Animalia > Chordata > Mammalia > Cetacea > Balaenopteridae > Balaenoptera > Balaenoptera acutorostrata

Balaenoptera acutorostrata (Minke Whale; Common Minke Whale; northern minke whale)

Synonyms:
Language: French; Spanish

Wikipedia Abstract

The common minke whale or northern minke whale (Balaenoptera acutorostrata) is a species of minke whale within the suborder of baleen whales. It is the smallest member of the rorquals and the second smallest species of baleen whale. Although first ignored by whalers due to its small size and low oil yield, it began to be exploited by various countries beginning in the early 20th century. As other species declined larger numbers of common minke whales were caught, largely for their meat. It is now one of the primary targets of the whaling industry. There is a dwarf form in the Southern Hemisphere.
View Wikipedia Record: Balaenoptera acutorostrata

Infraspecies

Balaenoptera acutorostrata acutorostrata
Balaenoptera acutorostrata scammoni

EDGE Analysis

Uniqueness Scale: Similiar (0) 
10
 Unique (100)
Uniqueness & Vulnerability Scale: Similiar & Secure (0) 
35
 Unique & Vulnerable (100)
ED Score: 20
EDGE Score: 3.04
Learn more at EDGE of Existence programme

Attributes

Gestation [2]  10 months 12 days
Litter Size [2]  1
Litters / Year [2]  1
Maximum Longevity [2]  50 years
Migration [1]  Interoceanic
Snout to Vent Length [4]  26 feet (786 cm)
Water Biome [1]  Coastal
Weaning [2]  6 months 3 days
Adult Weight [2]  8.267 tons (7,500.00 kg)
Birth Weight [2]  705.483 lbs (320.00 kg)
Diet [3]  Carnivore (Invertebrates), Piscivore
Diet - Fish [3]  30 %
Diet - Invertibrates [3]  70 %
Forages - Marine [3]  100 %
Female Maturity [2]  7 years 6 months
Male Maturity [2]  7 years 6 months

Protected Areas

Prey / Diet

Prey / Diet Overlap

+ Click for partial list (75)Full list (181)

Predators

Orcinus orca (Killer Whale)[5]
Somniosus microcephalus (gray shark)[7]

Providers

Parasite of 
Trichinella spiralis (pork worm)[7]

Consumers

External References

NatureServe Explorer

Citations

Attributes / relations provided by
♦ 1Myers, P., R. Espinosa, C. S. Parr, T. Jones, G. S. Hammond, and T. A. Dewey. 2006. The Animal Diversity Web (online). Accessed February 01, 2010 at animaldiversity.org
♦ 2de Magalhaes, J. P., and Costa, J. (2009) A database of vertebrate longevity records and their relation to other life-history traits. Journal of Evolutionary Biology 22(8):1770-1774
♦ 3Hamish Wilman, Jonathan Belmaker, Jennifer Simpson, Carolina de la Rosa, Marcelo M. Rivadeneira, and Walter Jetz. 2014. EltonTraits 1.0: Species-level foraging attributes of the world's birds and mammals. Ecology 95:2027
♦ 4Nathan P. Myhrvold, Elita Baldridge, Benjamin Chan, Dhileep Sivam, Daniel L. Freeman, and S. K. Morgan Ernest. 2015. An amniote life-history database to perform comparative analyses with birds, mammals, and reptiles. Ecology 96:3109
♦ 5Food Web Relationships of Northern Puget Sound and the Strait of Juan de Fuca : a Synthesis of the Available Knowledge, Charles A. Simenstad, Bruce S. Miller, Carl F. Nyblade, Kathleen Thornburgh, and Lewis J. Bledsoe, EPA-600 7-29-259 September 1979
♦ 6Diet of minke whales Balaenoptera acutorostrata in Scottish (UK) waters with notes on strandings of this species in Scotland 1992-2002, G.J. Pierce, M.B. Santos, R.J. Reid, I.A.P. Patterson and H.M. Ross, J. Mar. Biol. Ass. U.K. (2004), 84, 1241-1244
♦ 7Jorrit H. Poelen, James D. Simons and Chris J. Mungall. (2014). Global Biotic Interactions: An open infrastructure to share and analyze species-interaction datasets. Ecological Informatics.
♦ 8Towards the trophic structure of the Bouvet Island marine ecosystem, U. Jacob, T. Brey, I. Fetzer, S. Kaehler, K. Mintenbeck, K. Dunton, K. Beyer, U. Struck , E.A. Pakhomov and W.E. Arntz, Polar Biology, 29 (2). pp. 106-113 (2006)
♦ 9Szoboszlai AI, Thayer JA, Wood SA, Sydeman WJ, Koehn LE (2015) Forage species in predator diets: synthesis of data from the California Current. Ecological Informatics 29(1): 45-56. Szoboszlai AI, Thayer JA, Wood SA, Sydeman WJ, Koehn LE (2015) Data from: Forage species in predator diets: synthesis of data from the California Current. Dryad Digital Repository.
♦ 10Food of emperor penguins (Aptenodytes forsteri) in the western Ross Sea, Antarctica, Y. Cherel and G. L. Kooyman, Marine Biology (1998) 130: 335-344
♦ 11The role of notothenioid fish in the food web of the Ross Sea shelf waters: a review, M. La Mesa, J. T. Eastman, M. Vacchi, Polar Biol (2004) 27: 321–338
♦ 12Gibson, D. I., Bray, R. A., & Harris, E. A. (Compilers) (2005). Host-Parasite Database of the Natural History Museum, London
Abstract provided by DBpedia licensed under a Creative Commons License
Species taxanomy provided by GBIF Secretariat (2022). GBIF Backbone Taxonomy. Checklist dataset https://doi.org/10.15468/39omei accessed via GBIF.org on 2023-06-13; License: CC BY 4.0