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Summary: Whales catch food through the use of echolocation, which involves sending out a rhythmic clicking and buzzing noise that will bounce off objects, letting the whales know the distance between themselves and the object. Find out how whales can determine the texture and movement of an object through echolocation with help from an aquatic biologist in this free video on how whales catch food.
Erin Carter has been an aquarist at the Aquarium of the Bay in San Francisco since September 2004. She has worked with over 20,000 animals, focusing on teleosts and elasmobranches....read more
"Hello my name is Erin Carter, and I am an aquatic biologist with the Aquarium of the Bay in San Francisco. I have been an aquarist here for five years, I'm scuba certified, and I have a degree in marine biology. Whales catch food by using echo location like you may have heard for bats. So they send out a rhythmic clicking noise, and as they are diving or hunting they inter-mix that with a buzzing noise. And the clicking and the buzzing they send out bounces off things, and returns back to them with information about how far things are away from them, what the texture is, is it soft, is it moving, is it stationary. And they change the clicking and buzzing based on whether or not they have found prey in their location. And they basically continue buzzing until they hone in on the precise point of where their fish or their squid is that they have been looking for."
eHow Article: How Do Whales Catch Food?
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