When this is combined with the fact that some of the prey that rorquals depend upon, such as krill, are declining, it becomes clear why certain rorqual populations are struggling to recover from the days of commercial whaling.    From Wordnik.com.  [Lunging is expensive, jaws can be noisy, and what’s with the asymmetry? Rorquals part III] Reference

Watching a pair of bottlenose dolphins bow ride a rorqual.    From Wordnik.com.  [Lunging is expensive, jaws can be noisy, and what’s with the asymmetry? Rorquals part III] Reference

When a rorqual lunges, delicate timing is needed, otherwise the buccal pouch will rapidly fill with seawater and not with prey.    From Wordnik.com.  [Archive 2006-10-01] Reference

Once a mass of prey is engulfed, a rorqual then has to squeeze the water out through its baleen plates while at the same time retaining the prey.    From Wordnik.com.  [Archive 2006-10-01] Reference

A rorqual may engulf nearly 70% of its total body weight in water and prey during this action, which in an adult blue whale amounts to about 70 tons (Pivorunas 1979).    From Wordnik.com.  [Archive 2006-10-01] Reference

Their feeding style is anything but passive: Paul Brodie, an expert on rorqual feeding, has described it as ‘the largest biomechanical action in the animal kingdom’.    From Wordnik.com.  [Lunging is expensive, jaws can be noisy, and what’s with the asymmetry? Rorquals part III] Reference

Occasionally rorqual skulls have been discovered in which the long lower jaws have been stuck wedged inside various of the skull openings and with their tips protruding like tusks.    From Wordnik.com.  [Archive 2006-10-01] Reference

Furthermore, not all rorqual species feed by lunging – the sei in particular uses a technique called skimming, whereby the whale keeps its mouth slightly open and moves forward through a body of prey at a continuous speed.    From Wordnik.com.  [Lunging is expensive, jaws can be noisy, and what’s with the asymmetry? Rorquals part III] Reference

There are three kinds of whale; the Greenland, called by the sailors the right whale, as being most highly prized by them; the great northern rorqual, called by fishers the razor-back or finner, and the cachalot or spermaciti whale.    From Wordnik.com.  [Thrilling Stories Of The Ocean From Authentic Accounts Of Modern Voyagers And Travellers; Designed For The Entertainment And Instruction Of Young People] Reference

As a rorqual lunge-feeds, an immense quantity of water (hopefully containing prey) is engulfed within the buccal pouch, transforming the whale from ‘a cigar shape to the shape of an elongated, bloated tadpole’ (Orton & Brodie 1987, p. 2898).    From Wordnik.com.  [Archive 2006-10-01] Reference

Moving back to the morphology of the rorqual lower jaw, a tall, well-developed coronoid process – way larger than that of any other mysticete – projects from each jaw bone and forms the attachment site for a tendinous part of the temporalis muscle, termed the frontomandibular stay.    From Wordnik.com.  [Archive 2006-10-01] Reference

Recent studies show that lunge-feeding is not just dynamic, it is also extremely expensive in metabolic terms, and even though rorquals glide as they lunge (thereby conserving some energy), it still seems that lunge-feeding is so energetically costly that constraints are imposed on rorqual behaviour.    From Wordnik.com.  [Lunging is expensive, jaws can be noisy, and what’s with the asymmetry? Rorquals part III] Reference

The study involved rorqual whales, a family of species that includes largest animals on Earth.    From Wordnik.com.  [Yahoo! News: Business - Opinion] Reference

This enables rorqual whales to capture enough food in a few hours to sustain them for the rest of the day.    From Wordnik.com.  [Yahoo! News: Business - Opinion] Reference

He came out to meet me upon the back of a mighty 'rorqual,' and a body-guard of four hundred picked narwhals swam before him.    From Wordnik.com.  [Tales of the Chesapeake] Reference

From its sharp back and forked tail, I should pronounce it to have been a rorqual, or "finner," as they are called by the fishermen.    From Wordnik.com.  [The Captain of the Polestar] Reference

It belongs to the family of rorqual whales, so-called for the pleated ridges (from the Norwegian for furrow) that line their bellies.    From Wordnik.com.  [The Guardian World News] Reference

Jurassic deinosaurs, I am inclined to believe that the tonnage of a decent modern rorqual must positively exceed that of the gigantic.    From Wordnik.com.  [Falling in Love With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science] Reference

(Heyning & James 1996), and the rorqual tongue, used in manipulating prey, requires the support of large, robust hyoids (Werth 2007).    From Wordnik.com.  [ScienceBlogs Channel : Life Science] Reference

Mr. Blyth's observations the lower jaw of this species is more slender in proportion to its size than that of any other rorqual or even right whale.    From Wordnik.com.  [Natural History of the Mammalia of India and Ceylon] Reference

Leaning over the rail, with the great rorqual laying perfectly still a few feet below, I was told to mark how slender and elegant were his proportions.    From Wordnik.com.  [The Cruise of the Cachalot Round the World After Sperm Whales] Reference

Finbacks, a species of rorqual, were always pretty numerous, and as if they knew how useless they were to us, came and played around like exaggerated porpoises.    From Wordnik.com.  [The Cruise of the Cachalot Round the World After Sperm Whales] Reference

The 20th century saw an ­unprecedented cull of rorqual whales in the ­Southern Ocean, by factory ships from the ­Falklands and South Georgia, as well as Norwegian, Soviet and.    From Wordnik.com.  [The Guardian World News] Reference

Zealand Berardius easily beats the ichthyosaurus; our sperm whale is more than a match for any Jurassic European deinosaur; our rorqual, one hundred feet long, just equals the dimensions of the gigantic American.    From Wordnik.com.  [Falling in Love With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science] Reference

"The proportional length of the radius indicates the animal to have been a Balaenoptera or rorqual, while the remarkable slenderness of the lower jaw suffices to prove it a distinct species from any hitherto-described rorqual.".    From Wordnik.com.  [Natural History of the Mammalia of India and Ceylon] Reference

Exceeding 7 m in blue whales, rorqual lower jaws are the largest single bones in history (ha!.    From Wordnik.com.  [Archive 2006-10-01] Reference

Here it’s worth noting that different rorqual species specialize on different prey, though some (the minkes and the fin whale) seem to be opportunists.    From Wordnik.com.  [Lunging is expensive, jaws can be noisy, and what’s with the asymmetry? Rorquals part III] Reference

While a rorqual uses its muscles to open its jaws, the energy that powers the expansion of the buccal pouch is essentially provided by the whale’s forward motion, and not by the jaw muscles.    From Wordnik.com.  [Archive 2006-10-01] Reference

The true body shape of rorqual whales.    From Wordnik.com.  [Archive 2006-10-01] Reference

"She was belly up, rorqual pleats extended with decomposition gases.    From Wordnik.com.  [UnderwaterTimes.com News of the Underwater World] Reference

(rorqual) family, belonging to the group of baleen whales from the Mysticeti sub-order ", says the paleontologist.    From Wordnik.com.  [PhysOrg.com - latest science and technology news stories] Reference

I’ve seen two explanations for the term rorqual.    From Wordnik.com.  [Archive 2006-10-01] Reference