The blue whale is the largest filter feeder.
A filter feeder, also known as a suspension feeder, is any animal that obtains food by filtering water for nutrient particles. Examples of a filter feeder include mysids, flamingos, clams, krill, sponges, and whale sharks. A filter feeder uses some mechanism, such as a filter basket or fin (as in baleen and blue whales) to collect aquatic prey, usually plankton (a generic term for small aquatic animals and plants), and siphon it into their mouths for consumption. and digestion. Filter feeders engage in one of four main types of feeding, the others being reservoir feeding (eating particles on the ground), liquid feeding (as in spiders and hummingbirds), and mass feeding (as in humans and birds). most other animals).
Baleen whales feed on filters that eat microorganisms such as water flea plankton.
Filter feeding is a popular mode of feeding among aquatic organisms because it requires little active effort: you simply float and let the food particles reach you. Of course, there must be a critical concentration of food particles in the water, or the filter feeder will starve. Fortunately for filter feeders, the oceans are filled with gigatons of plankton at all latitudes. If an aquatic animal is not a filter feeder, it has to be a mass or bottom feeder.
Flamingos are a type of filter feeder.
Filter feeders range from very small (krill) to very large (blue whale). As the blue whale is the largest living animal, perhaps even the largest animal that ever lived, and feeds on other animals by filter feeding, the blue whale is considered the largest living omnivore. The only small filter feeder, the Antarctic krill, rivals humans for the largest number of biomass species on the planet. As we can see, filter feeding can be a successful feeding strategy. Some filter feeders, such as certain whales, may feed on other filter feeders.
Certain types of jellyfish have an interesting mechanism that they use for filter feeding. Using a thin web of tentacles, they catch small particles of food. These tentacles then slowly rotate in a corkscrew motion to bring the prey into the jellyfish’s mouth. Since jellyfish tentacles contain stinging cells, they paralyze small prey on contact.