ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2020
Predator-informed looming stimulus experiments reveal how large filter feeding whales capture highly maneuverable forage fish.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 24 papers.
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Who cites it
24 citing papers in PubMed.
- Escalating competition in changing seas: baleen whales exploit killer whale prey herding.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2026Article
- Coevolutionary attack and avoidance strategies in predators and grouping prey.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2026Review
- Locomotion and hunting strategies of large vertebrate predators in pelagic waters.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2026Review
- Increases in foraging performance of humpback whales in multi-predator feeding aggregations with California sea lions.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2026Article
- Sensing flow gradients is necessary for learning autonomous underwater navigation.Nature communications · 2025Article
- WasPeerJ · 2025Article
- Solitary humpback whales manufacture bubble-nets as tools to increase prey intake.Royal Society open science · 2024Article
- Links between the three-dimensional movements of whale sharks (Rhincodon typus) and the bio-physical environment off a coral reef.Movement ecology · 2024Article
- Cheap gulp foraging of a giga-predator enables efficient exploitation of sparse prey.Science advances · 2023Article
- Kinematics and energetics of foraging behavior in Rice's whales of the Gulf of Mexico.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Minke whale feeding rate limitations suggest constraints on the minimum body size for engulfment filtration feeding.Nature ecology & evolution · 2023Article
- Article
- Estimating energetic intake for marine mammal bioenergetic models.Conservation physiology · 2023Article
- Fine-scale diversity of prey detected in humpback whale feces.Ecology and evolution · 2022Article
- Field measurements reveal exposure risk to microplastic ingestion by filter-feeding megafauna.Nature communications · 2022Article
- The fish ability to accelerate and suddenly turn in fast maneuvers.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Scaling of maneuvering performance in baleen whales: larger whales outperform expectations.The Journal of experimental biology · 2022Article
- The limits of convergence in the collective behavior of competing marine taxa.Ecology and evolution · 2022Article
- Fast and Furious: Energetic Tradeoffs and Scaling of High-Speed Foraging in Rorqual Whales.Integrative organismal biology (Oxford, England) · 2022Article
- Article
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5 authors.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The unique engulfment filtration strategy of microphagous rorqual whales has evolved relatively recently (<5 Ma) and exploits extreme predator/prey size ratios to overcome the maneuverability advantages of swarms of small prey, such as krill. Forage fish, in contrast, have been engaged in evolutionary arms races with their predators for more than 100 million years and have performance capabilities that suggest they should easily evade whale-sized predators, yet they are regularly hunted by some species of rorqual whales. To explore this phenomenon, we determined, in a laboratory setting, when individual anchovies initiated escape from virtually approaching whales, then used these results along with in situ humpback whale attack data to model how predator speed and engulfment timing affected capture rates. Anchovies were found to respond to approaching visual looming stimuli at expansion rates that give ample chance to escape from a sea lion-sized predator, but humpback whales could capture as much as 30-60% of a school at once because the increase in their apparent (visual) size does not cross their prey's response threshold until after rapid jaw expansion. Humpback whales are, thus, incentivized to delay engulfment until they are very close to a prey school, even if this results in higher hydrodynamic drag. This potential exaptation of a microphagous filter feeding strategy for fish foraging enables humpback whales to achieve 7× the energetic efficiency (per lunge) of krill foraging, allowing for flexible foraging strategies that may underlie their ecological success in fluctuating oceanic conditions.
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