The biggest little whales
When we talk about whales, a lot of the words that come to mind describe how big they are: ‘enormous’, ‘huge’, ‘giant’, ‘largest-ever’, ‘leviathans’. We measure them by comparisons to buses, herds of elephants and dinosaurs. So it might surprise you to learn that there are some whales which get totally different descriptions – like the ‘pygmy blue whales’ which make the Indian Ocean home.
Pygmy blue whales are a tropical subspecies of the blue whale, and though they are only a few metres shorter in length, reaching about 24m as opposed to the 30m, they are often about half of the overall weight of a blue whale in the Antarctic.