ArticleScience advances2025
Life in the slowest lane: Feeding allometry lowers metabolic rate scaling in the largest whales.
Article in Science advances, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 6 papers.
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Who cites it
6 citing papers in PubMed.
- 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
- In the tracks of a whale: inferring size class, orientation and swimming speed from thermal flukeprints.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
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Authors and funding
8 authors.
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Abstract
The hypothesized impacts of whale foraging on ocean productivity are ultimately defined by their metabolic rate, but determining energy expenditure for ocean giants remains challenging. The largest baleen whales use a high-drag lunge-feeding strategy that is hypothesized to come at a high energetic cost, thus requiring exceptional calorie intake. We used biologging tags to measure respiratory rates in foraging rorquals and demonstrate that their field metabolic rates are less than half that predicted by prey consumption estimates and by scaling predictions from smaller marine mammals. The relative cost of rorqual foraging decreases with increasing size as larger whales spend disproportionately longer time filtering prey from engulfed water. By decoupling active swimming and filtration, the largest rorquals forage with limited movement costs. The evolution of lunge feeding confers an energetic advantage that is unique among filter feeders and may have provided an evolutionary pathway to the largest body sizes.
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Registered trials
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