What Does a Gray Whale Eat?

Video Transcript

"Hello, my name is Erin Carter and I am an aquatic biologist at the Aquarium of the Bay in San Francisco. I have been an aquarist here for five years, I am scuba certified and I have a degree in marine biology. The gray whales are interesting in that they are the only whale to consistently feed off th bottom of the ocean. So they use the baleen like a filter and what they'll do is they'll actually roll on their side and suck up sediment and eat everything from tube worms to larvae to plankton, to crabs, to any small fish that are down there and they'll filter the water and the sediment and then the food will get caught in the baleen and the sediment and the water shoots out the other side of their mouth. And scientists actually believe that they can tell whether a gray whale is left or right handed by what side the barnacles grow on. Because that would be the side that they're always turning on the ground and it would be the one that would be collecting all of the larvae for the barnacles. So you can kind of see one side of their body always has barnacles on it and the other one's clean and they say that that's what causes it. And it's actually they pull their tongue away from their mouth and it creates suction drawing that sediment in and blowing it out the other side. So, it's very interesting. They're the only whales that consistently eat off the bottom. They are as big as a city bus though and they need to eat about three thousand pounds worth of food everyday. So I mean they're active at it all the time."