why do killer whales only eat the tongue and jaw of a baby whale?

Answer 1

Ummm ...

Where exactly did you hear that?

Orcas eat all sorts of aquatic animals - mostly smaller fish like salmon, but also including seals, sharks, other whales, etc. If you've heard of a specific instance where a baby whale was attacked in this way, it was probably an attempt to disable the prey.

I assure you, after that happened, the entire baby whale would have been eaten.

Answer 2

Many people don't understand the shear size of blue whales and put it into perspective by comparing it to other animals on Earth. When they are born the baby blue whale's tongue weighs more than an entire adult elephant. The tongue can be 30 to 40% of a full size adult Orca. What may seem as being wasteful, actually isn’t. The Orca has no way to keep meat to eat later, and a baby’ blue whales tongue can feed a dozen orcas.

The tongue and lower jaw of the blue whale calf are very tender and they can easily and quickly tear the tongue apart into bite size pieces with little effort. their heads to tear off pieces of meat in the same manner as does seals/sea lions, crocadiles do to get the meat into pieces that can be swallowed whole.

Orcas do not have the teeth to cut off pieces of meat like sharks do and it would take a long time to dismember the baby whale enough to get access to the internal organs and muscle, and even if they do get access to the internal parts of the whale, the extra amount of calories they use to get inside a whale is less than the calories they would gain by eating more of the whale calf. The size of the orca’s head alone would limit the amount of meat the orcas could get.

Answer 3

If you saw this on TV, this is just a very popular piece of footage. Killer whales usually would eat other parts/more of a whales body. Maybe they ate their fill and went on their way. Maybe the crew that was filming the whole thing scared them off.

Answer 4

is this from that pbs special about killer whales and it followed that one killer that hunted the other whale for hours but they only ate the jaw & tongue? haha i think the program said that it was just a weird occurrence and that usually they eat the whole thing

Answer 5

In descriptions I somewhat have study of assaults with the aid of killer whales on super whales they did no longer decrease their feeding to easily those aspects. They stripped off and ate virtually all the blubber of the super whale.

Answer 6

Lol maybe he was a "tongue and jaw" kinda guy...the wife likes the fins and the kids go for the easy to eat blubber.
It really just like KFC fi you think about it!

Answer 7

How much of a baby whale would YOU eat?!

Answer 8

I can't be bothered to answer this question. It was ONE video of ONE incident. - work it out.

Answer 9

youve been watchin too much blue planet

Answer 10

the rest is blubber