Everything About Whales Is Big
That includes their appetites, right from birth. For example, the blue whale calf can consume up to 130 gallons of milk during its nursing period, at which time it will gain an average 200 lbs. a day. But then, you have to consider that an adult blue whale, has a heart the size of a small car, with arteries so wide, that a young child could stand upright in them.
Take an average blue whale, at 160 tons, and you have the equivalent weight of 30 bull elephants or 1600 men who weighed 200 lbs, apiece. But even at that gargantuan size, their eye is only the size of a teacup, and the external ear would be comparable to the tip of a pencil.
They're big eaters as adults too, with a mouth that takes in some 10,000 gallons or 256,000 glasses of water at a time. But of course, they aren't going to swallow it. They use the baleen that hangs from their upper jaw, to filter out the sea life that makes up the primary part of their diets.
Don't mistake them for ponderous slowpokes though. Even a blue whale calf can speed along at 22mph. They were apparently impressive for either their speed or size, even 250 years ago, when the developer of a biological classification system, Linnaeus, gave them the Latin name Balenoptera musculus, with the "musculus" translating to "winged mouse".