What's the difference between a baleen whale and a toothed whale?
Some of the biggest animals ever sip tiny shrimp through a comb of fingernail-stuff, while a dolphin counts as a whale with teeth.
▶ Start the storyA baleen whale filters its food through a comb of bristles, while a toothed whale grabs its food with teeth. That is the whole split. Of about ninety living whale species, only 15 are baleen whales and 75 are toothed whales, and the two groups parted ways roughly 34 million years ago.
Baleen is not bone. It is , the same stuff as your fingernails and hair, grown in triangular plates arranged across the upper jaw. The whale takes in a huge mouthful of water, then pushes the water out through the rack of plates, and the food stays behind. People have compared the plates to sieves or Venetian blinds.
Baleen whale
- plates sieve small food
- 15 living species
- Blue whale, right whales,
Toothed whale
- Teeth catch fish and squid
- 75 living species
- Dolphins, , sperm whales
Toothed whales are a bigger and more varied group than the name suggests. It includes sperm whales and beaked whales, but also all the dolphins and . Yes, a dolphin is a small toothed whale. Their teeth are not for chewing: they catch fish, squid or other marine invertebrates and swallow them whole.
Size gets tangled up in this too. The largest animal known to have lived, the blue whale, is a baleen whale at 31 m, yet the toothed whales run from the 1.4 m vaquita up to the 20 m sperm whale. So a whale's size tells you little about which kind it is. How it eats tells you almost everything.
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Recap
Baleen whales filter with a keratin comb; toothed whales, dolphins included, catch food with teeth.
💡 A trick to remember it · Baleen is a hair comb for the sea; teeth are a fork. Fingernails and sieve, versus fork and fish.
Surprising fact · Baleen whales begin to grow teeth before birth and lose them.
Sources (4)
No source, no claim. Every fact in this lesson (17 claims) cites at least one of these.