ArticleScience advances2023
Cheap gulp foraging of a giga-predator enables efficient exploitation of sparse prey.
Article in Science advances, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 9 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
9 citing papers in PubMed, 25 citations in OpenAlex.
- Sprint-like cardiac dynamics support repeated acrobatic lunges in foraging rorqual whales.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Constraints on lunge feeding: krill can clog the baleen of filter-feeding whales.The Journal of experimental biology · 2026Article
- Energetic benefits of resting behaviour in humpback whale mother-calf pairs revealed by biologging and UAS-photogrammetry.Conservation physiology · 2026Article
- Estimating energy expenditure of sperm whales living in social units.Conservation physiology · 2026Article
- Respiration rates and inferred mass-specific field metabolic rates decline with body size among five sympatric cetaceans.Journal of comparative physiology. B, Biochemical, systemic, and environmental physiology · 2025Article
- Phylogenetic allometric scaling of near basal breathing frequency in terrestrial, semi-aquatic and aquatic mammals.Experimental physiology · 2025Article
- Life in the slowest lane: Feeding allometry lowers metabolic rate scaling in the largest whales.Science advances · 2025Article
- Solitary humpback whales manufacture bubble-nets as tools to increase prey intake.Royal Society open science · 2024Article
- Low hunting costs in an expensive marine mammal predator.Science advances · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
10 authors at 4 institutions in 3 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The giant rorqual whales are believed to have a massive food turnover driven by a high-intake lunge feeding style aptly described as the world's largest biomechanical action. This high-drag feeding behavior is thought to limit dive times and constrain rorquals to target only the densest prey patches, making them vulnerable to disturbance and habitat change. Using biologging tags to estimate energy expenditure as a function of feeding rates on 23 humpback whales, we show that lunge feeding is energetically cheap. Such inexpensive foraging means that rorquals are flexible in the quality of prey patches they exploit and therefore more resilient to environmental fluctuations and disturbance. As a consequence, the food turnover and hence the ecological role of these marine giants have likely been overestimated.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.