612477]
- Terman Fellowship from Stanford University
- American Cetacean Society Monterey Bay chapter
- American Cetacean Society San Francisco Bay chapter
- Drs Earl H. Myers and Ethel M. Myers Oceanographic and Marine Biology Trust
- U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) [N000141612477] Funding Source: U.S. Department of Defense (DOD)
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Fundamental scaling relationships influence the physiology of vital rates, which in turn shape the ecology and evolution of organisms. For diving mammals, benefits conferred by large body size include reduced transport costs and enhanced breath-holding capacity, thereby increasing overall foraging efficiency. Rorqual whales feed by engulfing a large mass of prey-laden water at high speed and filtering it through baleen plates. However, as engulfment capacity increases with body length (engulfment volumeabody length(3,57)), the surface area of the baleen filter does not increase proportionally (baleen areaxbody length(1)(,8)(2)), and thus the filtration time of larger rorquals predictably increases as the baleen surface area must filter a disproportionally large amount of water. We predicted that filtration time should scale with body length to the power of 1.75 (filter timaxbody length(1)(,7)(5)). We tested this hypothesis on four rorqual species using multi-sensor tags with corresponding unoccupied aircraft systems-based body length estimates. We found that filter time scales with body length to the power of 1.79 (95% Cl: 1.61-1.97). This result highlights a scale-dependent trade-off between engulfment capacity and baleen area that creates a biomechanical constraint to foraging through increased filtration time. Consequently, larger whales must target high-density prey patches commensurate to the gulp size to meet their increased energetic demands. If these optimal patches are absent, larger rorquals may experience reduced foraging efficiency compared with smaller whales if they do not match their engulfment capacity to the size of targeted prey aggregations.
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