The pygmy blue whale is one of four subspecies of blue whales, and though I only saw the back of it a few times in Indonesia, I will never forget these moments.
Marine mammals have a very special place in my heart. One reason might be that I just didn’t see many species yet. I have seen lots of spinner dolphins, bottlenose dolphins, a few pilot whales, and briefly a manatee. But a proper large whale was missing so far.
For picmybug mammals are amongst the least common group of animals I’m writing about. Cat and rat followed an otter, and that was it so far.
Now I have the chance to write about the largest animal that ever lived on our planet. Or at least one of the largest. There have been dinosaurs getting at least very close, and since you usually only get fragments of dinosaurs, how could we ever really know the exact size. I mean who close are we even looking? OK now I checked. In 2012 at least six fossils of the titanosaur Patagotitan mayorum were found. They might have been up to 37m. Does that matter when you talk about an animal living right now that reaches the size of Christ the Redeemer, the famous statue of Jesus Christ in Rio de Janeiro, or the Colossus of Rhodes, or the American Dream (a limousine built in 1986)?
The last one is actually a good way to grasp 30m size. Imagine your car was 30m long. 4 wheels wouldn’t be enough to carry it’s weight. You’ll need 26. One engine wouldn’t be enough to move it, you’ll need 2 powerful engines. You could fit 75 friends comfortably. And since you would be rich, you could install a pool, a jacuzzi, a helipad, and a water bed, a bar and these things.
And to put that into perspective, a standard limousine like a Mercedes E class is roughly 5m long. That’s the size of a female Great white shark.
For advanced scuba divers I have another image. 30m is the maximum depth for most recreational divers, imagine you descend along a vertical standing blue whale – you could just reach the tip of the fluke!
But as we know, when it comes to the estimation of size, especially in the water, we can’t really trust ourselves. I find it impossible to tell the size of a large animal on a dive. Small animals can maybe be compared to commonly used objects like a phone, a lighter or a coin. But such big animals? I don’t know.
So when you look up the sizes of whales, you’ll get different maximum numbers. Is it measured by scientists, by whalers, or an estimation of a layman? Is it a recent sighting or a historical one? It is important to have the backgrounds of a size to bring it into context.
The blue whale is the largest animal alive, followed by the fin whale. It comes in 4 – 5 subspecies, and the fin whale in 3. Then where exactly does the pygmy blue whale stand? The term pygmy is anyways very confusing in its way, later more. Tadayoshi Ichihara described our whale, and published it in 1966. So it’s the pygmy blue whale’s 60th birthday this year! The only Wikipedia entry about Ichihara is in Finish. He passed away in 1981. You can find details of his publication here.
But let’s get to the size comparison of the subspecies.
The largest subspecies of blue whales is B. musculus intermedia from the Antarctic. There have been records of 30+ meters. That is the largest animal alive and maybe ever.
No. 2 is B. musculus musculus from the north Atlantic. 28m are not much behind.
No. 3 gets interesting. It’s the southern fin whale (Balaenoptera physalus quoyi) with 27m. It is bigger than any whale except for the two blue whale subspecies.
Our pigmy blue whales shares no. 4 of the largest whale subspecies reaching 24m, same as B. musculus indica from the northern Indian ocean.
And they are closely followed by no. 5, the north pacific fin whale (Balaenoptera physalus velifera) with 23m, and the northern fin whale (Balaenoptera physalus physalus) 23m (?).
No. 6 would be the sei whale (Balaenoptera borealis) which comes in 2 subspecies of similar size, 19.5m.
The largest fish in the world, the whaleshark, is with a rare record size of 18.8m behind those whales. Researchers claim that these sharks are much smaller nowadays, probably because of overfishing and boat traffic.
I was surprised that the blue whale was amongst the 10000 animals Carl Linnaeus described 1758 is his Systema naturae. Today you would think that must have been an event of huge publicity. Balaenoptera musculus’ translation is either ‘muscular finned whale’, or ‘little mouse finned whale’. There might have been a sense of humor when Linnaeus described the Blue whale.
In fact the word musculus is used for muscles because some people in ancient Greece and Rome thought a muscle, for example the biceps, looks like a mouse moving under the skin.
The family Balaenopteridae contains two genera with 9 species of Balaenoptera, and another one in its genus, the humpback whale (Megaptera novaeangliae).
This family of whales is also called rorquals, what is French with Norwegian roots. It translates to something like reed whale. Reed like the plant, that in groups resembles the baleen plates of whales. What they use as a filter for plankton. Baleen again comes from Latin, and means whale. ‘Baleen plates in rorquals’ can be translated as ‘whale plates in whale whales’. Balaenopteridae means finned whales. But they are not the only ones with baleen plates, in total 16 species of 4 families filter the water that way.
The other 73 species of whales like orcas or belugas are in the parvorder Odontoceti, and they kept their teeth.
The term pigmy was introduced in Homer’s Iliad. He described a fictional group of tiny people. These pygmies were in a constant battle with herons, so I guess they were the size of rabbits, or even smaller? And that’s what the term was later used for. Pygmies were people under roughly 1.5m. The avarage greek men was 165 to 170cm those days. Ethnic groups of rather short people occur in the central African, and some Asian rainforests. South America doesn’t have pygmy tribes in that sense, and of course all these tribes have their own history, names, traditions and beliefs. It is by no means my intension to classify anyone simply based in their height.
Later, and that’s 18th century, naturalists borrowed the term to discribe smaller species within a group. It is not about the total size, but about the relative size compared to similar species. So you can have a pygmy elephant as well as a pygmy blue whale, hippopotamus or sea horse.
Their voice is something noteworthy. I haven’t spend much time on whale voices before writing this post. Also I didn’t hear the blue whales singing in Indonesia unfortunately. But it’s 2026, and these things are even on Spotify. So let’s listen to whale voices. Orcas sound a bit like doves. Humpbacks sound like indigenous instruments in a cave, right whales like a cow, sperm whales like a motorbike, F1 race or a herd of crabs. But the Blue whale voice sounds to me like aliens, like The war of the worlds. I must say this is tense alían-movie material to me.
There’s tons of information about whales. People are truly fascinated and concerned about whales. I won’t repeat all the astonishing figures. But I noticed something that bothered me. The weight of whales is often referred to in tons. And then there is metric tons (1000kg), long tons (2240lb, 1016kg), and short tons (2000lb, 907.19kg). And if you want, you can find dozens of historical, or application specific tons. Tons of tons, and I wonder why we make or lives so complicated. Before we used it for weights, it was even used for volumes. Tun is a large barrel. Language is a beast, and my favorite learning here is the word megagramm for a metric ton.
But the thing that stood out for me in Indonesia was this. We were actually diving in the same bay where these blue whales came to rest. While our maximum depth was 30m, (this is the size of a big blue whale!), they were not far away from us. We were on muck dives, scanning the sand for the tiniest creatures, while maybe less than 100m away possibly a blue whale would watch us, or at least listen. Imagine the shock if you would actually see one, when your eyes are calibrated on tiny nudibranches and crabs.
