The ancestors of Big Blue took to sea, millions of years ago, in the warm waters near the equator. Each year, when summer and daylight come to the frozen continent of Antarctica, Big Blue swims south to places around the edge of the continent where there is a pound of shrimp in a cubic foot of seawater.

After filling up on shrimp, and after making a thick layer of whale blubber, the whales swim back to the tropics to frolick in the warm water, and to make little whales. A new-born Blue Whale is the size of an elephant.

After millions of trips, Blue Whales became streamlined for fast travel. If you could remove the wings and tail from a Boeing 737 you have a body about the size and shape of the biggest Blue Whale.

Female whales tucked their teats (mammary glands) into folds in the skin, and the males retracted their 10-foot-long penis inside their body to reduce drag, for the sake of speed during the long voyages from their home near the equator to the feeding grounds near the pole, and then back again.

Each year, in four short months, Blue Whales must find enough food near Antarctica for the long trip back home They must eat enough krill to last through the mating season, and still have enough food energy stored up to make the long trip back to Antarctica. Each year, the Big Blues hope that the krill will be there in great abundance.

Twenty million years ago the ocean near Antarctica must have had tons of krill, because it was that long ago that whales began to develop baleen and started to change the way they ate. If Blue Whales had not learned how to make sieves of baleen and glup big mouthfuls of krill, and if the ocean around Antarctica, twenty million years ago, didn't have lots of krill, then the Big Blue would never have developed (evolved) to be the Biggest Animal that Ever Lived.

"I can truly say, said the storyteller, that......

the Blue Whale is the biggest animal that ever lived in the world because the ocean water near Antarctica is loaded with krill."

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