HOW MANY giant squid does your average sperm whale eat? The issue has been much debated in
"In his May 1996 article on the giant squid, Richard Conniff reported two hard-to-fathom findings by scientist Clyde Roper.
"First
HOW MANY giant squid does your average sperm whale eat? The issue has been much debated in
"In his May 1996 article on the giant squid, Richard Conniff reported two hard-to-fathom findings by scientist Clyde Roper.
"First, Roper estimated that a 50-tonne sperm whale may eat three or four giant squid per day. Second, Roper said there are roughly a million sperm whales in the world.
"Conservatively estimating, if only half the whales are eating three giant squid per day, a cataclysmic calamari ingestion of 547 500 000 giant squid is occurring annually. Extrapolating further, if one assumes that the volume of a giant squid is approximately 400 cubic feet [about 11 cubic metres], a gargantuan 219 billion cubic feet of giant squid are being eaten by voracious sperm whales on a yearly basis.
"This figure, which comes to a...
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